When Communication Fails: Examining How, Why, and Where Communication Goes Wrong

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Successful communication is critical for all human interaction, from giving instructions in the workplace to developing and maintaining relationships. But communication is not always successful. Sometimes people are misunderstood, their intended meaning is taken the wrong way, or it is missed entirely. Misunderstandings often have serious consequences and can lead to faulty and harmful decisions. Past research on miscommunication has tended to focus on specific types of miscommunication, such as that between people of different genders or cultures. The goal of this project is to develop a more general theoretical model of miscommunication. The aim is to gain a clearer understanding of the general principles involved in communicative misunderstanding. A special focus of this project is miscommunication that occurs in digital contexts, such as texting and email. The research will help to uncover general principles, increase basic understanding of miscommunication, and identify the factors that contribute to it. This project integrates insights from social psychology, linguistics and communications to develop and test a model of communicative misunderstandings in the context of digital communication (texts, email, etc.). A general framework is developed in which miscommunication is defined as an instance of a sender's communicative intent not being correctly recognized by the recipient. An important facet of the model is a focus on the interpersonal process of face management (a person's public identity). The research considers how factors such as culture, individual differences, and emoji influence the salience of face management, and how these combine to predict message characteristics and communicative success. Eleven experiments address critical questions about miscommunication. The research will show how the linguistic realization of specific speech acts and emotions vary as a function of threats to public identity (face-threat), and how the relationship between different intentions can influence communication errors. It will also consider the role of emoji in message production and intention recognition, and how these processes are moderated by cultural and individual differences in communication style and mentalizing capacities. Successful communication is critical to almost all human interactions. With the rapid growth of digital communication it is increasingly important to understand how, why, and where communication goes wrong.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.