Social and Cognitive Approaches to Interpersonal Communication

Susan R. Fussell, Roger J. Kreuz

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317778967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Writing & Presentation Skills

Historically, the social aspects of language use have been considered the domain of social psychology, while the underlying psycholinguistic mechanisms have been the purview of cognitive psychology. Recently, it has become increasingly clear that these two dimensions are highly interrelated: cognitive mechanisms underlying speech production and comprehension interact with social psychological factors, such as beliefs about one's interlocutors and politeness norms, and with the dynamics of the conversation itself, to produce shared meaning. This realization has led to an exciting body of research integrating the social and cognitive dimensions which has greatly increased our understanding of human language use. Each chapter in this volume demonstrates how the theoretical approaches and research methods of social and cognitive psychology can be successfully interwoven to provide insight into one or more fundamental questions about the process of interpersonal communication. The topics under investigation include the nature and role of speaker intentions in the communicative process, the production and comprehension of indirect speech and figurative language, perspective-taking and conversational collaboration, and the relationships between language, cognition, culture, and social interaction. The book will be of interest to all those who study interpersonal language use: social and cognitive psychologists, theoretical and applied linguists, and communication researchers.

PART I

Introduction and Background

— 1 —

Social and Cognitive Approaches to Interpersonal Communication: Introduction and Overview

Susan R. Fussell	Roger J. Kreuz
Carnegie Mellon University	The University of Memphis

Any utterance, from a simple “uh huh” to an hour-long lecture, is the complex output of a variety of psychological processes—formulating what to say, selecting the right words, monitoring the effects of the message on the audience, and so forth (Levelt, 1989). Likewise, any act of message interpretation is based on both psycholinguisticprocesses (e.g., lexical retrieval, syntactic processing) and social-interactional factors such as beliefs about what a speaker is trying to achieve by his or her message (Gernsbacher, 1994). Historically, the social aspects of language use have fallen in the domain of social psychology, and the underlying psycholinguistic mechanisms have been the purview of cognitive psychology. In recent years, however, it has become increasingly clear that these components of language use are highly interrelated: Cognitive mechanisms underlying speech production and comprehension interact with social psychological factors—such as beliefs about interlocutors and politeness norms—and with the dynamics of the conversation itself, to produce shared meaning. This realization has led to an exciting body of research examining how social and cognitive aspects of language use interact to affect interpersonal communication and to substantial progress in understanding the content and processes underlying language use.

This volume aims to show that the cross-fertilization of theories and findings from social, and cognitive psychology has proved extremely fruitful for understanding many aspects of human language use. Each of the four sections of the book illustrates this theme as it applies to such topics as people's intentions or goals when using language, the role of language in research settings, indirect and figurative language, perspective-taking and conversational interaction, and the relationship between language and cognition.

In this chapter, we first discuss the scope and aims of the book. Then, we outline some basic themes and historical influences on the work presented in the ensuing chapters. As will be seen, many of these influences arise from fields other than psychology—ordinary language philosophy, conversational analysis, and sociolinguistics—and much research can be viewed as an attempt to empirically test ideas and findings from other fields in an experimentally rigorous fashion. Finally, we provide a brief overview of each chapter with an emphasis on how it embodies the book's goal of integrating social and cognitive approaches to interpersonal communication.

THE SCOPE OF THE BOOK

The field of interpersonal communication is clearly immense, and comprehensive coverage of all approaches to this topic would far exceed the page limitations of this book. The decision to select contributors for such a volume is difficult and necessarily entails a focus on some aspects of communication at the expense of others. In this section we briefly describe the ways in which we have limited the content of this volume and the motivations behind our decisions.

Verbal Communication

Collecting contributions from psychologists whose theories and research focus on the production and comprehension of verbal language was our obvious way of limiting the scope of this volume. Although individual chapters discuss the relationship between verbal communication and closely aligned disciplines, such as nonverbal communication, paralinguistics, decision making, memory, and norms of social interaction, all contributions share a primary focus on spoken or written language. It should be emphasized that this limitation is not meant to imply that we consider nonverbal and paralinguistic phenomena to be of lesser importance to interpersonal communication; rather, it reflects our goal of illustrating the many ways a joint social-cognitive approach can be usefully applied to a relatively narrow set of research problems

Experimental Research Paradigms

A second way we limited the scope of this volume was to solicit contributions that discuss experimental research on language use and understanding, as opposed to case studies, observational research, or purely theoretical discussions. This decision was motivated by our desire to provide a body of work illustrating the strengths of experimental psychological research for answering key questions regarding human communication. Thus, this volume makes an excellent companion for recent volumes that focus on alternative approaches to communication (e.g., Carter & Presnell, 1994; Coulthard, 1992; Leeds-Hurwitz, 1995; Markova & Foppa, 1990) and fleshes out other volumes that contain a variety of approaches (e.g., Hewes, 1995; Slobin, Gerhardt, Kyratzis & Guo, 1996).

Although all contributors use experimental methods, the topics they address and thus the research paradigms they have developed are by no means identical. An understanding of any complex process, of which interpersonal communication is an example par excellence, requires a variety of converging methodologies. The studies described in the chapters of this book differ in their focus on conversational roles (message initiator, recipient, or both), modality of communications (written, spoken, computer-mediated), level of analysis (words, sentences, conversational exchanges), and research strategies (audio- and videotaped conversations, vignette studies, on-line reaction time studies, and so forth). Readers can glean insight into both common and novel experimental approaches to communication by glancing though the methodological descriptions in each chapter.

THEMES AND HISTORICAL INFLUENCES

Krauss and Fussell (1996) identified four basic models or sets of theoretical assumptions that have guided much of the research on interpersonal communication: Encoder-Decoder models, Intentionalist models, Perspective-taking models, and Dialogic models. These models differ in their assumptions about how meaning arises from language use: For Encoder-Decoder models, meaning is a property of messages; for Intentionalist models it resides in speakers' intentions; for Perspective-taking models it derives from an addressee's point of view; and for Dialogic models it is an emergent property of the participants' joint activity. Each contribution to this volume, although perhaps more closely aligned to some models than to others, can be viewed as an effort toward a hybrid theory of interpersonal communication that takes into account what has been learned from all these approaches. Although the contributors address different topics from different theoretical angles, it is possible to identify several interrelated themes or assumptions that run through most if not all chapters. We outline these themes briefly in this section.

Communication Involves the Exchange of Communicative Intentions

Most contributions to this volume can each be viewed as stemming, either directly or indirectly, from the view that successful communicationentails the exchange of communicative intentions (Grice, 1957, 1969). In this view, words do not have a one-to-one relationship to the ideas a speaker is attempting to express; rather, a single utterance, such as “It's cold in here,” can convey a range of meanings (e.g., a statement about weather conditions or a request to close the door), and a single meaning can be expressed in a potentially infinite number of ways. Consequently, listeners must go beyond the literal meaning of a message to derive the speaker's intended meaning. Clarification of when, why and how they do so is a goal of chapters throughout this volume.

Communication is Goal-Directed

Austin (1975) observed that many utterances can be described as acts on a speaker's part (e.g., questions, promises, demands). Similarly, Searle's Speech Act Theory (Searle, 1969, 1975) distinguished between three rather different types of acts that an utterance can be designed to achieve: a locutionary act (the act of uttering a specific sentence with a specific conventional meaning), an illocutionary act (the act of demanding, promising, etc. through the use of a specific locution), and a perlocutionaryact (an attempt to achieve a verbal or behavioral response from the addressee). For example, “It's cold in here” is a locutionary act that is a statement about the weather; but as an illocutionary act, it might be a request to close the door, and as a perlocutionary act, it might be an attempt to get the listener to close the door. Why speakers decide to create one type of speech act versus another and the mechanisms underlying listeners' understanding of these speech acts is a topic of several chapters.

Communication is a Cooperative Endeavor

Grice (1975) proposed that conversation be viewed as a cooperative endeavor. Even when their purpose is to dispute, criticize, or insult, communicators must shape their messages to be meaningful to their addressees. To do so, Grice proposed, they follow a general Cooperative Principle comprised of four basic rules. Grice termed these rules Conversational Maxims: Messages should be consistent with the maxims of quality (be truthful), quantity (contain neither more nor less information than is required); relation (be relevant to the ongoing discussion); and manner (be brief and unambiguous). Grice argued that even in the face of apparent violations, communicators typically assume that the cooperative principle holds and seek to interpret messages in a way that resolves these apparent violations. The various chapters in this volume address such issues as what motivates speakers to create utterances that on the surface violate the Cooperative Principle and how listeners understand these violations in both conversational settings and special circumstances such as laboratory settings and human-computer interaction.

Communication Consists of Ordered Exchanges
Between Speaker and Listener

A fourth major influence on the work presented in this volume stems from conversational analysis, a field that focuses on the structure of conversation (e.g., Atkinson & Heritage, 1984; Drew & Heritage, 1992; Jefferson, 1975; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, 1982; Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977). Conversational analysts have demonstrated that conversations consist of orderly sequences of utterances (such as question-answer pairs); others have argued that alternative forms of communication, such as writing, follow the same orderly organization (Bakhtin, 1981). Many of the conversation analysts' theoretical ideas have been formulated in psychological terms by Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986, Wilkes-Gibbs & Clark, 1992) in their influential Collaborative Theory of communication, which assumes that speakers and hearers work jointly to ensure that a message is understood. The influence of this model on current research and theory in the psychology of interpersonal communication can be seen throughout this volume.

Communication is Socially-Situated

Finally, in keeping with the overall theme of this volume, contributors' chapters illustrate the many ways in which language use is socially-situated. For example, Brown and Levinson's (1987) theory of politeness, which states that the indirectness of a message is a function of the relative status and social distance of communicators, plays a strong role in Holtgraves' contribution (Chap. 4). In addition, the assumption that communicators tailor speech to their addressees (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981; Brown, 1965; Clark & Marshall, 1981; Coupland, Coupland, Giles & Henwood, 1988; Krauss & Fussell, 1991; Mead, 1934; Rommetveit, 1974; Volosinov, 1986) is the subject of an entire section of this book. Many of the contributions can be viewed as attempts to delineate precisely how social factors, such as to whom one is speaking, influence language production and comprehension.

OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS

Although all contributors to this book combine elements of both social and cognitive psychology in their studies and theories of interpersonal communication, the particular ways they do so and the types language phenomena on which they concentrate vary substantially. The grouping of the chapters into four sections is meant to relect these differences in approach; however, it should be noted that there is much overlap between sections and many chapters could have been placed in more than one part of the book. Below, we briefly describe these four sections and the chapters they contain.

Section I, Introduction and Background, includes two chapters, in addition to this introductory one, which form a founda...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Part I: Introduction and Background
• Part II: Indirect Speech and Figurative Language
• Part III: Perspective-Taking and Conversational Collaboration
• Part IV: Cognition, Language, and Social Interaction
• Author Index
• Subject Index