The Effects of Dogmatism on Message Formulation.

This paper presents two research studies on the use of dogmatism as a predictor of verbal communication behavior. The studies examined the effects of dogmatism on the formulation of written and oral persuasive messages by comparing college students' scores on the Rokeach D and California F Scales with a content analysis of the written or oral persuasive messages that the students prepared. The results show that dogmatism is inconsistent as a predictor of communication behavior, suggesting that some intervening variable is more important to encoding behavior than dogmatism. Thirty-seven hypotheses for future research in this area are proposed, and a list of references is attached. (RL)