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Literature summary of the social psychology of communication
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The social psychology of communication.Lecture 1 - What do we talk about?
Gossip as cultural learning - Baumeister, R.F., Zhang, L., & Vohs, K.D. (2004)
Modern society is a complex system, it offers many opportunities but also contains
unforeseen risks and problems. Individuals have to make their painful way through a
problem’s shifting mazes by hard experience. They way can be smoothed and softened,
however, by learning about the adventures and misadventures of others. This is perhaps a
crucially important function of gossip. Anecdotes reveal potentially useful information about
how our culture and society operate.
Existing theories about gossip.
Most psychologist have regarded the motive to gossip as rooted in the malicious desire to
harm others by damaging their reputation. There is some truth in this view, but some forms
of gossip lack any pejorative dimension, then defamation cannot be the sole purpose of
gossip.
Dunbar (1966) believes that gossip is an important form of social communication that serves
to bond people togethers. In gossip they share information about themselves and about
others in their social community. Gossip maintains social relationships and helps people
better understand each other.
The content of gossip also has valuable information for the hearer about culture and society.
Gossip provides information and thus promotes cultural learning. Effective participation in
culture requires the individual to behave according to a vast set of guidelines, rules, norms,
laws, morals and scripts. One must learn all these rules. Anything to makes the process of
learning these rules easier is beneficial to the individual seeking to live in the culture. Gossip
is a potentially powerful and efficient means of transmitting information about the rules of the
culture.
Gossip may be the result of evolution. Gossip serves a valuable function in helping people
learn about life in their culture, and so nature may have instilled a penchant for gossip as
one generally useful adaptation toward cultural life. People are drawn to gossip without
being aware of any desire to promote cultural learning.
Gossip can be effective regardless of it being positive or negative. The majority of gossip will
be negative. Norms are perhaps best conveyed by focusing on violations, as are laws and
other rules.
Men are more focused on big social groups, while women are more focused on close knit
connections. This makes men more likely to gossip about celebrities, sport figures etc and
woman more likely to gossip about family or close friends.
Need for Gossip in Learning.
Communicating principles by telling stories is apparently more effective than describing the
principles in the abstract, at least for reaching many audiences.
,Gossip is a form of social control. Gossip serves as a group-level adaptation to individuals
misdeeds. Gossip serves as a policing device that cultures employ as a low-cost method of
regulating member’s behaviours, especially those that reflect pursuits of selfish interests that
come at a cost to the broader community.
Why gossip?
The hearer of the gossip is interested because it is valuable to know information about the
rules of the culture. Gossip contains personally relevant information. The teller of gossip may
want to pass along the information of want to elevate their social status.
Study
Gossip was focused mostly on people known to the participant, the social network outside of
immediate family. However 15% of the gossip pertained to people not personally known to
the hearer. This is sufficient to suggest that gossip must serve another function, next to
conveying information about acquaintances.
Most people have emotional reactions to gossip. Negative emotions are more common
(51%), but positive emotional reaction occur in a large minority (41%).
There is a high correlation between negative emotion to the gossip and the participant
claiming they learned something from the gossip. The worse people felt on hearing the
gossip, they more they said they learned from it.
The emotional response of the person hearing the gossip appears to depend on very little on
how the gossip was depicts the target but very strongly on whether the hearer learns
something useful for his or her own life.
64% of the gossip in the research were accompanied by a clearly positive answer that the
hearer learned something. This confirms the idea that gossip is a form of cultural learning.
Conclusion.
Gossip has many function, but the function of helping people learn about how to function
efficiently in society deserves a prominent place in the theory of gossip.
The study part of this research found that the other three functions can not be the sole
functions, because the results of the study conflict with this view.
Gossip can be understood as an extension of observational learning, in the sense that
people can learn about the complexities of social and cultural life by hearing about the
successes and especially the misadventures of others.
Gossip greatly expands the opportunities for cultural learning, because one can benefit from
the experiences of others outside of one’s field of vision and sometimes even outside one’s
circle of friends.
If we continue to dismiss gossip as essentially idle, malicious talk about unfortunate
individuals, they may overlook some of its most important and valuable functions.
,A cognitive approach to human communication: an action assembly theory - Greene,
J. O. (1984)
The cognitive system has developed to facilitate action, and further, that the functions of the
cognitive system are best understood in terms of their implications for action.
The task of developing a model of the communicative output system is a hard one. The
stream of social behavior is multi channeled, multi-functional and reflects a complex array of
levels of organization.
The present effort began with a basis observation concerning the nature of social behavior,
namely that communicative behaviour is at once novel and creative yet patterned and
repetitive.
A moment’s reflection reveals that social behaviour of any individual is composed of a
repertoire of repetitive words, topics, themes and instrumental phrases, yet any particular
discourse is almost certainly a unique combination of these elements.
If we are to develop models of the communicative output system then we must come to grips
with the concurrent novel and repetitive aspects of social behaviour itself suggests two basic
processes: selection of old elements and construction of novel patterns.
The approach adopted here is cognitivism. Requirements for a cognitive theory is the
assumption that in order to yield falsifiable predictions a theory must specify both the
information structures of the mind and the processes which operate over those structures. A
second basic tenet of cognitivism is that it is possible to develop multiple, distinct model
each of which is sufficient to account for observed input-output regularities.
A general theoretical framework.
The human mind is a repository of both conceptual and procedural knowledge. The
procedural store represents those things we have learned to do, in order to act efficaciously.
Individuals store action-outcome contingencies in procedural memory. Procedural memory is
modular, it is organized on the basis of a large number of elemental units, each of which
relates to some limited aspect of an output problem. It is obvious that all of the elements of
the procedural store do not impact upon all behaviours, thus there must be some process of
selection operation over these procedural records.
The occurrence of a goal or desired outcome which matches previous outcomes should
result in activation of records which contain those outcomes. Activating conditions for any
element of procedural knowledge are comprised of desired outcome plus any initial
conditions which have been proven relevant in past goal pursuits. While a given goal may
excite a number of action-outcome records, the most highly activated elements will be those
with initial conditions which match present conditions. In this way, only the most appropriate
procedures will play a role in output production.
, A procedural record is formed when a given action results in a particular outcome. However,
on the basis of a single trial the record defining the relationship between action and outcome
should be wek. In contrast, an often activated procedure should give a strong relationship.
The task facing the communication, is the integration of these various procedural records
and activated knowledge from the conceptual store to form a coherent output representation
of action to be taken.
Theoretical propositions.
The theoretical statements of the general framework assume the status of axioms in the
present theory:
1. A procedural record is a modular entity containing a specification for action and an
outcome associated with that action.
2. Each procedural record is characterized by a level of strength reflecting the status of
the action-outcome contingency of the record. The strength of any record is a
function of its recency and frequency of activation given that the action-outcome
relationship continues to hold.
3. The output representation of action-to-be-taken is a hierarchy of levels of increasing
specificity where each level is relatively autonomous in its exclusion of output
demands
4. At any moment a procedural record possesses some level of activation. In order for a
procedural record to impact upon output processing, this level of activation must
exceed some threshold value.
5. The activating conditions for any element of the procedural store are defined as
occurrence of a goal to which that record is relevant plus the occurrence of any
conditions which have proven to mediate the action-outcome contingency contained
in the record.
It is possible to specify seven types of functions relevant to human interaction:
1. Interaction functions: include those ends which people attempt to accomplish by
communicating with others.
2. Content formulation functions: concern the formulation of locutionary, illocutionary
and thematic dimensions of behaviour.
3. Management functions: derive from demands for topic continuity and chaining.
4. Utterance formulation functions: derive from lexical, syntactic, and articulatory
requirements for the formation of intelligible utterances.
5. Regulatory functions: concern speaker-turn regulation in ongoing interaction.
6. Homeostatic functions: concern the need to regulate physiological controlled
quantities during interaction.
7. Coordinative functions: concern the functional integration of effector units involved in
articulation and nonverbal behaviour.
The hierarchical levels of the output representation, from most abstract to most specific are:
interactional representation, ideational representation, utterance representation and
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