Interpretation and Production of Interpersonal Behavior

The question of how people interpret (decode) and construct (encode) the meaning of social behavior is central to the understanding of social interaction. Early research has suggested that there may be differences in the level of difficulty involved in the processes of encoding and decoding social behavior. These differences are surprising, given that people engage in both processes constantly in everyday life. This research is an initial exploration of this problem. Groups of research participants were asked to either construct social behaviors or to interpret social behaviors. It was hypothesized that the encoding of interpersonal behavior would be more difficult than the decoding of behavior. The results of this study confirmed the hypothesis