Military Cyber Influence Operations Theory

Some very interesting stuff...


[link to www.au.af.mil]

Some snippets

"Additionally, three communication theories are key to evaluating strategic alternatives in the handling of bad news: social penetration theory, information manipulation theory, and inoculation theory. Social penetration theory shows the importance of providing increasingly-personal information in ever-greater degrees to establish a meaningful relationship. Information manipulation theory outlines four factors [amount disclosed, quality, relevance, and clarity] that are important in the release of information, as the factors can alarm receivers to purposeful or inadvertent information manipulation and/or deception. Inoculation theory purports that forthrightness by the source in delivering bad news might over time curtail negative receiver reactions to bad news, at least to some degree."

"To test the cross-cultural validity of uncertainty reduction theory, a study was conducted using students from South Korea and the United States who were chosen to represent high- and low-context cultures respectively. Uncertainty reduction theory is based upon the assumption that the primary concern of strangers upon meeting is one of uncertainty reduction, or of increasing predictability of the behavior of both themselves and others in the interaction. The high-context/low-context culture distinction depends on the amount of contextual information left unstated in typical communication settings--Korean leaves much unstated, while American English spells out much information explicitly."