Willingness To Communicate (WTC)

Abstract

The Willingness to Communicate (WTC) scale, developed by James C. McCroskey and Virginia P. Richmond (1987; McCroskey, 1992), is a seminal psychometric instrument designed to quantify an individual’s trait-like predisposition toward approaching or avoiding the initiation of verbal interaction when given free choice. Over five decades of communication theory have investigated various social orientations—such as communication apprehension, reticence, shyness, and vocal activity; however, the WTC scale uniquely operationalizes the fundamental volitional decision to initiate discourse across diverse social settings. The scale comprises 20 items, structured around a balanced 4 × 3 factorial paradigm encompassing four distinct communication contexts (Group Discussion, Meetings, Interpersonal Conversations, and Public Speaking) crossed with three relational receiver categories (Strangers, Acquaintances, and Friends). To obscure the underlying measurement intent and mitigate demand characteristics, eight filler/distractor items representing non-evaluative functional encounters are embedded alongside the twelve scored items. Respondents rate their behavioral inclination on a continuous percentage probability continuum ranging from 0 (Never communicate) to 100 (Always communicate). Psychometric investigations consistently demonstrate robust internal consistency reliability for the composite scale (α = .85 to .92) and acceptable to good reliability across context-specific (α = .60 to .82) and receiver-specific (α = .65 to .85) subscales. The instrument exhibits established construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity, correlating positively with self-perceived communication competence and extraversion, and negatively with communication apprehension, neuroticism, and social introversion. This comprehensive review synthesizes the empirical foundation, factor structure, scoring mechanics, and normative benchmarks of the WTC scale.

Keywords

Willingness to Communicate, WTC, James C. McCroskey, Virginia P. Richmond, communication apprehension, self-perceived communication competence, talkativeness, reticence, interpersonal communication, psychometrics

Authors

The Willingness to Communicate scale was conceptualized and empirically validated by two eminent scholars in instructional and interpersonal communication:

• James C. McCroskey, Ed.D. (1934–2012): Longtime Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication Studies at West Virginia University. McCroskey was one of the most prolific researchers in the discipline of speech communication, publishing over 200 articles and dozens of books. He pioneered the conceptualization of communication apprehension (CA), the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA-24), and teacher nonverbal immediacy.
• Virginia P. Richmond, Ph.D.: Professor Emerita of Communication Studies at West Virginia University and later Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Richmond is a renowned authority on organizational communication, supervisor-subordinate relationships, nonverbal behavior, and communication orientations, having served as President of both the Eastern Communication Association and the National Communication Association (NCA).

Inquiries regarding the historical development and academic use of the scale can be directed through scholarly archives curated by the McCroskey estate and the National Communication Association.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Willingness to Communicate (WTC) scale is to directly measure an individual’s global behavioral predisposition to initiate communication when free from external mandates, organizational duties, or coercive social pressures. While a substantial proportion of communicative behaviors in daily life occur as passive responses to direct inquiries (e.g., answering a supervisor’s question, responding to a roll call, or returning a greeting), human social interaction is fundamentally propelled by the proactive initiation of dialogue. Prior instruments often conflated an individual’s communication competence or internal affective anxiety with their overt behavioral choice to speak. McCroskey and Richmond (1987) established that an individual can possess high linguistic proficiency and low physiological anxiety, yet still systematically opt to remain silent.

The clinical, educational, and organizational utility of the WTC scale is extensive:

• Educational and Instructional Diagnosis: In academic contexts, identifying low-WTC students enables educators to distinguish between cognitive comprehension deficits and volitional communicative reticence. Tailored pedagogical approaches, such as low-stakes small-group scaffolding, can be implemented to systematically nurture communication confidence.
• Second Language Acquisition (L2 Research): While originally designed for native speakers (L1), the WTC construct was adapted by Peter D. MacIntyre and colleagues into a foundational framework for second-language acquisition, establishing WTC as the ultimate pedagogical goal of language instruction.
• Organizational Assessment and Leadership Development: In workplace environments, high WTC scores correlate with proactive socialization, effective team coordination, upward information dissemination, and informal leadership emergence. Conversely, low WTC can signal risks for information bottlenecks, employee isolation, and poor knowledge sharing.
• Intervention Outcome Monitoring: The scale functions as an evaluative metric for therapeutic programs addressing communication avoidance, social anxiety, and public speaking phobia, allowing clinicians and communication consultants to track changes in behavioral approach tendencies following cognitive-behavioral restructuring or skills training.

Psychological Construct

The WTC construct represents an omnibus, trait-like orientation toward verbal initiation. McCroskey and Richmond (1987, 1990) defined it as the variability in an individual’s inclination to talk in situations where they have completely free choice. Unlike state communication willingness, which fluctuates based on ambient room temperature, conversational topic, interlocutor attractiveness, or transitory mood states, trait WTC exhibits cross-situational consistency and longitudinal stability across the lifespan.

The construct is operationalized through a 4 × 3 structural matrix comprising two orthogonal dimensions: Communication Context and Receiver Type.

1. Context Dimensions

• Group Discussion (Items 8, 15, 19): Involves small, informal collectives of individuals (typically 3 to 6 participants). Group discussion requires collaborative exchange, active turn-taking, and spontaneous topic maintenance. Individuals with high WTC in this domain freely contribute ideas and steer group discourse.
• Meetings (Items 6, 11, 17): Represents medium-to-large, semi-structured organizational or institutional assemblies. Meetings typically adhere to explicit or implicit agendas, formal chairing, and higher stakes regarding status and professional evaluation. Low WTC in meetings often manifests as passive attendance without verbal participation.
• Interpersonal Conversations (Items 4, 9, 12): Denotes dyadic exchanges occurring in everyday spontaneous environments (such as waiting in line). This context requires minimal formal protocol but high relational coordination, immediacy, and mutual monitoring.
• Public Speaking (Items 3, 14, 20): Involves one-to-many formal presentations before a physically or psychologically distinct audience. Because public speaking entails continuous individual responsibility for discourse, high cognitive load, and elevated visibility, it universally evokes lower WTC norms relative to dyadic encounters.

2. Receiver Dimensions

• Strangers (Items 3, 8, 12, 17): Communicating with individuals with whom no prior relational history exists. Interactions with strangers inherently possess high psychological uncertainty, ambiguous behavioral expectations, and heightened potential for social evaluation or rejection.
• Acquaintances (Items 4, 11, 15, 20): Interacting with known individuals with whom relational intimacy remains shallow or surface-level (e.g., casual classmates, coworkers from adjacent departments). Uncertainty is moderate, governed primarily by conventional social norms.
• Friends (Items 6, 9, 14, 19): Communicating with individuals with whom deep interpersonal trust, shared history, and positive emotional bonds have been forged. Threat perception is minimal, yielding the highest willingness baseline across all empirical populations.

3. The Distractor/Filler Dimension

The WTC scale incorporates eight uncalculated filler items (Items 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 13, 16, 18). These items describe functional, service-oriented, or institutional role interactions (e.g., communicating with a salesperson, waiter, police officer, or spouse). These items serve to mask the 4 × 3 matrix, preventing respondents from discerning the systematic manipulation of context and receiver categories, thereby attenuating tactical impression management and demand characteristics.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the WTC scale is rooted in personality psychology, the trait paradigm of communication, and socio-cognitive theory. Prior to the mid-1980s, communication research was dominated by single-orientation constructs, which McCroskey and Richmond grouped into three distinct theoretical streams:

1. Affective/Anxiety Formulations: Constructs such as stage fright (Clevenger, 1959), speech anxiety, and Communication Apprehension (McCroskey, 1970, 1977). These formulations conceptualize the speaker’s internal autonomic arousal and cognitive fear of negative evaluation.
2. Behavioral Output Formulations: Constructs centered on empirical speech volume, such as verbal activity, vocalization rates, and talkativeness (Mortensen et al., 1977). These metrics measure the output of communication once dialogue has already commenced, rather than the initial volition to participate.
3. Avoidance/Approach Preference Formulations: Constructs such as Reticence (Phillips, 1968, 1984), Shyness (Buss, 1980; Cheek & Buss, 1981), and Unwillingness to Communicate (Burgoon, 1976). Burgoon’s original 26-item Unwillingness to Communicate scale focused on chronic communication alienation, anomie, and generalized distrust.

McCroskey and Richmond (1987) posited that Willingness to Communicate represents the central behavioral nexus of human interaction. Their theoretical model identifies two primary cognitive-affective antecedents that account for the vast majority of variance in WTC:

• Self-Perceived Communication Competence (SPCC): An individual’s subjective self-evaluation of their ability to communicate effectively. Notably, objective communication skill bears an inconsistent relationship with willingness; rather, it is the belief in one’s communicative competence that acts as a cognitive catalyst for approaching social interaction.
• Communication Apprehension (CA): An individual’s level of fear or anxiety associated with either real or anticipated communication with another person or persons. CA functions as a potent emotional inhibitor, prompting behavioral avoidance.

In this dual-antecedent model, high SPCC fosters approach tendencies, while high CA triggers avoidance mechanisms. When combined with underlying biologically based personality orientations—specifically Extraversion-Introversion and Neuroticism (Eysenck, 1970)—these cognitive assessments coalesce into an enduring, trait-like probability function that dictates whether a person will voluntarily initiate discourse across everyday social encounters.

Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations have established strong evidence for the construct, criterion, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the WTC scale across diverse demographic and international cohorts.

1. Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by empirical alignment with established theoretical expectations. In their foundational validation studies, McCroskey and Richmond (1987, 1990) and McCroskey (1992) demonstrated that WTC scores correlate robustly and positively with Self-Perceived Communication Competence (typically r = .50 to .65, p < .001). Conversely, the scale exhibits moderate to strong negative correlations with the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA-24), with coefficients typically ranging from r = −.45 to −.60 (p < .001). Furthermore, WTC demonstrates statistically significant positive convergence with Eysenck’s Extraversion (r ≈ .35 to .48) and significant inverse relationships with Shyness (r ≈ −.40 to −.52), Reticence, and Neuroticism (r ≈ −.25 to −.35).

2. Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

Predictive validity has been repeatedly verified via behavioral laboratory trials and observational classroom paradigms:

• Latency to Initiate Interaction: In laboratory settings where unacquainted dyads are seated together under the guise of waiting for an experiment, participants with high WTC scores initiate verbal conversation significantly faster (shorter latency to first utterance) than participants with low WTC scores.
• Voluntary Classroom Participation: Longitudinal observational studies in university lecture and seminar settings indicate that baseline WTC scores reliably predict the frequency of voluntary, unprompted questions and spontaneous contributions over an academic semester (accounting for 15% to 25% of unique behavioral variance).
• Information Exchange in Working Teams: In organizational simulations, high-WTC team members voluntarily exchange higher volumes of project-critical information, assume spontaneous coordination roles, and are more frequently nominated as emergent leaders by peers.

3. Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity analyses verify that the WTC scale does not simply duplicate generalized talkativeness or linguistic competence. When participants are placed in coerced interaction paradigms (e.g., structured job interviews or mandatory oral examinations), the correlation between WTC and total speaking time diminishes substantially. This confirms that WTC isolates the volitional choice to initiate rather than physical speech volume or capacity once communication has been socially enforced.

Reliability

The WTC scale demonstrates strong reliability metrics across diverse demographic populations, academic settings, and language translations.

1. Internal Consistency

Extensive testing across college student samples and general adult populations yields Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the 12-item composite total score that consistently range between .85 and .92 (McCroskey, 1992). The eight distractor items are omitted from psychometric reliability calculations because they do not form a theoretically coherent construct.

Because the subscales comprise only 3 or 4 items each, their internal consistency estimates are expectedly lower than the total score, yet they remain within acceptable to good psychometric boundaries for subscale research:

• Context-Type Subscales (3 items each):
  • Group Discussion: α = .65 to .75
  • Meetings: α = .68 to .78
  • Interpersonal Conversations: α = .60 to .72
  • Public Speaking: α = .72 to .84
• Receiver-Type Subscales (4 items each):
  • Strangers: α = .76 to .86
  • Acquaintances: α = .70 to .81
  • Friends: α = .66 to .78

2. Test-Retest Reliability and Temporal Stability

Investigations evaluating the temporal stability of the WTC scale across multi-week test-retest intervals (ranging from 3 to 12 weeks) demonstrate stability coefficients between r = .78 and .86. These figures substantiate the foundational theoretical premise that Willingness to Communicate operates as a stable, trait-like disposition rather than an ephemeral psychological state.

Factor Analysis

The latent dimensionality of the WTC scale has been rigorously examined via both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to evaluate the structural integrity of its crossed-facet design.

1. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial principal components and principal axis factoring with orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations revealed that when the 12 scored items are analyzed without constraints, a dominant first general factor accounts for 35% to 45% of the total variance, confirming the psychometric appropriateness of calculating an omnibus Total WTC score. Secondary factor extractions cleanly resolve into either the four communication contexts (with Public Speaking items exhibiting the highest unique eigenvalue separation) or the three receiver categories (with Stranger items clustering as a distinct, highly loaded dimension).

2. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Model Fit

Subsequent structural modeling has compared alternative latent architectures to explain the multidimensionality of the instrument:

• Single-Factor Model: A strict unidimensional model where all 12 items load onto a general WTC factor yields poor to marginal fit (χ²/df > 4.5, RMSEA ≈ .095, CFI ≈ .82), indicating that context and receiver variations introduce substantial systematic variance that cannot be ignored.
• Hierarchical Second-Order Model: A hierarchical framework wherein a global WTC latent construct governs four first-order context factors (Group, Meeting, Dyad, Public) or three receiver factors demonstrates substantially improved fit (χ²/df ≈ 2.2, RMSEA ≈ .054, CFI ≈ .94, TLI ≈ .92).
• Bifactor Model: A bifactor representation—specifying a primary general WTC factor alongside orthogonal context and receiver group factors—frequently demonstrates superior fit (χ²/df < 1.8, RMSEA ≈ .042, SRMR ≈ .038, CFI ≈ .97). Standardized loadings onto the general factor remain robust (.50 to .75), validating the use of the overall composite score for primary clinical and educational diagnostics, while confirming that subscales provide reliable incremental diagnostic precision.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Tool Name: Willingness to Communicate (WTC) Scale
• Authors: James C. McCroskey and Virginia P. Richmond (1987, 1992)
• Measurement Format: 20-item self-report questionnaire utilizing a probability estimate format (0% to 100%)
• Item Breakdown:
  • 12 Scored Items: Mapped across a 4 × 3 matrix (4 contexts × 3 receiver types).
  • 8 Filler/Distractor Items: Non-scored items (Items 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 13, 16, 18) included to mask test intent and diminish social desirability bias.
• Response Scale: Continuous percentage probability continuum from 0 (Never choose to communicate) to 100 (Always choose to communicate).
• Administration Time: Approximately 5 to 10 minutes.
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (native and non-native speakers across educational, clinical, and corporate environments).

Scoring Instructions and Formulas

To calculate subscale and total scores, compute the arithmetic mean of the designated items. All resulting scores fall on the continuous 0 to 100 scale:

Context-Type Subscales:

• Group Discussion: (Score Item 8 + Score Item 15 + Score Item 19) / 3
• Meetings: (Score Item 6 + Score Item 11 + Score Item 17) / 3
• Interpersonal Conversations: (Score Item 4 + Score Item 9 + Score Item 12) / 3
• Public Speaking: (Score Item 3 + Score Item 14 + Score Item 20) / 3

Receiver-Type Subscales:

• Stranger: (Score Item 3 + Score Item 8 + Score Item 12 + Score Item 17) / 4
• Acquaintance: (Score Item 4 + Score Item 11 + Score Item 15 + Score Item 20) / 4
• Friend: (Score Item 6 + Score Item 9 + Score Item 14 + Score Item 19) / 4

Composite Total WTC Score:

• Total WTC: (Stranger Subscore + Acquaintance Subscore + Friend Subscore) / 3
  (Equivalently: The sum of all 12 scored items divided by 12.)

Normative Interpretive Thresholds

Based on normative data derived by McCroskey and colleagues from large cohorts (exceeding 10,000 respondents), scores fall into High (> 1 SD above the mean), Moderate (within ±1 SD of the mean), and Low (< 1 SD below the mean) classifications:

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Willingness to Communicate scale was first formulated in 1987 (McCroskey & Richmond) and formally published with full empirical psychometric validation in 1992 in Communication Quarterly. In keeping with the lifelong commitment of James C. McCroskey and Virginia P. Richmond to foster open communication scholarship, the instrument is in the public domain for non-commercial educational, diagnostic, and scholarly research purposes. No royalty fees or formal permission requests are required for academic research, instructional use, thesis dissertations, or classroom administrations, provided that proper bibliographic citation is credited to the original authors. Any commercial packaging, profit-driven corporate deployment, or inclusion within proprietary psychometric software batteries requires direct written authorization from the authors’ literary representatives.

References

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• Clevenger, T., Jr. (1959). A synthesis of experimental research in stage fright. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 45(2), 134–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335635909382343
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• Yashima, T. (2002). Willingness to communicate in a second language: The Japanese EFL context. The Modern Language Journal, 86(1), 54–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-4781.00136

Items of the Scale