Another look at information management: A rejoiner to McCornack, Levine, Morrison, and Lapinski

Our approach to information management in IDT is compatible with McCornack's IMT. However, our disagreements concerning the primacy of Grice's CP, the relevant conversational expectations, and communicators' sensitivity to expectancy violations produce points of departure in our approaches. Additionally, unlike IMT, our information managements dimensions are intended to underlie both the encoding and decoding of messages and to apply to truthful as well as deceitful discourse. IMT does not provide an explanation for how senders create deceptive messages, how listeners, upon detecting surface deviations, judge sender honesty, or how messages actually deceive. IDT's notions of strategic manipulation of information and expectancy violations are a promising starting point in explaining this process. It is clear that information management in deception is an important area for theoretical development and empirical testing. McCornack and his colleagues have been instrumental in bringing it to the attention of deception researchers. Our approach to information management in IDT, like McCornack's IMT, describes properties entailed in information management during deception. Theoretical exchanges, such as this one, help clarify and extend the idea of information management in both deceptive message production and processing.