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Lecture Notes of The Social Psychology of Communication, 2022
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Lecture notes of all (guest) lectures of the course The Social Psychology of Communication.
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The Social Psychology of CommunicationWeek 1 – 14/09/2022
The idea of the Basic Communication Model is that the context is essential to understand any word –
to understand any observation.
Communication is a very large and complex field – it is about doing things and integration of things.
You can look at it from many aspects, so it’s a field in itself.
What then is the psychology of communication?
Communication, you might argue, at the core is about communicating mental representations to the
other. One’s brain has a certain activation with a meaning, which is to be told to another person, so
that person has the same meaning in his head.
Bringing about specific mental representations in the other. It’s not a picture, video, or
word, but a meaning. And this meaning is what the person wants to communicate.
E.g. if one says love, the other knows what (s)he means. And this is what communication is about: it
is a shared reality.
Imagine that you want to communicate that you want to have a pizza. So, next time you want to
have a pizza, you flash the light twice and turn the wheel once to the right. So, if the other person
sees this, (s)he knows that the person wants a pizza. This way, there’s an endless number of
messages one can send. But, this is not very convenient.
Therefore, we have the body. One can move their muscles and move in a very complex way.
If one can do this, one can conclude that it has a survival evolution – we are made to
communicate – it is at the bottom of the survival, we needed it to survive in groups.
The first thing are the vocal cords: imagine that you don’t use your muscles around your mouth and
you want to make a sound, you just make some noise – this is the basic thing of communication
through language. But, there is more to it. Now, let’s use some muscles. Now, you can do a lot more
things with the sound, different tones, etc. Eventually, we talk to each other.
Through this, you can, e.g., say thank you – the mental representation of a positive feeling caused by
person B. If there is a positive feeling caused by another, then one has the mental representation of
thank you in their head that that person wants to communicate. And it has a broader meaning, e.g.:
- “I acknowledge that this thing which feels positive for me was caused by you.”, or
- “I reinforce our relationship by sharing meaning.”
So, there is a mental representation of thank you.
The video of saying “thank you” in different languages: all these people have the same mental
representations, but they are saying different words. And there are people in the world who
understand what they mean, and that’s language.
Language is about
- phonology: the speech sounds;
- semantics/vocabulary: the meaning of the units;
- syntax & morphology: the rules of combining words, and change word forms; and
- language: communicate complex / series of mental representations.
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,So, that’s the linguistic perspective on communication, but it’s all meant to communicate the mental
representations.
E.g. “Hello”, could have the meaning
- “I recognize you as a person.”
- “I am not negative towards you.”
- “I want to communicate with you.”
And this is the meaning that the person has in his head. And that person wants to send it to the
other.
It is a shared language. You have to know the symbols – you can only understand to which
mental representation it refers if you have the same rules.
E.g. when someone says “anthropomorphisation”, it can be that it doesn’t ring a bell at the other
person there is no mental representation when someone says this word, or he stands completely
different (e.g. the response “he is from mars”) there is no shared reality.
The social reality: if someone says A, the other person believes it and says it to someone else, who
believes it, etc. – It is no physical reality – The social reality is the things in our head, e.g. “there is a
god”.
Social reality is a power of humans. Animals can’t make a social reality. This social reality that we
make together by communicating with each other, and influencing each other, some people think
that the media is making a social reality around corona.
There are groups and we are making a reality that is so important for our behavior.
We have a lot of possible interactions: huge cities, going to space, smartphones, huge buildings,
super computers, etc.
Specialization: e.g. computer builders part producers raw materials. Only because all
those people have their specialization, only therefore we can build such grand tasks like
super computers.
We are focusing on the personal communication – the process of communication between two
interlocutors.
The basic communication model:
It is important to take the context into account!
You have to learn to very carefully watch things, to see what we see, and to learn what we can see.
What you see is the coding, and what it means (the message) needs to be understood in the
context.
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, E.g., you see a picture of a man, what is he doing? Running, training, loving sports, or being athletic?
These are all different inferences. You have to really disentangle what you see and what it means.
What do we talk about?
What we talk about says something about the relation or the goals. You have to learn to recognize
certain topics that people talk about and infer what is happening, what there goal is.
We always communicate with a goal. There are different instances, with different goals. And one
instance can have different goals at the same time.
E.g. “Hey, you look great!” What is the goal? It can (I) improve the relationship, (II) boost the other’s
self-esteem, (III) present yourself as friendly, or (IV) establish a norm of closeness. It can even be that
the other doesn’t look great, but you are just saying it to achieve goal (II) for example.
It is a converging remark, a positive remark.
So, try to figure out the goals. There are several types of goals.
1. Influence/organize: teach, persuade, collaborative action.
2. Identity: being a good and consistent person.
3. Interaction: looking positive and acceptable.
4. Relational resource: preserve the relationship.
5. Personal resource: avoiding repercussions.
6. Arousal management: avoid getting stressed.
Communication is also polished, it is based/shaped on other goals. For example, you do not only
want 1, but also 4 – you make an ensemble of the goals.
The goal(s) a person has shapes how one says something.
A primary goal (with certain secondary goals) leads to the communication strategy.
One must: observe (see/hear what’s happening) infer (make an inference) check (check what’s
happening) act.
From observing to knowing (or rather thinking you know) what is going on (making an
inference) is a lot of uncertainty – it is often coping with uncertainty.
(this is also in the exam: something can be still uncertain, but the right answer is still more certain
than the others)
There are several things you can recognize / strategies you can use and through that, you can make
inferences.
1. Topic of choice.
2. Type of arguments.
3. Language intensity.
4. Interruptions.
5. Response latency, speech rate.
6. Turn duration.
7. Code/language choice.
8. Speaking time.
9. Accent mobility.
10. Patronizing talk.
You can use all these things and the more you recognize, the more communication relevant
strategies you recognize, the better you can infer, the better you know what’s going on.
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