How to get people to respond? (Stivers & Rossano, 2010)

Stivers, T. & Rossano, F. (2010), Mobilizing response. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 43(1), 3–31.

What is the article about?

“A fundamental puzzle in the organization of social interaction concerns how one individual elicits a response from another” (p.3).

So begins Stivers and Rosano‘s account of how speakers design their talk to invite a response in conversation.

It’s not simply the grammar (e.g. a question) or the function of an action (e.g. an invitation) that determines the likelihood of a response. The authors explain that speakers are drawing on a range of resources – words chosen and word order, the prosody (i.e the pitch and rhythm of how the word are spoken), taking into account the other person’s knowledge and interest, and how they position their body, maintain eye gaze and so on – to make relevant a (particular type of) response from another person.

What did they find?

Stivers and Rossano propose that the conditional relevance (the expectation that one turn sets up for a particular type of next turn) is not so much an either/or proposition as others have proposed (see Schegloff 1969), but best thought of on a cline, a slope between ‘really unlikely to elicit a response’ on one end and ‘compelling to respond’ at the other.

For practitioners, this paper illustrates, that no single action determines what happens next. A furrowed brow by itself does not compel a response. Rather, speakers draw on a combination of turn design features which can increase the likelihood of eliciting a response. Stivers and Rossano essentially propose a formula whereby:

(i) Interrogative syntax + (ii) recipient epistemic authority (i.e. the recipient knows more/enough about it) + (iii) prosody (i.e. rising intonation + (iv) eye gaze = increases likelihood of a response.

Why does it matter?

The authors argue that:

“each feature is response mobilizing, and that, while for various reasons not all four features are always present, when speakers design that turns with more of these features, they treat recipients as more accountable for responding”(p.16).

In other words, using more of these features is more likely to elicit a response.

This work shows that there are varying degrees of responsibility for the respondent to provide the relevant response. Where the speaker includes more of these response mobilizing features, the more accountable the recipient is to provide the response.