As Spitzberg and Hecht noted in 1984, if a person desires to communicate competently, he or she requires, at least to a certain degree, these three attributes: motivation, knowledge, and skill. The first of these attributes--the motivation to be a competent communicator--must come from within the person. Motivation occurs when someone desires to present himself or herself favorably. Thus, in the end, this first attribute is the responsibility of the communicator alone. In contrast, the second and third attributes--knowledge and skill about communication--are not solely the domain of the person communicating. Other people share the responsibility when, whether intentionally or not, they serve as teachers and models for a person who is learning to communicate.

Speech communication is a discipline that has always taken upon itself the responsibility of providing instruction designed to help students communicate competently in various settings. These settings include public forums and, more recently, private, or interpersonal, situations. Any responsible training will attempt to provide both the skills and the knowledge that students need to communicate effectively. However, there will always be controversy regarding which facet the instructor should stress more, skills or knowledge. How does this controversy affect this book?

There are students of speech communication who examine which factors can best teach people how to be effective communicators. Some of these students apparently believe that skill is the most important factor because they think that knowledge is useless without the skill necessary to apply it. This hypothesis seems to be the philosophical underpinning for multitudes of textbooks about such things as, for the most relevant example, small group interaction. In actuality, these books are thinly disguised "how to" guides. There is a potential danger with these kinds of textbooks. Students may learn, for example, a repertoire of leadership skills without gaining a necessary understanding of the circumstances under which they should use these skills.

This kind of dilemma brings to mind the story of a gorilla who had the reputation of consistently hitting a golf ball 400 yards. Someone entered the gorilla into a professional golfing tournament. At first, the human contestants were terrified after the gorilla proved his prowess by hitting a tremendous drive on the first hole. However, they became considerably calmer when the gorilla stepped up to the green for the second shot and again drove the ball 400 yards. As you can see, not only did the gorilla not know how to putt, but he also did not know that he should not drive on the green. In essence, the gorilla did not know when it was appropriate to apply his skill.

Yet, the gorilla did know something. He had some beliefs about how golf should be played, and these beliefs allowed him to do four things. First, they let him describe what he was trying to do. He was trying to move the ball as far from its present location as he could. Second, they allowed the gorilla to predict what would happen. The ball would move far from its current location if he hit it hard with a golf club. Third, the beliefs made it possible for him to explain why the ball would be farther from its present location after he hit it than before he hit it. Fourth, they allowed the gorilla to control his behavior. He knew that if he wanted the ball to move far from its current location, he should hit it as hard as he could.

In short, the gorilla had what scientists call an "implicit theory"--a set of beliefs such as we described above. The beliefs do four things. They allow gorillas or people to (1) describe an outcome they want to occur, (2) predict that the desired outcome will take place under certain conditions, (3) explain the reasons the desired outcome will occur under those conditions, and (4) know what they have to do to bring about the conditions that will, in turn, give them what they want. As we can see, the gorilla's implicit theory about how to play golf was critical in determining how he acted on the golf course.

Implicit theories affect the behavior of people in a similar way. People use them to guide their actions in the situations they meet every day. The ways in which people communicate, for example, follow from whatever implicit theories they have about communication. These theories concern the available options and the effects of those options. How successful people are as communicators partly depends on whether they know their options and how to choose the best ones.

As we can see with our example of the gorilla, difficulties arise when the implicit theory is faulty. The problem with the gorilla's implicit theory was that it was far too simple to allow him to play a competent round of golf. Not only did he lack the knowledge to putt when he was on the green, but he also lacked the ability to analyze his actions. Without that ability, he could not learn how to improve.

When an implicit theory is appropriate to the situation, however, it can help a person a great deal. We have written Small Group Discussion with this in mind. The main goal of this book is to develop students' implicit theories about group discussion.

We contend that the best way to do this is to make students aware of explicit theories about group discussion that social and behavioral scientists have developed. These theories present a diverse range of proposals about how group discussion works. It is advantageous to students to develop as great a breadth of understanding of these theories as they can. The greater their understanding, the more options they have to choose from when they make decisions about how to act in group settings.

Thus, by learning and thinking about these explicit theories, the students' own implicit theories about group discussion should become both broader and deeper than they had been previously. The result we hope for is that this experience will give students a greater ability to use communicative skills in a competent manner. We also hope that students will be better able to analyze themselves and their groups and thereby improve discussion performance.

This book covers topics that are central to an understanding of decision-making discussions in small groups. In each chapter we try to tell one or two stories about group discussion based on what could be called a "literature." By a literature, we mean a set of theoretical and research articles that lead to some definite conclusion about a topic, even if that conclusion is that ideas about the topic are contradictory. Many important questions have not received enough attention from scholars to produce a literature. Therefore, any discussion of these questions could only consist of unsupported conjectures.

Thus, the book is in a sense a prisoner of what theorists and researchers have and have not chosen to study, which leads to various biases in our coverage. Past research on group discussion is tilted toward task-performance aspects of group discussion and away from social or "maintenance" aspects. It has been performed mostly in experimental settings using groups of white male Americans meeting one time only and making decisions that do not affect them. Thus, little can be said about many of the possible cultural factors that might impact a group decision, about differences between experimental and "real" groups, and about how groups may evolve over time. We hope that future research will begin to fill in these and other gaps. Given the work available, we have attempted to provide as broad a range of areas and as broad a discussion of these topics as is feasible.

In general, the chapters build on one another. In other words, each chapter's discussion assumes that the reader has an understanding of the material of previous chapters. Therefore, an instructor who does not assign chapters of this book in sequential order may, from time to time, need to help his or her students with certain concepts. If the assigned chapter takes it for granted that the students already understand concepts that earlier chapters have covered, the instructor may need to prepare students by discussing these ideas.

Finally, as we have criticized other books for downplaying the importance of theoretical knowledge, others can charge us with going to the other extreme and downplaying the importance of group discussion skills training. We stand guilty of this charge (Chapter 13 notwithstanding). For introductory courses requiring a broader base of information, we recommend supplementing this book with more skills-oriented material.

Acknowledgments

The roots of this book go back a long way. They begin with a course entitled "Theory and Practice of Small Group Discussion" that I taught for the first time in 1979 when I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dissatisfaction with the textbooks that were available for use in the course led me to begin to write my own after I finished my graduate degree. The resulting book, also entitled Theory and Practice of Small Group Discussion, was finished and subsequently published by myself in 1984 and revised in 1987.

Theory and Practice was a direct predecessor to the present book, Small Group Discussion: A Theoretical Approach. The first two editions of Small Group Discussion were "conventionally" published by Gorsuch-Scarisbrick, Publishers, in 1990 and 1994. They sold it to another publisher, who let it go out of print. As the publisher again, I feel the World Wide Web is the natural medium for this and any future editions.

In contrast with past editions, I wish to keep my thank yous short. I send them to all of those who taught the small group discussion course along side me at the University of Wisconsin, all of those who trusted me enough to adopt Theory and Practice during the 1980s, all of those who helped Gorsuch-Scarisbrick and me to find one another, all of those at Gorsuch-Scarisbrick who worked to make the book the best it could be, all of those who have reviewed and made suggestions toward improving the past versions of Small Group Discussion, and all of those who have been steadfast in their loyalty to Small Group Discussion during the 1990s. A particular thank you goes to Ellen Curtis for her effort to make the earlier editions of Small Group Discussion accessible. None of this would have been possible without the contributions of Elaine Gilby and Matthew Pavitt, and the book remains dedicated to both of you. One final thank you for Hal Witteman, one its earliest adopters and its most dedicated reviewer. Hal always reminded me to accentuate the book's relevance to practice, which among other things inspired me to add the "From Theory to Practice" sections to some of the chapters in this new edition. I dedicate these sections to him.

Charles Pavitt