Social Behaviour in Police Interviews: Relating Data to Theories - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 317

a b

Dominant

Dominant

Compete Leading

Aggression Helping

Defiant Cooperative

Withdraw Depend

Submissive

Submissive

Fig. 16.2 ( a ) Leary's rose is defined by two axes: a dominance axis ( vertical ), describing the
speaker's dominance or submissiveness towards the listener; and an affect axis ( horizontal ),
describing the speaker's willingness to cooperate with the listener. The rose can be divided into
eight areas that each corresponds to a stance. ( b )The solid arrows indicate the behaviour-inviting
relation between the quadrants according to Leary's ( 1957 ) theory. So, dominant-together invites
submissive-together behaviour (and vice-versa) and dominant-opposed invites submissive-opposed
behaviour (and vice-versa)

This means that a dominant act (for example, power display) elicits submissive
acts, whereas an act with positive affect (for example, cooperative behaviour)
elicits another positive affect act (see Fig. 16.2 b). For example, if someone displays
dependent behaviour towards another person (submissive and positive), that other
person will feel a tendency to adopt a leading stance (dominant and positive)
(Leary 1957 ).

16.3.1.1 Corpus Examples

In the corpus, we see several examples of different stances. In the Van Bron scenario,
the suspect mostly behaves in a detached manner, unwilling to cooperate and
expressing this through either competing or defiant behaviour. For example, when
Van Bron becomes frustrated about not getting enough time to speak his thoughts
and says to one of the officers that they should let him speak, the addressed officer
says that he does not need to comply with Van Bron's wishes. As a result, Van Bron
becomes somewhat aggressive and acts in a very dominant way, which corresponds
to a hostile-dominant stance. On the other hand, the police officer usually displays
behaviour with a together stance, for example in the Wassink scenario, in which the
police officer does his very best to explain in other words to the interviewee what he
was saying just a moment before. In this attempt to help the interviewee, the officer
takes a very positive stance towards her by trying to help and cooperate with her.