Communication: Language and Persuasion

Communication and Persuasion

• Chapter 5 focuses on communication, while chapter 6 will cover persuasion.
• Resources are available in physical copy or online through the library.

Overview

• Language rules, cognition, culture, and identity are key aspects of communication.
• Nonverbal behavior, conversation, discourse, and computer-mediated communication also play important roles.

Communication and Persuasion

• Language shapes thought patterns, which in turn influence actions.
• This is from Bandura, 1999.

Communication

• Communication involves transferring information between individuals or groups
• It forms the basis of social interaction.

Language

• Language is constructed with sounds known as phonemes
• Phonemes turn into meaningful components such as morphemes
• Language is then organized by sets of rules.
• Utterances are complete units of speech in spoken language.

Rules of Language

• Meaning is determined by semantic rules that determine the meaning of sounds and words.
• Grammar includes morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules for language production and comprehension.
• Language rules facilitate effective communication, enabling the reliable transfer of information between individuals or groups.

Pragmatics

• Pragmatics involves the distinction between the literal meaning and the intended meaning.

Speech Act Theory

• Speech Act Theory by Austin in 1962, considers language to be performative, enabling actions.
• People can distinguish between literal and intended meaning through performed speech actions.
• This theory allows people to perform or achieve actions through speech.

Characteristics of Utterances

• Locution refers to the literal meaning of an utterance.
• Illocution is the speech act performed by the utterance.
• Perlocution is the unintended effect of an utterance
• Indirect language, as described by Searle in 1975, communicates an intended meaning that is not explicitly stated but is understood.

Cooperative Principle

• Grice's Cooperative Principle (1975) addresses how people communicate effectively.
• To be cooperative, one must adhere to certain rules when communicating.

Grice's Maxims

• Quantity: Providing the right amount of information in a conversation.
• Quality: Making truthful contributions.
• Relation: Ensuring contributions are relevant.
• Manner: Being clear, straightforward, and avoiding ambiguity.

Politeness

• Politeness includes processes where communicators frame conversations to save face.
• Delicacy is often required.
• Saving face involves maintaining a positive self-perception.
• Face is an individual's concern about their value or standing in the eyes of others.
• Positive face reflects a desire for approval
• Negative face reflects a desire to not be bothered.
• Threats to face are unpleasant, so utterances are altered to not cause harm to people's feelings

Language, Culture, and Cognition

• Language shapes thought patterns that affects people’s behaviour
• People who speak different languages may perceive the world differently.
• Cultural frame switching occurs because languages are learned in different cultural settings, which influences thought.
• Studies show that bilinguals may have different personality traits depending on the language they are speaking.
• For example, extraversion scores were higher in English among Spanish and English bilinguals
• Chinese and English bilinguals were more collectivistic when speaking Chinese, and more individualistic when speaking English

Language and Cognition

• The "saying is believing effect" is the tendency for a person's memory of individuals, groups, or events to be influenced by what they have said about them.
• Describing someone or a group to an audience can change how you remember them.
• Communicating negatively about something will case you to only remember the information of that thing negatively
• In doing so, we create a link between the language used and how we think.

Language, Personality, Identity, and Gender

• The way we speak and what we say reflect who we are
• Our patterns of behavior, personalities, gender identities, and other experiences influence how we communicate socially.
• Social markers are features of language use that convey information about a speaker’s characteristics.

Personality and Language

• Inferences about personality can be derived from a speaker's language use.
• In the matched guise technique, attitudes about a speaker are measured based on their language use.
• Speech characteristics are manipulated in experimental settings to evaluate competence and sociability.
• Rapid speech rates often correlate with high ratings of competence, trustworthiness, and sociability, while long pauses indicate lower ratings.

Identity and Language

• Language is used to identify someone's social status
• Accent is the most accurate indicator of social class
• Class variations in accents occur in cultural context.
• Received pronunciation is a standard, high-status spoken accent.
• Accents that deviate from this standard are looked down upon

Speech Accommodation Theory

• Focuses on how individuals modify their speech in conversations to suit various contexts.
• Motives include wanting to be understood or liked
• Speech convergence involves shifting speech style to match that of the listener
• Speech divergence involves shifting speech style away from the listener.
• Communication accomodaion involves modifying all their forms of communication, verbal and non-verbal

Gender and Language

• Differences in speech patterns are related to gender identity.
• There are vocal pitch differences between male and female speakers.
• It is not known if this is related to social or biological/anatomical factors.
• Women generally use the middle part of the register, while men use the lower part.
• A "deeper" voice is considered more socially desirable for men.
• Evidence shows that speech register is influenced by gender roles
• A Japanese study has discovered that Women's voices have dropped in recent years because of higher social status

Language and Stereotyping

• Language communicates our thoughts about people or groups
• This can happen explicitly or indirectly through stereotypes
• Lyons and Kashima conducted the Serial transmission experiment of Chinese Whispers
• Participants were asked to recall stereotype-consistent and inconsistent information during the game
• In the end, stereotype-inconsistent information disappeared while stereotype-consistent information was remembered

Language Abstraction

• Linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) suggests behavioural events are described at different abstraction levels, ranging from concrete verbs to abstract adjectives and nouns.
• The more abstract the language, the less it conveys about specific events and the more it describes the person.
• Linguistic intergroup bias is the tendency to describe ingroup positive and outgroup negative behaviour abstractly and vice versa.
• The linguistic expectancy bias describes expected behaviours abstractly and unexpected behaviours concretely

Nonverbal Communication

• Nonverbal communication includes everything to communicate a message excluding words.
• Social intellect is used to read other people's emotions, motives, intelligence, etc
• And is also capable of communicating the information about the self
• Co-verbal behaviours are nonverbal forms of communication used accompanied with speech to amplify a message
• Patterson's (1983) nonverbal behavior helps us to express intimacy, establish dominance, facilitate goals & regulate conversation.

Types of Touch

• Heslin and Patterson (1982) define five touch types that are based on intent.
• The types are Professional/Functional, Social/Polite, Friendship/Warmth, Love and Intimacy, and Sexual

Interpersonal Distance

• Hall (1966; 1984) observed four zones of interpersonal distances
• Ranging from Intimate (up to 0.5 m), Personal (0.5-1m), Social (1-4m), and Public (4m)

Facial Expressions

• Voluntary and involuntary, these changes in the face convey information for a conversation
• Display rules are the cultural rules governing what and how to express emotions

Gestures

• Gestures include hand and arm movements during conversation
• Emblems are quotable gestures that substitute verbal communication

Gaze & Eye Contact

• Gaze refers to looking at someone's eyes
• People spend 2/3 of a conversations looking at a person's eyes
• Eye contact refers to looking at each other's eyes at the same time
• The way we gaze differs in gender and culture

Nonverbal Communication

• Our nonverbal behaviours are influenced by the presence of other people.
• Argyle and Dean (1965) – Found that people reach an equilibrium in conversation and maintain it by responding in compensatory ways to any changes in their conversational partner's behaviour
• Nonverbal behaviour influence others
• A Buekeboom (2009) experiment suggests that nonverbal cues can influence subsequent language use.

Decoding

• Nonverbal sensitivity improves with age and experience
• Psychopathology can impede on one's ability to decode nonverbal behaviour.

Deceit

• Motivational impairment effect causes irony in concealing deceit that makes it less effective

Conversations

• Conversations include verbal and nonverbal communication
• Back-channel communication are cues to let a speaker know someone is listening
• Conversation analysis (CA) studies interactions, speech, and patterns of conversation.

Discourse Analysis

• Many Phenomenon in social psychology are analyised
• Including: the role of emotions in relationships
• study of crowd and collective action

Communication Tech

• Communication has been revolutionized by interent tech
• CMC refers to communicating using computer networks
• Anonymous communication has consequences.

Deindividuation

• Describe situations where individuals act in and do not see themselves as it
• Higher levels of disclosure and trolling
• Propaganda and recruitment get disseminated.

CMC negative

• Cyberbullying, stalking, and harassment occur on these platforms
• Internet causes extremism
• People often get radicalized
• Fundraising also takes place on extremist networks