EFFECTS OF DIFFERENT DEGREES OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT AN AUDIENCE ON THE CONTENT OF COMMUNICATION.

The article focuses on the effects of different degrees of knowledge of an audience on the content of communication. The experiment reported in this paper grows out of those reviewed above with one exception. The author has attempted to study perception as one step in the general process of communication and not as an isolated problem. The experiment concluded that the content of a communication is affected by the degree of knowledge which the communicator has of his audience. However, these effects seem to be minimal. It was found that the change of one word in briefing a subject does not seem to usually alter the content of his communication significantly. The major variables affecting the content of a communication are: (a) the nature of the communicator (b) the nature of the objects to be communicated (c) the nature of the audience (d) the degree of briefing about the audience. The method used in this experiment offers a way to measure these variables and to predict the relationships among them for a specific situation.