Interpersonal Communication

Charles R. Berger, Charles R. Berger

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110373875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Interpersonal communication has been studied in terms of both communication functions and specialized contexts. This handbook comprehensively covers the field including research on processes of social influence, the role of communication in the development, maintenance and decline of close personal relationships, nonverbal communication, cognitive approaches, communication and conflict, bargaining and negotiation, health communication, organizational socialization and supervisor-subordinate communication, social networks, and technologically-mediated interpersonal communication. Two chapters are dedicated to research methods in the field. The handbook includes chapters by widely recognized and respected scholars in the field.

Part I: Interpersonal communication:
An introduction

Charles R. Berger

1 Interpersonal communication: Historical foundations and emerging directions

Abstract: Since its inception in the 1950s, the interpersonal communication sub-discipline has evolved from a research enterprise preoccupied with understanding the role communication plays in the exercise of social influence to a broader purview that seeks to explain the role face-to-face and mediated social interaction play in the achievement of a broad range of instrumental and social goals. This evolution has featured development of theories aimed at explaining a variety of fundamental interpersonal communication processes and functions and the adoption of research methods that capture the dynamic, give-and-take of social interaction. These theories, and the research they have spawned, have been incorporated into such related communication science sub-disciplines as organizational, inter-cultural, and health communication, as well as research areas that deal with marital and family communication, social support and communication technology. This chapter traces these developments and suggests several future avenues that interpersonal communication theory and research might traverse.

Key Words: Historical Foundations, Social Influence, Relationships, Cognitive Processes, Approaches to Inquiry, Levels of Analysis, Future Research Vectors

1 Introduction

Interpersonal communication theory and research have shown explosive growth along multiple dimensions since the field’s inception during the post-World War II period. The interpersonal communication domain’s scope of interest has not only broadened immensely since these early days, researchers working in such seemingly unrelated areas of communication science as mass communication, organizational communication and communication technology have drawn heavily on conceptual frameworks and research advanced by interpersonal communication scholars. Moreover, interpersonal communication processes have become significant research foci in several applied areas. This volume’s chapters reflect ongoing research enterprises that exemplify these and other historical developments, and several of the chapters provide a glimpse of theory and research trajectories that are likely to develop more fully during the remainder of the 21^st century.

The goals of this chapter are to place the contemporary study of interpersonal communication into its historical context and to delineate alternative approaches to interpersonal communication inquiry. An additional aim is to identify paths along which the field is likely to develop in the coming decades. In the process of pursuing these three goals, the volume’s chapters will be placed in a broader context that may aid in the identification of new research directions.

2 Historical foundations

In order to characterize the present and future landscape of the interpersonal communication sub-discipline as it is represented in this volume, it is necessary to understand its origins and how it has developed from its inception to the present. As will become apparent, choices of focal research areas within the field that were made decades ago are still quite apparent in contemporary interpersonal communication theory and research. Moreover, in all likelihood, these early commitments will continue to be reflected in future incarnations of the interpersonal communication research domain.

2.1 The post-World War II period

Interpersonal communication emerged as a research area within the larger project of erecting a social scientific discipline of communication during the years following World War II. This broader communication science initiative was inspired primarily by researchers interested in mass media effects (Schramm 1954) and its roots predated World War II (Bryant and Pribanic-Smith 2010; Delia 1987). Early mass media effects researchers were housed in other social science disciplines. These interdisciplinary origins were highlighted by Schramm (1963) when he designated Harold Lasswell (political science), Paul Lazarsfeld (sociology), Kurt Lewin (psychology) and Carl Hovland (psychology) as the discipline’s “founding fathers.” Lazarsfeld’s pioneering studies of media effects on voting behavior (Benoit and Holbert 2010) and his landmark study of personal influence (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955) fueled interest in communication research within journalism departments. Lasswell’s work in political communication had a similar effect on the same audience. However, it was Lewin and Hovland’s work, among others, that served as the launching pad for the field of interpersonal communication. Lewin’s interests in group processes and their influence on individual behavior (Lewin 1945) and Hovland’s extensive, experimentally-driven research program focused on communication and persuasion that extended from the late 1940s until the early 1960s (Hovland, Janis and Kelley 1953; Sherif and Hovland 1961) both exerted significant impact on the first generation of interpersonal communication researchers who emerged primarily from speech departments during the late 1950s. Maccoby (1963) characterized Hovland’s communication and persuasion research program as the empirical core of the “new scientific rhetoric,” a label that comported closely with the emerging research orientation of social-scientifically inclined speech communication scholars.

Given these two, highly influential figures, it is not surprising that the first generation of interpersonal communication researchers who emerged from graduate programs housed in speech communication departments during the 1950s and early 1960s were primarily concerned with the study of communication and social influence processes (Berger 2005; Bryant and Pribanic-Smith 2010). Some of these researchers were inspired by Hovland’s work that focused on the role source, message and individual difference factors play in the process of persuasion, particularly persuasion in one-to-many contexts. Others looked to Lewin’s and other’s (Bales, 1950) group dynamics work to guide their research on influence processes within groups. Characterizations of the communication process reflected these early intellectual influences, for example, Berlo (1960: 12) proclaimed “… we communicate to influence – to affect with intent.”

2.2 Communication and relationships

Although these traditions of communication and social influence research continue to be important features of the current interpersonal communication landscape, as evidenced by such chapters as Dillard and Wilson’s (see Chapter 7) in the present volume, a significant turning point in these early lines of research occurred during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The emergence of the human potential movement during the late 1960s with its emphasis on authentic self-presentation through open and honest communication in some ways constituted a dialectical alternative to the more manipulative aspects of communication aimed at producing persuasive outcomes. In addition to research demonstrating the potential benefits of self-disclosure (Jourard 1971), a topic that continues to receive research attention and theoretical elaboration (Petronio 2002), research dealing with such topics as interpersonal attraction (Byrne 1971) and the development of interpersonal relationships (Altman and Taylor 1973) began to shift interpersonal communication researchers’ interests to the role communication plays in relationship development (Berger 1977). Several of this volume’s chapters reflect the continuing interest in relationship development processes (see Chapter 15, Vangelisti and Solomon) and such closely-related research areas as intergroup communication (see Chapter 2, Dragojevic and Giles), interpersonal conflict (see Chapter 8, Canary and Canary), negotiation (see Chapter 9, Roloff), interpersonal adaptation (see Chapter 10, Burgoon, Dunbar, and White), emotional expression (see Chapter 12, Planalp and Rosenberg), uncertainty management (see Chapter 13, Knobloch and McAninch), social support (see Chapter 16, Jones and Bodie) and social networks (see Chapter 17, Parks and Faw). This shift to relationship development-related research was accompanied by the then-emerging interest in nonverbal communication among interpersonal communication researchers (Knapp 1972), including the area of deceptive communication (Knapp, Hart, and Dennis 1974). These interpersonal communication research domains remain highly active ones and are represented in this volume’s chapters (see Chapter 3, Guerrero; Chapter 14, Vrij).

During the 1960s, interpersonal communication research concerned with social influence processes was informed by such social psychological theories as social comparison theory (Festinger 1954), dissonance theory (Festinger 1957, 1964), social judgment theory (Sherif and Hovland, 1961) and reactance theory (Brehm 1968). By the 1970s, however, evidence of increased interest in theory development began to manifest itself among interpersonal communication researchers. Formal theories devised by interpersonal communication researchers addressed such issues as the role uncertainty plays in communication during initial encounters between strangers and the development of relationships (Berger and Calabrese 1975; Berger 1979) and the consequences of proximic violations of personal space (Burgoon 1978). These early theoretical forays marked the beginning of a number of subsequent theoretical proposals by other interpersonal communication researchers and helped to establish a strong theory development ethic within the interpersonal communication research community. This volume’s chapters reflect this continuing commitment to theory development and contain lengthy lists of original theories concerned with such phenomena as communication accommodation, interaction adaptation, and uncertainty management.

2.3 The cognitive turn

During the 1980s, the cognitive revolution found its way into the communication science discipline in general and the interpersonal communication area in particular. It was heralded by the proclamation “Cognito ergo dico” (Planalp and Hewes 1982) and the individual’s place in communication science was subsequently reinforced by Hewes and Planalp (1987). This move sparked general interest in message production processes and the initial version of Action Assembly Theory (Greene 1984), a general account of action production. The notion that interpersonal communication is a goal-directed, plan-guided process was carried forward in work on Goal-Plan-Action (GPA) models (Dillard 1990), planning theory (Berger 1997), cognitive rules model (Wilson 1990), as well as others (Greene 1997). This research tradition is reflected in the chapters concerned with message production (see Chapter 4, Palomares) and imagined interactions (see Chapter 11, Honeycutt). However, the focus on the individual cognitive processes subserving message production that developed during this period was met with some skepticism because it failed to capture the fundamental dialogic and reciprocal nature of interpersonal communication and the non-linear dynamics of the process entailed by its inherent dialectical tensions (Burgoon and White 1997; Baxter and Braithwaite 2008; Baxter and Montgomery 1996). These critiques notwithstanding, the cognitively-informed message production focus has been carried forward into the new millennium by interpersonal communication researchers interested in such areas as supportive communication (Burleson and MacGeorge 2002; MacGeorge, Feng, and Burleson 2011), goal detection and planning (Berger and Palomares 2011), and skilled message production (Greene and Burleson 2003).

2.4 The era of diversification

The progressive expansion of the interpersonal communication field’s theoretical purview has naturally led to diversification of the contexts within which interpersonal communication processes are studied. Some of these contexts have become highly active sub-areas of study within their own right. Family communication (see Chapter 18, Koerner) and marital communication (see Chapter 19, Segrin and Flora) represent such sub-specialties within interpersonal communication. In addition, researchers whose primary foci seemingly lie beyond the boundaries of interpersonal communication have found interpersonal communication theory and research to be integral to understanding communication within their particular domains of interest. The chapters concerned with organizational communication (see Chapter 20, Kramer and Sias), health communication (see Chapter 21, Duggan and Thompson), intercultural communication (see Chapter 22, Kim) and technologically-mediated communication (see Chapter 23, Walther and Lee) exemplify the substantial reach and impact interpersonal communication theory and research has exerted well beyond the immediate boundaries of the sub-discipline.

3 Approaches to interpersonal communication inquiry

The chapters concerning the measurement of social interaction (see Chapter 5, Caughlin and Basinger) and the analysis of social interaction data (Chapter 6, Liu) each address in detail a number of issues surrounding the collection and analysis of data gathered in interpersonal communication research. Consequently, the discussion of approaches to the study of interpersonal communication that follows will address broader conceptual questions about alternative ways of studying interpersonal communication.

3.1 What is interpersonal communication?

Posing this question may seem to be a somewhat odd way to begin a discussion about alternative approaches to interpersonal communication inquiry; however, it is probably the case that the way in which this question is answered has a great deal to do with the way in which one approaches the study of interpersonal communication. Some early interpersonal communication scholars defined interpersonal communication as communication between two people and no more (King 1979; Smith and Williamson 1979). During that same era, others took issue with this numerically-based definition (Berger and Bradac 1982) and still others argued that communication can be predicated on knowledge available at least three different levels: cultural, sociological and psychological (Miller and Steinberg 1975). Individuals may interact with each other primarily based on cultural norms or their membership in particular social-demographic categories such as sex, age or race. When interacting on the basis of cultural and sociological information, individuals do not know each other as individuals, thus their interactions tend to be impersonal or “non-interpersonal” (Miller and Steinberg 1975). When individuals increasingly predicate their behavioral choices during interactions on psychological level knowledge, that is, knowledge about the unique personal characteristics and history of their partners, their interactions become more interpersonal and less impersonal (Miller and Steinberg 1975...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface to Handbooks of Communication Science series
• Contents
• Part I: Interpersonal communication: An introduction
• Part II: Fundamental processes
• Part III: Methodological approaches
• Part IV: Functions of interpersonal communication
• Part V: Interpersonal communication contexts
• Biographical sketches
• Author index
• Subject index