Robert M. Krauss
Ezequiel Morsella
Battle, n. A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)
When neighbors feud, lovers quarrel, or nations war, the predictable remedy prescribed by the voices of reason is communication. The prevailing view is that, faced with conflict, communicating is always the right thing to do: the UN Security Council encourages hostile countries to “hold talks,” and marriage counselors advise quarreling couples to “express their feelings.” So commonplace is the prescription that advice to the contrary seems anomalous; it’s difficult to imagine the secretary general imploring hostile nations to refrain from dialogue. The positive role of communication in ameliorating conflict seems so obvious that the premise is seldom given serious examination. Why should communicating be so helpful? Under what conditions does communication reduce conflict?
An attempt to answer such questions is the main burden of this chapter. In large part, the answers derive from considering what communication entails and what its instantiation precludes, that is, what it brings to, and demands of, particular situations. To understand the complex interplay between communication and conflict, we describe four paradigms of communication—four models of the communication process—and consider how each relates to conflict. 1 We briefly examine communicative mishaps that are potential sources of conflict and consider how and why communication can ameliorate conflict. Finally, we discuss some inherent limitations of communication as a peacemaker, limitations that result from the realization that understanding, the cardinal goal of communication, does not imply agreement, as Bierce’s definition illustrates.
Before we begin discussing the intricate interplay of conflict and communication, it is important to specify what we mean by the latter term. The concept of communication is an important focus for fields as diverse as cell biology, computer science, ethology, linguistics, electrical engineering, sociology, anthropology, genetics, philosophy, semiotics, and literary theory, each of which employs the term in its unique way. Indeed, communication has been used in so many ways and in so many contexts that, as sociologist Thomas Luckman observes, it “has come to mean all things to all men.”
Common to all conceptualizations of communication is the idea of information transfer. Information that originates in one part of a system is formulated into a message that is transmitted to another part of that system. As a result, information residing in one locus comes to be replicated at another. In human communication, the information corresponds to what are loosely referred to as ideas or, more scientifically, mental representations. In its most elemental form, human communication may be construed as the process by which ideas contained within one mind are conveyed to other minds. Though attractive because of its simplicity, this description fails to capture the true richness and subtlety of the process by which humans communicate, an enterprise that involves far more than automatically transferring ideas.
The most straightforward conceptualization of communication can be found in the encoder-decoder paradigm , in which communication is described as transferring information via codes. A code is a system that maps a set of signals onto a set of meanings. In the simplest kind of code, the mapping is one-to-one: for every signal there is one and only one meaning, and for every meaning there is one and only one signal. Such is the case for Morse code. The sequence dot dot dot dot signifies the letter H , and only H ; conversely, the letter H is uniquely represented by the sequence dot dot dot dot , and only that sequence.
Much of the communication in nonhuman species is based on the encoding-decoding principle. For example, vervet monkeys have two distinctive vocalizations for signaling the presence of their main predators, eagles and snakes. When one or the other signal is sounded, the vervets respond quickly and appropriately, scanning the sky in the first case, and scanning the grass around them in the second. Just as the Morse code dot dot dot dot invariably designates the letter H , the vervet “aerial predator call” unambiguously signals the presence of predacious eagles.
Viewing human communication as encoding and decoding assumes a process in which an abstract proposition is (1) encoded in a message (i.e., transformed into a signal whose elements have a one-to-one correspondence with the elements of the proposition) by the sender, (2) transmitted over a channel to the receiver, and (3) decoded into an abstract proposition that, it is believed, is isomorphic with the original one. For example, a speaker may formulate the proposition [John] [give book] [Mary] and thus transmit the message, “John, please give Mary the book.” After receiving and processing the message, John presumably understands that he has been asked to give a particular book to someone named Mary.
One reason the received message may not be identical to the transmitted one is that all communication channels contribute some degree of noise (any undesired signal) to the message. The more signal there is relative to the amount of noise (the signal-to-noise ratio), the closer the transmitted message is to the received message; hence the more similar the received proposition is to the original one. A low signal-to-noise ratio can distort the meaning of a message or even render it incomprehensible.
Noise, of course, has a deleterious effect on all communication, but its effect in the arena of conflict can be especially pernicious because it forces the recipient of a message to fill in information the noise has distorted. Given the antagonistic interpersonal orientation that parties in such situations often have, the filled-in information is more likely to worsen conflict than reduce it.
As an example of how noise may be introduced into communication, consider what happens when using third (or fourth or fifth) parties to transmit messages, in contrast to direct communication. As in the children’s game of Telephone, each party’s successive retelling of a message is likely to introduce some distortion, so that when it arrives at the ultimate destination, it may bear little resemblance to the original. There may be times when discussing delicate subjects is inadvisable in environments where misunderstanding is likely to occur. Also, whenever distortion is likely, redundancy (multiple encoded messages) can be helpful. Restating the same idea in different forms does not guarantee its acceptance, but it should increase the probability of correct understanding.
Avoid communication channels with low signal-to-noise ratios; if that is impossible, increase redundancy by restating the same idea in various forms.
Noise is not the only factor that can compromise communication. Even if the transmitted and received messages are identical, the retrieved proposition may vary significantly from the original. Speaker and listener may be employing codes that differ subtly, and this may lead to misunderstanding. For example, lexical choice often reflects a speaker’s implicit attitude toward the subject of the utterance. In a given situation, any one of several closely related terms (woman, lady; Negro, black, African American; crippled, handicapped, disabled, physically challenged ) might serve adequately to designate or refer to a particular individual, yet each term may be associated with a somewhat different conceptualization of its referent as part of a complex ideology or network of attitudes and values. If such ideologies or values are not shared, application of a term may be construed as antagonistic.
For example, at the height of the Cold War, an offhand comment made by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to a British diplomat was translated as, “We will bury you.” According to linguist Alan K. Melby, Khrushchev’s remark, made in the context of a conversation about the competition between communism and capitalism, was essentially a restatement (in considerably more vivid language) of Marx’s claim of communism’s historic inevitability. Although “we will bury you” is an acceptable literal rendering of Khrushchev’s words, an equally accurate, and contextually more appropriate, translation would have been, “We will be present at your burial.” Such a rendering is consistent with Khrushchev’s comment later in the same conversation that communism did not need to go to war to destroy capitalism, since the latter would eventually self-destruct. In the United States, the common interpretation of “we will bury you” was that “we” referred to the USSR, “you” meant the United States, and “bury” denoted annihilate. For many, especially those who viewed communism as a malign doctrine, the phrase became prima facie evidence of the USSR’s malevolent intentions toward the United States.
The controversy over proper translation of Khrushchev’s remark reveals a serious shortcoming of the encoder-decoder account of human communication: although language is in some respects a code, in other respects it is not. The fact that “we will bury you” could yield two equally “correct” renderings that differed so radically underscores the fact that humans do not use language simply as a set of signals mapped onto a set of meanings.
The Khrushchev episode dramatically illustrates why the process of encoding and decoding is not a good characterization of human communication. There was no question about the specific words Khrushchev had uttered, and competent translators did not differ on the ways the Russian utterance might be rendered in English. At issue was a more complicated question: What had Khrushchev intended the utterance to mean?
The view of communication implicit in the encoder-decoder position is that meanings of messages are fully specified by their elements—that meaning is encoded, and that decoding the message is equivalent to specifying its meaning. However, it is easy to demonstrate that this is often not the case. Unlike the vervet’s aerial-predator call, which has an invariant significance, in human communication the same message can be understood to mean different things in different circumstances, and this fact necessitates a distinction between a message’s literal meaning and its intended meaning. “Do you know what time it is?” is literally a question about what the addressee knows, but it is usually understood as a request. Although its grammatical mood is interrogative, it is conventionally taken to be an imperative; a reasonable paraphrase might be, “Tell me the time.” However, not all sentences of the form Do you know X? are intended as requests; “Do you know C++?” is likely to be understood as a question about familiarity with a programming language.
Understanding consists of recognizing communicative intentions—not the words used, but rather what speakers intend those words to mean. The intentionalist paradigm highlights the danger of participants’ misconstruing each other’s communicative intentions.
When listening, try to understand the intended meaning of what your counterpart is saying.
What might be called the Humpty Dumpty approach to communication (“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”) is a formula for disaster. In fact, communicators in a conflict situation should assume precisely the opposite of what Humpty Dumpty’s maxim advises.
When formulating a message, consider what the listener will take your words to mean.
Had Khrushchev prefaced, “We will bury you,” with an allusion to Marx’s claim of communism’s historic inevitability, it is unlikely that the remark would have fanned the flames of the Cold War.
In conflict, misunderstandings are especially likely because individuals interpret utterances to be consistent with their own attitudes. More than half a century ago, Solomon Asch (1946) demonstrated that the same message (“I hold that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical”) would be interpreted quite differently depending on whether it was attributed to V. I. Lenin or to Thomas Jefferson (its actual author). The word rebellion can be interpreted in more than one way. Respondents’ knowledge of the purported author was an important determinant of their interpretation of the word, and hence of the message’s intended meaning.
The problem can become considerably more problematic when the parties to the conflict use different languages to communicate, as the furor caused by Khrushchev’s remark illustrates. The translator had provided a literal English rendering of a Russian phrase that was intended to be understood figuratively. Nonliteral usage is a pervasive feature of language use. It adds enormously to our ability to formulate colorful and nuanced messages, but it does pose particular problems for a translator. In the first place, correctly apprehending the intended meaning of a nonliteral expression often requires cultural knowledge that goes beyond just technical mastery of the language. Understanding the significance of Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev—“Go ahead, make my day!”—requires at least a vague awareness of the Clint Eastwood film it echoes, Dirty Harry . It can require considerable cognitive effort to apprehend a speaker’s communicative intention, but the effort must be expended if the parties are to understand each other. In the absence of this effort, communication can become bogged down in a cycle of misinterpretation and denial:
Given the flexible relationship between the literal and intended meanings of an utterance, it is remarkable how well we understand each other. Utterances that are intended to be understood nonliterally are a common feature of everyday language use. Although some canonical forms of nonliteral usage are so salient that they have names (irony, metaphor, hyperbole), more mundane examples of nonliteral usage pervade everyday talk. When we say that we understand what others say, we are implicitly claiming to comprehend what they intend for us to understand. The decoded meaning of the utterance certainly contributes to that intended meaning, but it is only part of it. Occasionally misunderstandings do occur (as when an addressee interprets an ironic statement literally), but for the most part, we understand nonliterally intended utterances correctly, usually without being consciously aware of possible meanings that such an utterance could have in other contexts.
Despite facility in accomplishing this, the process by which a listener constructs the intention of an utterance is exceedingly complex and a matter of some contention among psycholinguists. In large part, it depends on the existence of knowledge that is shared between speaker and addressee, or common ground, as it is often called.
The most elemental kind of common ground communicators rely on is knowledge of the language they are speaking. But as many an embarrassed tourist has discovered, much of the common ground that underlies language use derives from a complex matrix of shared cultural knowledge. Without this knowledge, many utterances are incomprehensible or, perhaps worse, interpreted incorrectly. This point is particularly relevant to use of language in conflict situations, especially when the conflict stems from differences in intention, goal, value, and ideology. To the extent that such variations derive from a lack of mutually shared knowledge, communication suffers. Understanding the importance of common ground in interpreting utterances points to one of the drawbacks of relying too heavily on an intentionalist interpretation of communication: the addressee cannot derive the intended meaning from a message if the meaning resides outside the realm of shared knowledge. Moreover, since what is common ground for a given speaker varies as a function of the addressee (i.e., it varies from addressee to addressee), the speaker is obliged to generate only those utterances that he or she believes the addressee is capable of understanding.
Of course, it is within participants’ power to make this easy or less easy to accomplish. Not only can addressees try to look beyond the speakers’ words to the underlying communicative intention, but speakers can seek to express themselves in ways that will lead to the desired interpretation on their addressees’ part. This, of course, requires one to see the world through the eyes of another.
Perspective taking assumes that individuals perceive the world from differing vantage points and that because the experiences of each individual depend to some degree on his or her vantage point, messages must be formulated with this perspective in mind. The late Roger Brown put the essential idea succinctly: “Effective coding requires that the point of view of the auditor be realistically imagined” (1965, p. 242). However, apart from the general admonition that the addressee’s perspective be taken into account, it is not always clear how one should go about implementing what is sometimes referred to as the principle of audience design—the idea that messages should be designed to accord with an addressee’s ability to comprehend them. In the best of circumstances, it is difficult to take the perspective of another accurately; the more unlike oneself the other happens to be, the more difficult the task becomes.
In conflict situations, even more problematic than the absence of common ground may be the misperception of common ground—incorrect assumptions that communicators make about what their partners know. It is well established that people’s estimates of what others know, believe, or value tend to be biased in the direction of their own beliefs—what they themselves know. As a result, comprehending the intended meaning of an utterance may require knowledge one lacks, and this is particularly likely if the cultural situations of the parties involved are markedly different. In all probability, it would never have occurred to so confirmed a Marxist as Nikita Khrushchev that the context for the interpretation of his ill-received remark would be anything other than the doctrine of Marxism’s historic inevitability.
Such misperceptions are common in conflict for two reasons. First, the magnitude of the perspectival differences that communicators must accommodate may itself be an important source of conflict. For an ardent pro-life activist, it may be difficult to conduct a discussion about abortion that is not grounded in the position that abortion is a kind of murder; messages grounded in this premise, directed at the activist’s pro-choice counterpart, are unlikely to ameliorate conflict.
Second, conflict tends to make perceived distinctions among participants more salient and in so doing heighten the tendency to categorize them as members of in-groups or out-groups. The language people use in such situations reflects these distinctions. One manifestation of this is what Maass, Semin, and their colleagues have termed the linguistic intergroup bias (Maass and Arcuri, 1992; Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, and Semin, 1989). Any interpersonal act can be characterized at various levels of generality. For example, an observer might remark, “John carried Mary’s suitcase,” or “John helped Mary,” or “John is a helpful person,” all in reference to the same incident. A well-established research finding is that people describe the actions of in-group and out-group members with systematic differences. For an action that is negatively valent, the behavior of out-group members tends to be characterized at a relatively high level of abstraction, while that of in-group members is characterized more concretely. For positively valent behaviors, however, the pattern is reversed. Positively valent behavior of out-group members is characterized as a specific episode, while that of in-group members is characterized abstractly.
One consequence of the linguistic intergroup bias is to make stereotypes resistant to disconfirmation, since behavior that is congruent with a negative out-group stereotype tends to be characterized as a general property (“Smith is aggressive”), while behavior that is inconsistent with the stereotype tends to be characterized in quite specific terms (“Smith gave CPR to an accident victim”). The enhanced salience of stereotypes in conflict situations enormously complicates the process by which, again in Brown’s words, “the point of view of the auditor [can be] realistically imagined,” and by so doing undermines the effectiveness of communication.
When speaking, take your listener’s perspective into account.
Just as the speaker must take pains to be aware of the possible constructions listeners may place on an utterance, listeners have to be sensitive to the alternative constructions an utterance might yield. Although we habitually respond to what others say as though it could mean one and only one thing, this is seldom the case.
How insensitivity to this principle can affect communication is illustrated in a 1999 controversy involving Washington, DC, public advocate David Howard’s use of the word niggardly in a conversation with two aides. The aides, both African Americans, were unfamiliar with the obscure synonym for stingy and took it to be a form of a similar-sounding racial epithet, to which it is in fact etymologically unrelated. The ensuing flap (Howard, who is Caucasian, initially resigned but was then reinstated by Mayor Anthony Williams) polarized activists on both sides of the political spectrum. Although Howard was correct philologically, he was mistaken in assuming the word niggardly was in common ground. In retrospect, it seems clear that his choice of words was injudicious. Because the word was obscure, there was a good chance that at least some people would not know its meaning, and because of its similarity to a taboo word, the likelihood was great that it would be misinterpreted. Especially in situations where the addressee’s interpretation is consequential, an effective communicator tries to view his or her own utterances from the other’s perspective.
A serious complication of perspective taking in conflict situations derives from what is called the multiple audience problem. It is not uncommon for a communication to be designed to simultaneously convey different messages to different listeners, and this seems particularly likely to occur in conflict situations. For example, a mayor negotiating a salary increase with the teachers’ union may feel it is necessary to “send a message” to other municipal unions that he is willing to run the risk of a strike. Or the leader of the union may go to great lengths to ensure that a reasonable concession, part of the normal give-and-take of negotiation, is not seen by union members as a sign of weakness. The number of different (and sometimes contradictory) perspectives that a speaker may feel obliged to take into account can make public or open negotiations extremely difficult. Other things being equal, participants would be well advised to reduce the number of audiences to which their messages are addressed.
Of course, another person’s perspective is not always self-evident. It probably is in the best interests of the parties to expend some effort ascertaining what is and is not in common ground, and if necessary enlarging its contents. Such mutually cooperative efforts to ensure coordination on meaning is the essence of a dialogic approach to communication (discussed next). Participants deeply enmeshed in an acrimonious and apparently intractable conflict may find it difficult to achieve the degree of sensitivity to the other that such an approach requires. But without it there can be no communication of any consequence.
Thus far, our discussion has depicted communication as an unremittingly individualistic process—the product of contributions by what Susan Brennan has called “autonomous information processors.” Speakers and addressees act with respect to one another, but they act as individual entities. Communication consists of a set of discursively related but independent episodes. This kind of depiction may be appropriate for certain communications, such as the process by which writers communicate with their readers and broadcasters with their audiences, but it seems to miss the essence of what happens in most of the situations in which people communicate.
Participants in conversations and similar highly interactive communicative forms behave less like autonomous information processors and more like participants in an intrinsically cooperative activity. Clark and Brennan (1991) have made the point nicely: “It takes two people working together to play a duet, shake hands, play chess, waltz, teach, or make love. To succeed, the two of them have to coordinate both the content and process of what they are doing. . . . Communication . . . is a collective activity of the first order” (p. 127).
What we call the dialogic paradigm focuses on the collaborative nature of communicative activity. Perhaps the most fundamental respects in which the other three paradigms we have discussed differ from the dialogic is where they locate meaning. For the encoding-decoding paradigm, meaning is a property of messages; for the intentionalist paradigm, it resides in speakers’ intentions; for the perspective-taking paradigm, it derives from the addressee’s point of view.
In dialogic perspective, communication is regarded as a joint accomplishment of the participants, who have collaborated to achieve some set of communicative goals. Meaning is socially situated—deriving from the particular circumstances of the interaction—and the meaning of an utterance can be understood only in the context of those circumstances. Because the participants are invested in understanding, and being understood by, each other, speakers and addressees take pains to ensure that they have similar conceptions of the meaning of each message before they proceed to the next one.
An encoding-decoding approach to communication puts the listener in the role of a passive recipient whose task is to process the meaning of the transmitted message, but a participant in a communicative interchange is not limited to this role. Active listeners raise questions, clarify ambiguous declarations, and take great pains to ensure that they and their counterpart have the same understanding of what has been said. It is instructive to observe the person who is not speaking in a conversation in which the participants are deeply involved. Typically, such listeners are anything but inactive. They nod, interject brief comments (“uh-huh,” “yes,” “right, right,” “hmmm”), and change their facial expressions to mirror the emotive content of what is being said. These actions—sometimes called communicating in the back channel—are one means by which participants demonstrate their involvement in the interaction and their understanding of what has been said. Considerable research has shown that the absence of back-channel responses makes communication significantly more difficult (Krauss, 1987). Effective communication requires that listeners be responsive.
Be an active listener.
This recommendation seems to ask parties involved in an unresolved conflict to behave cooperatively; indeed, that is precisely what they do. Communication is intrinsically a cooperative activity. As the dialogic perspective makes clear, in communication the participants must collaborate to create meaning, and one reason that communication between conflicting parties so often is unavailing is that the parties are unable to collaborate to that degree. As Bismarck might have remarked, communication becomes a continuation of conflict by verbal means. Of course, the cooperation necessary for effective communication is of a minimal sort, and participants may collaborate to express (one hopes regretfully) their inability to see a resolution that is mutually acceptable. Nevertheless, that communication can be a first step, and developing lines of communication can be the foundation on which a solution ultimately rests. A paradoxical fact about human nature is that few things are as effective in inducing conflicting parties to cooperate as a common foe. In communication, the common foe is misunderstanding, and in collaborating to vanquish this enemy, the parties to a conflict may be taking the first step toward reducing their differences.
Focus initially on establishing conditions that allow effective communication to occur; the cooperation that communication requires, once established, may generalize to other contexts.
Each of the four paradigms reveals pitfalls that an effective communicator should avoid (noise, third-party transmitters, multiple audiences, and so on). The discussion thus far has mainly focused on the inherent complexity of communication and how its misuse can engender or exacerbate conflict. At first glance, the picture it presents is bleak. Tallying all the ways a communicative interchange can go awry leads one to wonder whether communication can ever have an ameliorative effect. Nevertheless, we all know that at least some disputes do get resolved peacefully, that long-standing adversaries can become allies, and that even seemingly irresolvable conflicts can be isolated, allowing parties to “agree to disagree.” In this section, we consider some simple behaviors that can enhance (though not guarantee) the ameliorative effects of communication.
Given a genuine desire to resolve the conflict, communication, artfully employed, can help achieve that end. Obviously what is most critical is the substance of the communication—the quality of the proposals and counterproposals that each participant makes. It would be foolish to expect others to accept solutions not in their best interests just because of “good communication.” However, quite apart from substance, the form that messages take can have (sometimes unintended) consequences. The very flexibility that makes communication so adaptable a tool also allows for more and less effective ways of achieving the same ends. For example, “Shut the door,” “Would you mind closing the door?” and “I wish we could leave the door open, but it’s so noisy” could (in appropriate contexts) be instances of utterances understood to have the same intended meaning. Although they differ in grammatical type and in the particular words they employ, all are understood as directives—attempts to induce the addressee to do something.
Utterances often are described in terms of the speech acts (Austin, 1962) they represent. Like physical actions, the things we say are intended to accomplish certain purposes; but unlike physical actions, they accomplish their purposes communicatively rather than directly. As we have just illustrated, the same speech act can be accomplished by a variety of utterances. Nevertheless, although “Shut the door” and “Would you mind closing the door?” both represent directives to close the door, they differ in another respect. The latter is an indirect speech act (one whose literal and intended meanings differ), while the former is a direct speech act that represents its meaning literally. Generally, indirect speech acts are perceived as more polite than direct ones, probably because the two kinds of directive have implications for the status or power differential of requester and requestee. Although different versions of the same speech act may be identical insofar as the message’s explicit content (construing that term narrowly) is concerned, it behooves a communicator to ensure that the form of the message does not undermine the information it conveys.
Pay attention to message form.
We conclude this discussion with a point we alluded to earlier. Communication is not a panacea, and in the absence of genuine desire to resolve conflict, it is as likely to intensify the parties’ disagreement as to moderate it. Although the point may seem too obvious to warrant mentioning, conflicts often serve multiple functions, and the parties may approach resolution with some ambivalence. They may find that the perceived benefits of continuing conflict outweigh its costs. In such cases, communication aimed at resolving the conflict may be unavailing—and could conceivably make things worse.
In a study published more than forty-five years ago, Krauss and Deutsch (1966) provided subjects in a bargaining experiment with an opportunity to communicate. The bargaining problem they confronted in the experiment was a relatively simple one to solve. However, allowing participants the means by which they could obstruct each other’s progress complicated matters considerably, typically resulting in poorer outcomes for both. The means of obstruction transformed participants’ focus from jointly solving a simple coordination problem to devising individual strategies that would defeat the other. Giving them a verbal communication channel did not materially improve matters; indeed, in some cases it made things worse.
The results of this experiment underscore the naiveté of regarding communication as the universal solvent for conflict, one whose application is certain to improve matters. More realistic is a view of communication as a neutral instrument—one that can be used to convey threats as well as offers of reconciliation, to put forth unreasonable offers as well as acceptable ones, to inflame a tense situation as well as to defuse it.
Given a genuine desire to resolve a conflict, communication can facilitate achieving this goal. Although we can affect others (and be affected by them) through communication, we can affect them (and be affected by them) only so much. The fruit of communication is to establish understanding, but beyond this, communication can do little (directly) to change the state of affairs or sway the outcome of a conflict based on irreconcilable goals. Good communication cannot guarantee that conflict is ameliorated or resolved, but poor communication greatly increases the likelihood that conflict continues or is made worse.
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