Explaining Communication

Contemporary Theories and Exemplars

Bryan B. Whaley, Wendy Samter, Bryan B. Whaley, Wendy Samter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135250409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Offering a direct sightline into communication theory, Explaining Communication provides in-depth discussions of communication theories by some of the foremost scholars working in communication today. With contributions from the original theorists and scholars known for their work in specific theoretical perspectives, this distinctive text breaks new ground in giving these scholars the opportunity to address students firsthand, speaking directly to the coming generations of communication scholars.Covering a wide range of interpersonal communication theories, the scope of this exceptional volume includes:
*the nature of theory and fundamental concepts in interpersonal communication;*theories accounting for individual differences in message production; explanations of human communication from dyadic, relational, and/or cultural levels; and*a history of communication theory.
Chapter authors offer their own views of the core ideas and findings of specific theoretical perspectives, discussing the phenomena those perspectives are best positioned to explain, how the theories fit into the field, and where future research efforts are best placed. While by no means comprehensive, Explaining Communication includes those theories that rank among those most often used in today's work, that have generated a substantial body of knowledge over time, and that have not been articulated in detail in other publications.With detailed explorations and first-hand discussions of major communication theories, this volume is essential for students in communication studies, interpersonal communication, and advanced theory courses, as well as for scholars needing a thorough reference to some of the most salient theories in communication today.

1
The Nature and Evaluation of Theory

Stephen W. Littlejohn

Public Dialogue Consortium

NATURE AND EVALUATION OF THEORY

Raúl and Taisha emerged from their history class shaking their heads and feeling disappointed. They wandered out of the building and down to the duck pond, where they sat on a bench to talk.

“How could any professor be that bad?” Raúl asked and then added, “He is so disorganized and dull, and you can't really understand what he's trying to say.”

“Hard to figure,” Taisha mused. “I'm upset because I was really looking forward to this course. I think he just can't connect with the subject. I think he hates it. They probably forced him to teach the class.”

“Well, I don't know,” Raúl responded, “I think he's just shy and doesn't like students very much. You know, I get the impression that he just doesn't like to teach.”

“Or he's afraid of people,” Taisha added.

“That may be the case,” Raúl surmised, “but how do you explain that dense language he's always using? I can't make sense of it.”

“Oh, professors just talk like that. They seem to get some false sense of importance out of using hard words,” Taisha replied.

“Well, my English prof doesn't,” Raúl said. “He's so cool. I mean, he really clicks with students, and he can explain stuff really clearly. Plus he's super interesting. He's an Assistant Professor, and he seems to just love coming to class. Everything seems really fresh and new to him. I think that matters. When you haven't taught the same thing 800 times, it's easier and more fun to share with others.”

“If that's so,” Taisha wondered, “how come some of the older profs do such a great job showing the relevance of what they teach? I think experience can help teachers see more angles and ways of understanding their subject.”

Taisha and Raúl were repeating a pattern heard just about everywhere we go. They were trying to explain a communication experience. In this case, they wanted to get an idea of why their professor communicated in certain ways. These students did what we all do. They took turns proposing possible explanations.

We are able to explain our experience because we have a variety of theories about how things work. Normally, such theories are implicit, or not spoken. Sometimes they are even subconscious. We may believe people are more nonverbally engaging when they are interested in the subject than when they are not. We may think that personal traits such as shyness affect individuals' interaction styles. We could say that people are more curious about things they know less about and that experience leads to familiarity and lower enthusiasm, or we could suggest just the opposite—that experience leads to commitment, which in turn leads to enthusiasm.

In addition, we have certain implicit theories of language. For example, we might believe that people use certain forms of talk to identify themselves as a community, or that we use language in certain ways to build our image in social situations. Each of these explanations surfaced in Raúl and Taisha's conversation.

Human beings seem to have a strong need to interpret, understand, and explain their experience in the world. We want to be able to make sense out of things, and when it comes to human social life, we are especially compelled to create meaning for the patterns of interaction we experience.

What Is a Theory?

A theory is a set of related propositions used to classify and explain aspects of the universe in which we live (Littlejohn, 1999, p. 21). Theory is normally taken as an academic term, because we associate it with science, but really everyone operates by theory most of the time. We put patterns of experience together in ways that help us make sense of our lives, predict what is going to happen, and help us respond and react to situations as they come up. We use terms—words, symbols, and numbers—to identify what we experience and to connect things together. When we have a way to talk about what we experience and explain things systematically, then we are using a theory.

Notice that we take our theories to be true, or at least we act as if they were true. However, you will also notice that people change their theories from moment to moment, as new explanations become necessary. Most important for ordinary people is that their theories work, that they are useful, that they make appropriate responses possible. When our understanding helps us see things clearly, then our theories are taken as true. When our ideas fail us—as they often do—we continue our search for a better way to understand.

Our theories provide us with two things that help us interpret experience. First, we have concepts, which are categories of things identified with a term. Look at the concepts that surfaced in Raúl and Taisha's conversation—boredom, shyness, liking, fear, dense language, self-importance, clear explanation, interest, experience, age, and others. Each of these is a set of perceptions that Raúl or Taisha group together, categorize, and distinguish from other perceptions. Boring experiences are different from interesting ones. So boredom and interest are concepts. Clear explanation is different from unclear explanation, which makes these concepts. Taisha and Raúl are able to communicate because these concepts mean more or less the same things to them.

But Taisha and Raúl are doing more than listing concepts. They are connecting them, or relating them to one another, which is the second thing that theories do. So Taisha and Raúl imply such things as, Shyness causes a feeling of boredom in listeners and Language density corresponds with comprehension. Of course much of the theory behind these conclusions remain unstated, but they could be articulated if Raúl and Taisha needed to do so. If they had to explain why they draw these conclusions, they would probably present a whole string of connections that justify the final conclusion about shyness, language, or clarity. It is the system of connections lying behind their conclusions that constitute Raúl and Taisha's theory-in-use.

In this chapter we will explore the nature of theory with a special emphasis on scholarship. First, we will take a look at how scientific theory is different from ordinary, implicit theory. Next, we will see how theory is created. Following that, we will discuss the role of research and publication in the production of theory and the similarities and differences among different types of theory and then look at various bodies of theory. We will conclude the chapter by learning about how to evaluate communication theories.

Scientific Theory

Given this tendency in human nature to seek clear and useful explanations, it is not surprising that scientists and scholars formalize theories. Scholars typically go about theorizing in a more systematic manner than do people in ordinary life. Scholars call their conceptual connections propositions, which are statements that associate or connect a concept to one or more other concepts. Here are some examples of propositions from various communication theories you will learn about in this book:

• Immediacy is correlated positively to eye contact.
• Cognitive dissonance causes attitude or behavior change.
• Well-defined roles found in working class families bring about the use of restricted codes, which reinforce the closed role system of the family.
• People control the impression they make on others by how they present themselves.

Let's take a closer look at these propositions.

The first statement claims that immediacy is associated with eye contact (Mehrabian, 1972). In ordinary language, this means that you give more eye contact to people you like than to people you do not like. This proposition has two concepts—immediacy (liking) and eye contact. The connection between these two is called a correlation, meaning that the two concepts are associated, though one does not necessarily cause the other. A positive correlation means that when one variable goes up, the other one also goes up. When one goes down, the other goes down. A negative correlation means that when one variable goes up, the other goes down. This proposition is simply saying that there is a positive correlation between liking and eye contact. It doesn't say that liking causes greater eye contact, or that greater eye contact causes liking, only that the two are associated with one another.

The second proposition deals with cognitive dissonance, which means awareness of being inconsistent. If you are a vegetarian for health reasons, but eat a lot of butter and cream, you might suffer cognitive dissonance. You value a healthy diet, but eat unhealthy, saturated fats. According to this proposition, once you become aware of this inconsistency, you will undergo either attitude or behavior change (Festinger, 1957). This is a causal relationship: Dissonance causes change. Notice, however, that a causal proposition can never stand on its own because other propositions are required to help explain the causal relationship. In this case, the explanation goes something like this:

When you are aware of an inconsistency in your thinking, you become stressed and feel tense, which is uncomfortable. In an attempt to relieve the tension and return to a more comfortable state of balance, you will change an attitude so that the cognitive dissonance disappears.

The third proposition states that well-defined roles found in working class families bring about the use of restricted codes, which reinforce the closed role system of the family (Bernstein, 1971). To translate,

Members of working class families behave in pre-defined ways and have little individuality. Such families use simple language that does not allow family members to elaborate very much on what they want to say. This restricted language will tend to keep the family members' behavior within the prescribed roles.

You can see that this is a circular connection. Limited roles leads to limited language, and limited language leads to limited roles. This kind of connection is called a causal loop, or mutual causation.

The fourth proposition has a different ring to it: People control the impression they make on others by how they present themselves (Goffman, 1959). The two concepts connected by this proposition are impression and presentation, and these are connected by personal choice. This is called an action connection. The action one takes leads to a goal or outcome. Unlike the first two types of proposition, which are more or less determined, an action statement suggests that people can choose to do various things to reach certain goals.

Propositions are the building blocks of theory, but no proposition by itself makes a theory. A theory is an organized set of propositions that together form a way of explaining or understanding something. The propositions of a theory paint a picture of how something works. Elaboration likelihood theory is a good illustration of what a theory looks like (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986); it is typically used to understand how persuasion works. Notice in the following paragraph, that this theory (presented in simplified form) is nothing more than an interconnected set of propositions that forms a picture of how information processing affects attitude change:

An individual sometimes evaluates a message in an elaborate, or critical, way, which is called central processing. In contrast, individuals sometimes treat a message in a noncritical way, which is peripheral processing. If a person is motivated and able, he or she will use central processing. When this is done, attitude change is less likely to occur, but when it does occur, it will be more enduring. If a person lacks motivation or ability, he or she will process the information peripherally, in which case attitude change will be more likely, but less enduring. Motivation is created by personal relevance of the message, the diversity of arguments in the message, or one's personal tendency to like critical thinking. Ability is associated with such factors as prior knowledge and message clarity.

For example, if you care deeply about the environment and pride yourself on knowing a lot about the natural world, you will probably process information on this subject in a central way, meaning that you would pay close attention to the details of environmental messages. If someone tried to persuade you that the Endangered Species Act caused harm to the environment, you would probably be pretty resistant to the idea, even though the speaker is quite credible in other ways. However, if you looked closely and found that there is some merit to the argument, you might change your mind a little, and this would probably be a fairly durable change.

How Theory Is Created

Most people will tell you that a theory is an educated guess about how something works. The common idea about theories goes something like this: A well informed person creates a theory about a phenomenon, not knowing whether the theory is true or false. By careful research, the theory is tested to determine whether it is correct or incorrect. If it proves false, it is discarded, and a new theory is created. If it proves correct, the theory is no longer a theory, but a picture of reality.

In this book, you will learn to understand theory in a way that is different from this. Very few contemporary scholars would distinguish between theory and reality. Rather, a theory is a way of packaging reality, a way of understanding it (Deetz, 1992, p. 66). You cannot understand reality without a theory. Reality in any realm of life can be represented in a variety of ways, so a number of theories could be useful. Because human beings always represent reality symbolically, they are always operating in the realm of theory. A theory is a system of thought, a way of looking at things. We can never “view” reality purely. Instead, we must use a set of concepts and symbols to define what we see, and our theories provide the lenses with which we observe and experience the world. In the chapters that follow, you will read many theories that utilize different concepts and symbols—and thus provide different lenses—for understanding the phenomenon of interpersonal communication.

Theories, then, are made. They are constructed by scholars for particular purposes (Pearce, 1991). People name concepts in the theory, they decide what connections or relationships to feature, they determine how to organize the theory, and they give the theory a title. They then use the theory to talk about what they experience.

Does this mean that anything goes, that you can “make up” any theory and assume it is as good as any other theory? No, it does not. Theories must have fit and utility (Brinberg & McGrath, 1985). Fit is the degree to which the categories and relations in a theory explain our experience of events. Do the categories and connections in the theory make sense in terms of our experience? Many theories are rejected because they do not seem to hold up in this way. However, a number of theories may fit; a number of theories may make sense in light of our experience. This is a good thing, because multiple theories expand our ability to describe and explain things from various perspectives.

The second way in which theories are tested is utility. Do they help us do things? Theories guide practice. Teachers like certain theories because they help explain things and organize a learning experience. Researchers like certain theories because they point to what should be observed and guide methods of observation. Physicians, psychologists, economists, managers, and architects all follow certain principles ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Lea's Communication Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Nature and Evaluation of Theory
• 2 Discourse and Identity: Language or Talk?
• 3 Nonverbal Communication
• 4 Impression Formation
• 5 Communication Theory and the Concept of “Goal”
• 6 Constructivism: A General Theory of Communication Skill
• 7 Aggressiveness Communication
• 8 Plans, Planning, and Communication Effectiveness
• 9 Formulating and Producing Verbal and Nonverbal Messages: An Action Assembly Theory
• 10 Problematic Integration Theory
• 11 A Theory of Communication and Uncertainty Management
• 12 Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory
• 13 Accounts
• 14 Communication Privacy Management Theory
• 15 Social Dialectics: The Contradictions of Relating
• 16 Communication Accommodation Theory
• 17 Relational Communication: As Viewed From the Pragmatic Perspective
• 18 Conversational Interaction: Understanding How Family Members Talk Through Cancer
• 19 Pragma-Dialectical Theory of Argumentation
• 20 Tides in the Ocean: A Layered Approach to Communication and Culture
• 21 Historical Contexts and Trends in Development of Communication Theory
• Author Index
• Subject Index