SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS OF INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS OF INTERPERSONAL
COMMUNICATION
Robert M. Krauss
Department of Psychology
Schermerhorn Hall
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027
(212) 854-3949
rmk@paradox.psych.columbia.edu
Susan R. Fussell
Department of Psychology
Magruder Hall
Mississippi State University
P.O. Box 6161
Mississippi State, MS 39762
(601) 325-7657
fussell@ra.MsState.edu

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Models of Interpersonal Communication
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Running Head: MODELS OF COMMUNICATION
To appear in E.T. Higgins & A. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social Psychology:
Handbook of Basic Principles. New York: Guilford Press.

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Models of Interpersonal Communication
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SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS OF INTERPERSONAL
COMMUNICATION†
Robert M. Krauss and Susan R. Fussell
Columbia University and Mississippi State University
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Communication and Social Psychology
Social psychology traditionally has been defined as the study of the
ways in which people affect, and are affected by, others.1 Communication
is one of the primary means by which people affect one another, and, in
light of this, one might expect the study of communication to be a core
topic of social psychology, but historically that has not been the case.
No doubt there are many reasons. Among them is the fact that
communication is a complex and multidisciplinary concept, and, across the
several disciplines that use the term, there is no consensus on exactly how
it should be defined. It is an important theoretical construct in such
otherwise dissimilar fields as cell biology, computer science, ethology,
linguistics, electrical engineering, sociology, anthropology, genetics,
philosophy, semiotics, and literary theory. And although there is a core of
meaning common to the way the term is used in these disciplines, the
particularities differ enormously. What cell biologists call communication
bears little resemblance to what anthropologists study under the same
rubric. A concept used in so many different ways runs the risk of
becoming an amorphous catch-all term lacking precise meaning, and that
already may have happened to communication. As the sociologist Thomas

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Luckmann has observed, "Communication has come to mean all things to
all men" (Luckmann, 1993, p. 68).
Despite this, for social psychologists communication (or some
equivalent notion) remains an indispensable concept. It's difficult to
imagine serious discussions of such topics as social influence, small group
interaction, social perception, attitude change, or interpersonal relations
that ignore the role communication plays. Yet such discussions typically
pay little attention to the specific mechanisms by means of which the
process works.
An instructive parallel can be drawn between the way contemporary
social psychologists think about communication and the way an earlier
generation of social psychologists thought about cognition. It was not
unusual in the late 1970s, when social cognition was beginning to emerge
as an important theoretical focus, for social psychologists of an earlier
generation to observe that social psychology had always been cognitive in
its orientation, so that a focus on social cognition was really nothing new.
There was some truth to this claim. Even in the hey-day of Behaviorism,
social psychologists really never accepted the doctrine that all behavior,
social and otherwise, could be explained without invoking what
Behaviorists disparagingly termed "mentalistic" concepts (Deutsch &
Krauss, 1965). Indeed, the concepts that defined the field (attitude, belief,
expectation, value, impressions, etc.) were cognitive by their very nature.
The point is well taken as far as it goes, but it fails to acknowledge the
differences between the implicitly cognitive outlook of the earlier social
psychology and the study of social cognition. In the former, it was
assumed that cognition underpinned virtually all of the processes studied.
The ability to think, perceive, remember, categorize and so forth were

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assumed to be capacities of the normal person, and little attention was paid
to the specific details of how these mental operations were accomplished.
In order for messages to change attitudes, people must be able to
understand them, remember them, think about them, etc. It was assumed
that people could and would do these things; exactly how was not thought
to be of great consequence.
In contrast, underlying the study of social cognition (as that term has
come to be understood) is the assumption that the particular mechanisms
by which cognition is accomplished are themselves important determinants
of the outcome of the process. For example, particularities of the structure
of human memory, and of the processes of encoding and retrieval, can
affect what will or will not be recalled. One consequence of this difference
in emphasis can be seen in an example. In the earlier social psychology,
negative stereotypes of disadvantaged minorities were understood as
instances of motivated perceptual distortion deriving from majority group
members’ needs, interests and goals (Allport, 1954). More recently,
however, it has been shown that such stereotypes can arise simply from the
way people process information about others, and that invidious motives
or conflict are unnecessary for their development (Andersen, Klatsky, &
Murray, 1990; Hamilton & Sherman, 1989). While motivation and conflict
probably do often play a role in the development of pejorative group
stereotypes, apparently it is not a necessary condition for their emergence.
(For a historical review of research in this area, see Rothbart & Lewis, 1994.)
In much the same way, contemporary social psychologists
acknowledge that communication mediates much social behavior, but seem
willing to assume that it gets accomplished, and display little interest in
how it occurs. Their focus is on content, not process. As a result, they may

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fail to appreciate how the communication situation their experiment
represents affects the behavior they observe. Recent work by Schwarz,
Strack and their colleagues illustrates some consequences of this oversight
(Bless, Strack, & Schwarz, 1993; Schwarz, Strack, Hilton, & Naderer, 1991b;
Strack & Schwarz, 1993; Strack, Schwarz, & Wänke, 1991). For example,
Strack et al. (1991) elicited subjects’ responses to two similar items: (1)
"How happy are you with your life as a whole?" and "How satisfied are
you with your life as a whole?" For one group of subjects, the two
questions were asked in different, unrelated questionnaires; for the other
group, the questions were asked in the same questionnaire, set off from the
other items in a box labeled "Here are some questions about your life."
Other things being equal, one would expect responses to the two
items to be highly correlated. Although happy and satisfied are not
synonymous, they bear many similarities in meaning; certainly there are
circumstances that can make one happy but not satisfied, and vice versa,
but people who are happy with their lives tend also to be satisfied with
their lives. When the two items were presented in separate questionnaires
the correlation between responses to them was 0.96, which probably is
close to the items' test–retest reliability. However, when the two items
were presented successively in the same questionnaire, the correlation was
significantly lower — r = 0.65. At first glance, the result seems anomalous.
Other things being equal, the closer two items in a questionnaire are, the
greater the correlation we would expect between their responses to be.
However, as Strack et al. point out, viewing the two items from a
communicative perspective alters these expectations considerably.
Consider the following question-answer sequences as part of dyadic
conversations:

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Conversation A
Q: How is your family?
A: . . . . . .
Conversation B
Q: How is your wife?
A: . . . . .
Q: How is your family?
A: . . . . . .
In Conversation A, we would expect the respondent to take his wife's
well-being into account in answering the question "How is your family?"
but in Conversation B we would expect him to exclude his wife’s well-
being when answering the same question, since that already had been
established (Schwarz, Strack, Hilton, & Naderer, 1991a). Schwarz and
Strack derive this prediction from a set of conversational maxims (Grice,
1975) -- rules to which participants in conversations must conform in order
to understand, and be understood by, their coparticipants.2 To the extent
that respondents in the Strack et al. (1991) experiment responded to the
questionnaire as though it were governed by the conversational maxims,
presenting the Happiness and Satisfaction questions in the same context
induced respondents to base their answers on the distinctive aspects of the
two content domains. Failing to understand the questionnaire as a kind of
communication situation could yield quite misleading results.3
The social psychologists of an earlier generation who assumed that
cognition underpinned the processes they studied were using a model of
cognition, however sketchily detailed it may have been. In many cases this
implicit cognitive model was adequate to support a serviceable explanation
of the social behavior under consideration, but in other cases their

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understanding of the social process was defective because it rested on
inappropriate assumptions about the underlying cognitive process. In a
similar way, contemporary social psychologists who assume that
communication is involved in the phenomena they study, but do not
consider the specific details of its operation, are implicitly assuming a
model of communication. In most cases the assumptions they make about
communication may be adequate, but when they are not, the
understanding of the phenomena under examination will be defective. For
this reason, we think it behooves all social psychologists, regardless of their
substantive interests, to be familiar with the processes that underlie
communication.
This chapter will review four models of interpersonal communication
and some of the research that they have motivated. As was noted above,
communication is an incorrigibly interdisciplinary concept, and saying
something useful about it in a single chapter requires a considerable
narrowing of focus. Despite the length of this chapter, we have had to
forego discussing a good deal of relevant work, and to discuss most of the
studies we describe in anything like the detail they warrant.
The term model is used in a number of quite different ways in science
(Lachman, 1960). It can refer both to rather diffuse theoretical perspectives
(e.g., "models of man") and to highly specific theoretical descriptions (e.g.,
"stochastic models of dual-task performance"). We are using the term in
the former sense, to point to commonalties of assumptions and emphasis in
the approaches different investigators have taken in studying
communication. The four kinds of models we will discuss each constitute
one way of imposing some measure of order on a very heterogeneous
corpus of theory and research. In many cases, the model is implicit in the

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investigator's approach to the research rather than a position that is stated
explicitly. We have tried to formulate the assumptions that underlie an
investigator's approach to communicative phenomena, and, based on these
assumptions, to identify the type of model that approach represents. As in
most classificatory endeavors, some exemplars fit better than others.
Although we have tried to avoid being Procrustean, we would not be
surprised if some investigators disagreed with our characterization of their
work.
The four classes of models we will discuss are Encoder/Decoder
models, Intentionalist models, Perspective-taking models, and Dialogic
models. These models, and the research they motivate, differ on a variety
of dimensions, and we will elaborate on these in the sections below. But
one fundamental respect in which they differ is where they locate meaning.
For Encoder/Decoder models, meaning is a property of messages, for
Intentionalist models it resides in speakers' intentions, for Perspective-
taking models it derives from an addressee's point of view, and for
Dialogic models meaning is an emergent property of the participants' joint
activity.
We focus on models that conceive of communication as a social
psychological phenomenon, by which we mean models that conceptualize
communication as result of complementary processes that operate at the
intrapersonal and interpersonal levels. At the intrapersonal level,
communication involves processes that enable participants to produce and
comprehend messages. At the interpersonal level, communication involves
processes that cause participants simultaneously to affect, and to be
affected by, one another. The aim of a social psychological model is to
explain how the two sets of processes operate in concert.

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1.2 Defining Communication: Some Options And Problems
Common to all conceptions of communication is the idea that
information is transmitted from one part of a system to another, but
beyond that, even within the disciplines that focus on human
communication, there is little agreement as to just how the concept should
be defined. One reason it is so difficult to formulate a satisfactory
definition of human communication is that different kinds of
communicative acts seem to convey information in quite different ways,
and there are a number of alternative conceptualizations of these
differences. In understanding this, it is helpful to think of two rather
different ways that acts can convey information. Imagine the response
elicited by an embarrassing situation. One response might be to say "This
is terribly embarrassing." Another response might be to blush
conspicuously, while saying nothing. We will refer to any behavior
(including an act of speaking) that conveys information as a signal. Both
blushing and saying "This is very embarrassing" might be thought of as
signals signifying an internal state of embarrassment. Blushing is an
example of a sign or expressive behavior; the sentence "This is terribly
embarrassing" is an example of a symbol or symbolic behavior. Although
both behaviors convey similar information — that the person is
embarrassed — they do so in quite different ways. Sign and symbol differ
both as to the process by which they are produced and the process by
which they are understood, and these differences have important
consequences for the way they function in communication. Some of these
differences are considered in the next section.

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