Person-centered tactics during verbal disagreements: Effects on student perceptions of persuasiveness and social attraction

The development of communication knowledge and skills for managing verbal disagreements is an important educational task in our increasingly diverse culture. Working from a constructivist framework, this study adapted an existing hierarchy of person-centered persuasion to analyze student performance in 42 dyadic verbal disagreements. After participating in an argumentative conversation, students were evaluated by their partners on measures of opinion change, perceived persuasiveness, and social attractiveness. As expected, students using person-centered tactics were rated by their partners as more persuasive. The partners' level of construct differentiation appeared to mediate some of these effects. In contrast, social attractiveness judgments were unaffected by tactic person-centeredness. Results are interpreted as evidence of the representative validity of the person-centered hierarchy for student samples. The usefalness of peer perceptions and interactive tasks in teaching person-centered argument is discussed.