An Investigation of the Relationship between Implicit Personal Theories of Communication and Community Behavior

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

A waning sense of community has been well documented and widely accepted as among the most significant problems of our time. Both social capital (trust in others and civic participation) and interpersonal acts of assistance (or helping) are considered to be common indicators of community. The question of whether certain personally held beliefs about communication correspond to differences in individuals' community behavior is a timely and important one. This study investigated whether individuals' levels of social capital and prosocial behavior differed as a function of message design logic. Results indicated that individuals employing the rhetorical message design logic reported significantly greater levels of social capital and prosocial behavior than did those employing expressive or conventional message design logics. The implications of this difference for communication scholarship and community health are discussed.