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Much of our understanding of face-to-face communication revolves around the way we make sense of what others say and do. Borrowing from earlier work in linguistics and psychology, several theories of interpersonal communication explore the ways that we perceive, understand, and respond to messages, or more broadly, at the process of interpretation and sense-making. Two such theories described below are speech act theory and attribution theory. According to speech act theory, while “sticks and stones may break your bones,” names really can hurt you! That’s because, according to this theory, words don’t mean; people mean (Littlejohn, 2002). It wasn’t only the names that hurt your feelings; John Searle (1969) would argue that the bully himself hurt your feelings, because yu knew or felt that he wanted to. Speech act theory asserts that speaking is an intentional action, and as such, we understand language only by interpreting and understanding a speaker’s intention. If someone says, “You’re fat,” in order to understand what the speaker means we must first understand his or her intentions. A speaker’s intentions are key in understanding language. Speech act theory identifies three levels of meaning, sometimes called “force” or “action,” in every utterance or message we speak when we are communicating. . The first, most basic level is called the “locutionary” or propositional level. This level refers to understanding the words or the content of an utterance. For example, if someone says, “Hand me that book,” you have to understand that “hand” in this case is a verb, you have to know that “me” refers to the speaker, and what book is desired. You also have to understand that in English, the referent “you” can be implied without explicitly speaking the word. This level may seem pretty obvious, but if you have ever tried to communicate in a foreign language, or understand someone speaking in a heavy dialect or speech peppered with slang, you quickly learn that it is essential. The second level of force in an utterance is known as the illocutionary force, or the intended effect of a message. For example, if I say “I am sorry” you are likely to hear that as an apology, whereas if I say, “Close the window” you are likely to hear that as a request or even an order if spoken firmly. You might not accept my apology or you might not close the window, but you are likely to know my intentions. Although there are many types of speech acts that function as illocutions, they are generally clustered into five categories (Searle, 1969): assertives, which are statements about what a speaker believes to be true or has evidence for (e.g., statements, assertions, claims); directives, which are intended to get the listener to perform some action (e.g., questions, requests, commands); commissives, which are intended to commit the speaker to some future action (e.g., promises, vows); expressives, which represent some internal feeling or state of a speaker (e.g., apologies, condemnations, congratulations); and declaratives, which somehow change the state of affairs through the very act of being spoken (as when a judge says, “I find you guilty” or a religious or civil representative says, “I now pronounce you husband and wife” (e.g., pronouncements, definitions). The third level of force or meaning of a speech act is the perlocutionary level, or the effect an utterance actually has on the listener. Usually, the illocutionary and perlocutionary effects match. If you ask someone the time, he or she usually responds by looking at a watch and telling you the time. However, there are interesting occasions when the two do not match. Often, if a mismatch occurs between illocutionary and perlocutionary effects because a listener violates the conventions or rituals of language use, speakers may rely on what are called indirect speech acts. At the dinner table we can simply say “salt” and someone will hand us the salt shaker. We only know it is a directive (request for the salt) because the conventions of dinner table contexts tells us so. Where speech act theory is concerned with our understanding of the specific function of the utterance (promise, hint), attribution theory deals with our perceptions of people’s behavior. It describes how we attempt to explain or give meaning to the behaviors of ourselves and others. Fritz Heider (1958), a well-known psychologist, suggested we might attribute someone’s behavior to a variety of causes, including aspects of the situation, personal characteristics, desires, and abilities, or the impact of others either permitting or obligating us to do something. In essence, when someone acts, in our minds we try to assign a reason to that action. Although a theory grounded in psychology, this theory clearly deals with the interpretation of communicative behavior, and so it also is very useful in understanding interpersonal communication. For example, imagine you see a group of people collecting money to aid the homeless during a time of economic depression. Many students are gathered around donating their spare change, but your friend Brooke just turns her head and walks by. In this example you might have attributed several causes to Brooke’s behavior (Brooke is cold and heartless, Brooke has no money with her, Brooke is strapped for cash, Brooke already donated money). Similarly, however, people also attribute one cause to a variety of behaviors (Brooke is cheap, therefore she doesn’t donate money, she doesn’t eat out often, and so on). Heider (1958) suggested that people have different perceptual styles, or patterns of perception of what goes on around them, especially in terms of making similar types of attributions (e.g., a cynic might consistently attribute negative internal causes to the behavior of others). The different meanings we place on the events that unfold before us help us make sense of the world. Sometimes we perceive that someone behaves a certain way for a specific reason, that is, that they did something on purpose. Such perceptions not only attribute a meaning to the person’s behavior, but they also infer meaning from the person’s motives, and they assume ability. The problem with attributions is that they are often incorrect. Researchers have catalogued a variety of errors in the attribution process. The most common of these, the fundamental attribution error, occurs when we attribute the cause of an event to a person’s personal qualities, underestimating the role of context or circumstances. In other words, we blame people for what happened to them (internal attribution), overlooking contextual factors or circumstances that may have caused the situation to be beyond a person’s control (external attribution). Ironically, when bad things happen to us, we tend to blame the situation for our misfortune instead of taking personal responsibility for it (a self-serving attribution bias). The bottom line is that our fundamental attribution error is that we are harder on others for our perceptions of their misfortunes than we are on ourselves. In summary, attribution theory posits that we place meanings on our perceptions of both our own and others’ behaviors. The meaning we give our perceptions includes attributing reasons behind both behaviors and motives. While these attributions are a natural part of making sense of the world, they are often wrong and can lead to miscommunication. Solutions to deal with these errors include carefully considering multiple causes (internal and external) for the behavior of both others and of yourself and perception checking—asking the other person if your understanding of her behavior is correct. In this sense, attribution theory can be very practical for improving our communication. References
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