John O Greene. Encyclopedia of Communication Theory. Editor: Stephen W Littlejohn & Karen A Foss. Sage Publications. 2009.
At the very core, communication skill simply concerns the proficiency or quality of one’s communicative performance. Just as people’s dancing, driving, or chess playing reflects a certain level of proficiency, so too do their various communication activities, such as listening, public speaking, and making small talk. Communication skill is one of the most extensively and intensively studied of all aspects of human behavior, in part because it is fascinating in its own right, but also because communication skill is vitally important to one’s well-being: Skillful communicators are happier and healthier, enjoy more satisfying interpersonal relationships, and perform better in school and in their jobs.
Historical Overview
Questions about communication skill have occupied thinkers for millennia: At least as far back as the Greek Classical Age (5th to 4th centuries BCE), philosophers grappled with identifying effective persuasion techniques. This concern with persuasion has continued as an important area of study to the present day, but in the past century, examinations of communication skill have extended far beyond issues of persuasion and social influence to include practically every aspect of verbal and nonverbal behavior. And the study of social skill has become a broad, interdisciplinary enterprise: Examinations of communication proficiency are found in virtually every branch of scholarly inquiry regarding human social behavior—from political science to neuroscience.
Disciplinary Developments
Amid the breadth and diversity of investigations of communication skill, certain key events and people stand out. Some of these concern the development of broad intellectual traditions and fields of study. For example, because skills are learned rather than innate, the scientific study of learning processes that began in the late 19th century bears directly on issues of skilled performance. The study of learning has, itself, undergone various transformations in perspective, progressing through the now familiar epochs of behaviorism (based on classical conditioning) in the early part of the 20th century, radical behaviorism (based on operant conditioning, most commonly associated with B. F. Skinner) in the middle of that century, and cognitivism during the past 50 years. Other pertinent threads are found in examinations of changes in children’s cognitive abilities as reflected in the rise of developmental psychology in the 1920s and 1930s (with Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and others) and the study of child language acquisition, which began to flower in the late 1950s. In a similar way, personality psychology, as represented in pioneering work of people like Gordon Allport in the 1930s, laid the groundwork for a tradition of examining the role of individual differences in behavioral proficiency that continues to the present.
Among these broad disciplinary developments, three others are particularly relevant. Studies of social influence, group and normative forces, empathy, and so on had occupied researchers since the early 1900s, but in the years immediately following World War II, led by scholars like Kurt Lewin, social psychology entered something of a golden age that saw the development of many of the classic concepts and theories that continue to infuse that field. Most pertinent to concerns with communication skills is that in the early 1970s, a particular branch of social psychology emerged. Social cognition placed emphasis on perception of others, attributions concerning their behavior, and memory for what they said and did—with the attendant assumption that these processes could be systematically biased or flawed.
The second disciplinary thread of particular importance grew from studies of perceptual and motor performance that, like allied studies of learning, date to the end of the 19th century, when early researchers investigated topics such as people’s ability to send and receive Morse code. With the aforementioned rise of cognitivism, early theorists, such as Frederic Bartlett in the 1950s and two decades later Alan Newell, Herbert Simon, John Anderson, and others, advanced the notion that high-level cognitive skills could be studied and understood in ways analogous to those pertaining to perceptual and motor skills.
A third disciplinary movement of special importance was the emergence of speech communication as an academic field. American colleges had taught courses in speech since their founding, but most often these courses were taught in English departments. Around 1900, speech departments began to break off from English, and in 1914 the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking (today the National Communication Association) was founded. Speech communication’s central focus on skills training has expanded over the intervening years such that departments now routinely offer classes devoted to enhancing skills for public speaking, group discussion, interviewing, conflict management, and so on.
A Sampling of Milestone Contributions
The emergence of various fields of study bearing on communication skill provided an intellectual milieu in which numerous specific conceptual advances were made. These are too numerous to list, but certain examples merit mention. During the 1960s, Albert Bandura developed social learning theory—a rejection of behaviorist, stimulus-response-reinforcement formulations—which instead gave emphasis to the cognitive, symbolic representation of actions and their consequences. Bandura made a compelling case that people can learn from observation and that rather than relying on direct experience of responses and reinforcement, we very often model the behavior of others. People, then, may act in a socially skilled way because they have observed others and are able to anticipate the consequences of their actions and monitor and regulate their own behavior.
In a series of books appearing in the 1970s, Michael Argyle and his colleagues advanced a general model of skilled interaction behavior that suggested that people pursue social goals via a sequence of steps: (a) perception of the environment—a process that involves attention, interpretation, and so on; (b) translation of perception into performance—a step that includes problem solving and decision making; and (c) motor responses—the generation of overt behaviors. Working from this model, Argyle was able to specify various sources of skill deficits (e.g., in goal setting, planning, behavioral enactment). Moreover, Argyle identified qualities such as expressivity, rewardingness, assertiveness, and so on that distinguish proficient from inadequate interaction behaviors. Yet another contribution of this work was the idea that people could be trained to employ more appropriate perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral responses.
A third example of important contributions to the study of communication skill, also from the decade of the 1970s, is found in John Wiemann’s examination of the nature of communication competence (and subsequent exploration of that construct by Brian Spitzberg, William Cupach, and others). Wiemann emphasized that competence is a dyadic construct in the sense that the competent communicator not only is able to achieve his or her own goals, but moreover to do so in a way that is satisfying for the other party in the conversation. In Wiemann’s formulation, five dimensions of competence are identified: (1) empathy, (2) affiliation and support, (3) social relaxation, (4) behavioral flexibility, and (5) interaction management skills (i.e., handling interruptions, taking turns, etc.).
Theories of Skill Acquisition
Because skills are acquired over time, a great deal of research has focused on understanding the processes that underlie skill development. This research shows that skill acquisition is typically a gradual process; in fact, studies in a variety of domains (not just communication skills) have shown that expert performance requires approximately 10 years of concerted practice. Much of the work on skill development has involved constructing learning curves that graph performance quality on the y-axis and amount of practice on the x-axis. (In many cases the number of practice trials examined in this research is in the hundreds or even thousands.) These learning curves virtually always have a characteristic shape: They show large performance gains early on, but over time, improvements with practice become smaller and smaller.
Significant to note is that although skill-acquisition curves almost always take the same general form, there are individual differences in the course of skill acquisition: Some people start off better, learn faster, and achieve higher levels of performance than others do. Theories of skill acquisition suggest that a variety of personal factors, including intelligence, achievement motivation, and age, will affect the course of performance improvement. Regarding this last point, while it is the case that older adults typically do not acquire new skills as rapidly as their younger counterparts, skills acquired early in life tend to be retained in later years.
The process of skill acquisition is marked by a number of behavioral and cognitive changes, including but not limited to (a) becoming faster or more fluent, (b) making fewer errors, (c) experiencing reduced cognitive load, and (d) being more flexible and adaptive. Various theories have been developed to explain these changes, but the prevailing view focuses on the distinction between declarative and procedural memory. Each of these refers to information held in long-term memory, but declarative information is essentially memory for facts, while procedural information is memory for how to do things. In the standard model, then, early in the process of skill acquisition, a person learns a set of facts or instructions about what to do. It is possible to act on the basis of this declarative information, but performance tends to be slow, error prone, and cognitively demanding. With continued practice, a person enters a second stage of skill acquisition, in which the information used to carry out the activity is transformed from declarative to procedural form. At this point it is no longer necessary to keep the instructions for the activity in mind, and as a result, he or she gets faster and experiences less cognitive load. Finally, in the third stage of skill acquisition, the procedural memory structures for the activity are strengthened with continued practice (a process which can extend over many years).
Theories of Skilled Performance
The Nature of Communication Skill
Despite the fact that it has been so extensively studied and discussed, there are a number of different theoretical perspectives on what communication skill actually entails. In part this diversity in perspectives arises from the fact that the properties or characteristics of a given sample of behavior can be coded at various levels of abstraction. For example, at a molar level, raters might judge whether a person was “friendly” or not. At a more fine-grained level of analysis, however, instances of smiling might be counted and timed. In a similar fashion, the functions served by a given action can be understood at various hierarchical levels (e.g., a person may be “answering a question” or “impressing a job interviewer”). Despite these, and similar, difficulties, it is possible to posit a rough hierarchy of levels of analysis commonly reflected in models of what constitutes communication skill. With no claim of exhaustiveness (i.e., that the framework captures every relevant approach), or of mutual exclusivity (i.e., that any particular model will reflect just one tier), a simple, five-tiered scheme is useful for imposing some order on a complex domain.
At the most molar level of the hierarchy are properties of skilled behavior identified in the aforementioned communication competence perspective. Certainly there are differences in the specifics of various formulations, but models in this vein generally emphasize that competent communication is characterized by (a) effectiveness and (b) appropriateness. That is, the competent communicator is able to accomplish his or her goals while also acting in a socially appropriate way. A person who is effective in achieving his or her objectives, but does so by threatening, bullying, lying, and so on, would not be considered competent, nor would one who is polite, ethical, and pleasant, but unable to “close the deal.”
A second hierarchical level for thinking about what constitutes communication skill derives from theoretical perspectives that emphasize that all social interactions involve the mutual presentation and negotiation of “social reality”—including the identities of the interactants, the nature of their relationship, and the definition of the social setting (e.g., the purpose of the interaction, standards of appropriate behavior). It is not unusual that one person’s view of self, other, relationship, and situation may differ considerably from that of his or her interlocutor. The skilled communicator, then, is sensitive to the implications of his or her own presentation of social reality, the ways in which the perspective of the other may be different, and ways of accommodating those differences or negotiating a mutually acceptable perspective.
Moving yet another step in the direction of more molecular conceptions of communication skill are views that emphasize general properties of behavior that are more or less skilled. It is this level of abstraction in the coding of behavior that tends to be reflected in people’s everyday characterization of their own and others’ actions (so, for example, we commonly think and talk about people as being friendly, rude, and so on). There are obviously a great many of these general dimensions relevant to communication skill, and what counts as skillful varies to some extent with culture and context, but among theories focusing on this level of analysis, emphasis is often given to qualities such as being (a) other-oriented (i.e., attentive and responsive to the other), (b) affirming (i.e., positive and supportive rather than caustic and punishing), (c) flexible (i.e., creative and adaptive), (d) fluent, and (e) relaxed and poised.
A fourth level reflected in characterizations of communication skill focuses on information processing capabilities required to act in an effective and appropriate manner. These mental activities include those related to taking in and making sense of the stimulus environment and those involved in behavioral production. Thus, on the input-processing side of the system, key components of skill include allocation of attention to relevant stimuli, listening, comprehension, social categorization, and appropriate inference making. With respect to behavioral production, the skilled communicator is able to plan and choose among behavioral alternatives, monitor and edit his or her behavior, and translate abstract conceptions of what to do and say into actual, intelligible verbal and nonverbal behaviors.
A final level of analysis seen in conceptions of communication skill is perhaps the most obvious and harkens back to Argyle’s pioneering work mentioned earlier. Here the focus is on overt behavioral features (e.g., speech rate, occurrence of disfluencies, direction and duration of eye gaze, discrepancies between message channels). Research dedicated to examining such molecular behavioral features indicates that, among others, behaviors perceived as more socially skilled include more eye contact, more smiling, more gestures, and fewer adaptors (i.e., fidgeting). In the verbal channel, behaviors such as asking more questions and paying compliments are perceived as skillful actions.
Sources of Variation in Communication Skill
One of the primary factors motivating the study of communication skill is the problem of variation in proficiency—a problem that manifests in numerous guises: Why are some people more skilled than other people? Why do people act in a more skillful way at certain times and in certain situations than in others? And why are individuals more skilled in some communication activities (e.g., making casual conversation) than in others (e.g., public speaking)?
These are compelling questions, and a great many theories have been developed to address them, but among these theories, certain themes and approaches are especially noteworthy. Some shortcomings in communication proficiency have their roots in cognitive and information processing deficits, as, for example, in cases of autism and age-related dementia. Among the population not characterized by problems such as these, the study of variation in communication skill very often involves examination of (a) motivation and ability, (b) stable individual-difference factors, or (c) state variables.
Examinations of the role of motivation and ability in communication proficiency are predicated on the notion that skilled performance requires both the ability to act in an effective and appropriate way and the motivation to do so. The person who does not know what to do (or how to do it) is unlikely to act in a socially skilled way. By extension, the individual who does know what to do but is not motivated to put that knowledge into practice is likely to behave in a suboptimal fashion.
Almost certainly, the most common approach to examining variability in communication skill is to locate the source of cross-individual differences in proficiency in relatively enduring trait-like individual-difference factors. Examples of such individual-difference variables are numerous indeed, but among the most prominent are extroversion, self-monitoring, and cognitive complexity. While the literature on the role of such variables in communication skill is extensive and very often produces statistically significant effects, it is important to note that these relationships tend not to be large, rarely accounting for more than 10% of the variance in actual behavior (as opposed to self-reports of behavior, responses to hypothetical scenarios, etc.).
In contrast to relatively enduring person factors, state variables refer to characteristics of persons that change over comparatively short time spans (i.e., days, hours, or even minutes). Among such state variables is the individual’s level of physiological arousal—a factor that is particularly interesting because some evidence suggests that the relationship between arousal and proficiency is curvilinear: Performance improves with increasing arousal up to some point, but beyond that, still higher levels of arousal result in performance decrements. Other examples of state variables include various moods and emotions, most prominently social anxiety—the nervousness and “butterflies” accompanying social interaction that have been shown to be associated with a variety of behavioral manifestations generally taken to be less competent or skillful. In contrast, positive moods tend to be associated with greater creativity and increased social engagement. Still other state variables related to social proficiency include stress, drug ingestion (e.g., “alcohol myopia”), and lack of sufficient sleep.