Abstract
The purposes of the present study were; (1) to examine the relationship between the motivation of utterance (persuasive and consideration) and the type of utterance in a negotiative situation and (2) to investigate the effect of a speaker's persuasion strategy (offensive vs. defensive) on the responden't choice in persuasion strategy. The negotiative situation was set by the experimenter so that the Ss (respondents) were supposed. to reach an agreement with a speaker (a hypothetical person) about the means of transportation (train or airplane) by which they would travel together. The Ss were asked to answer the first utterance of the speaker provided by the experimenter by writing down their counter utterances. Then, they rated the degree of their persuasive and consideration motivations on a seven-point scale. The utterance condition (offensive vs. defensive) was administered by randomly assigning Ss into one of these groups. The S's utterance was classified according to the following five categories:
1. With or without additional explanatory remarks following the statement of his opinion.
2. Whether or not the subject accepts the speaker's utterance.
3. The type of persuasion strategy (offensive vs. defensive) employed by the subject.
4. If the subject explains his or her personal reasons or not.
5. Intention to modify the basis of judgment on which the speaker (his or her hypothetical partner) stands.
Results of analysis show that persuasive motivation tends to have a close relationship with interpretative utterances and to discourage remarks for explaining personal reasons, while consideration motivation tends to have a close relationship with defensive strategy and supportive remarks. There existed a general tendency for the speaker's offensive utterance to cause the respondent's defensive utterances. A further examination of this result, however, strongly suggested that the correct hypothesis would be “weak offensive utterances tend to cause defensive utterances. ”
