Social Cognition and Communication

Joseph P. Forgas, Orsolya Vincze, János László

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781848726635
• eBook ISBN: 9781135011048
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Language is the essence of interpersonal behavior and social relationships, and it is social cognitive processes that determine how we produce and understand language. However, there has been surprisingly little interest in the past linking social cognition and communication. This book presents the latest cutting-edge research from a select group of leading international scholars investigating the how language shapes our thinking, and how social cognitive processes in turn influence language production and communication. The chapters represent diverse perspectives of investigating the links between language and communication, including evolutionary, linguistic, cognitive and affective approaches as well as the empirical analysis of written and spoken narratives. New methodologies are presented including the latest techniques of text analysis to illuminate the psychology of individual language users, and entire cultures and societies.

The chapters address such questions as how are cognitive and identity processes reflected in language? How do affective states influence language production? Are political correctness norms in language use effective? How do partners manage to accommodate to each other's communicative expectations? What is the role of language as a medium of interpersonal and intergroup influence? How are individual and cultural identities reflected in, and shaped by narratives in literature, school texts and the media?

The book is aimed at all students, researchers and laypersons interested in the interplay between thinking and communication, and should be required reading for all professionals who use language in their everyday work to interact with people.

1

Social Cognition and Communication

Background, Theories, and Research

JOSEPH P. FORGAS, ORSOLYA VINCZE, AND
JÁNOS LÁSZLÓ

The close interdependence between social thinking and communication has long been recognized by writers and philosophers. Indeed, much of social philosophy from Plato to Kant consists of speculations about the interdependence between mental life and social life. Several classical social theorists such as Cooley, Mead, James, and Lewin have focused on this issue, investigating the close interdependence between symbolic mental processes and strategic communication and interaction. Despite repeated claims for the importance of studying language in social psychology (e.g., Forgas, 1983, 1985; Krauss & Fussell, 1996; Moscovici, 1972; Semin, 1996; Smith, 1983), social cognition and research on language have developed relatively independently of each other in empirical psychology (Bradac & Giles 2005; Semin & Fiedler, 1992). Yet language has always been an essential part of social psychology (Strack & Schwarz, 1992), and language lies at the heart of mainstream laboratory experiments as well. As in everyday life, participants in every experiment must also follow the cooperative principle in interpreting the experimenter's messages (Strack & Schwarz, 1992; Schwarz, Strack, Hilton, & Naderer, 1991).

The objective of this book is to explore the links between the fields of social cognition and communication, and present the latest research on how social thinking and communication interact (Part 1). We also discuss how narratives can be analyzed to reveal the mental life of individuals and groups (Part 2), and how thinking and communication interact in strategic dyadic encounters (Part 3). Finally, the social and political significance of linking communication and cognition is considered (Part 4). In this introductory chapter, we take a brief look at the evolutionary, social, and psychological background of this integrative enterprise.

AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE AND THE SOCIAL BRAIN HYPOTHESIS

Researchers in both social cognition and communication increasingly take seriously the idea that the brain, just like the body, is rich in evolved design (Buss, 1999; Cosmides, 1989). The long history of Homo sapiens, living in increasingly complex social groups, required cognitive adaptations for social living. Effective communication assumes the mental capacity for representing the mental states of others, as well as representing others' mental representations about ourselves. There is now strong evolutionary evidence that social thinking and communication indeed developed hand in hand over evolutionary time.

According to the social brain hypothesis, neocortical processing capacity and the ability to coordinate and communicate in increasingly complex social groups have developed hand in hand in our ancestral environment, with the demands of social communication driving brain development (Dunbar, 1998, 2007). The maximum number of meaningful social relationships we can manage appears to be limited by cortical processing capacity. Regression analyses for numerous primate groups indicate that for humans, the mean manageable group size could be around 150.

It is remarkable that the size of most primary human groups throughout history, such as feudal villages and Stone Age tribes, approximated this number. There were about 150 people in a Neolithic farming village; 150 was the splitting point of Hutterite settlements, 200 is about the upper limit of the number of academics in a subspecialization, and about 150 has been the basic military unit size ever since antiquity. It seems that the computational capacity of our neocortex can support group integration and communication with up to 150 others. Indeed, language itself may have emerged as a cheap and efficient means of maintaining and coordinating such basic-size social groups, allowing early humans to collaborate and coordinate their actions (Dunbar, 1998, 2007). It is communication and cooperation that are the foundations of the impressive evolutionary success of our species, and it is the parallel evolution of language and a computational organ, the human brain, that made cooperation and social cohesion possible.

The Contemporary Social Context of Communication

Although an evolutionary perspective highlights the intimate links between social cognition and communication, historical and cultural influences also play an important role in how people manage their communication strategies. Modern industrialized mass societies present their members with unprecedented cognitive and communicational challenges. As our social lives become ever more complex and impersonal, and as our social interactions increasingly involve people we know hardly at all, the cognitive challenge of making our communication strategies effective becomes ever greater (Forgas, 1985). The evolution of Homo sapiens shaped our mental capacity to communicate well within small face-to-face social groups (Dunbar, 2007), yet we now face a profoundly different communication environment that is far removed from the ancestral world of primary groups (Buss, 1999; Sedikides & Skowronski, 1997).

In stable, small-scale societies, relationships are highly regulated. One's place in society is largely determined by ascribed status and rigid norms, identity is socially shared and defined, and social interaction mainly occurs between people who intimately know each other. In contrast, in modern mass societies, most of the people we encounter are strangers. Our position in society is flexible and negotiable, personal anonymity is widespread, mobility is high, and identity must be constructed and negotiated (see Chapters 13, 14, and 15, this volume). This dramatic change in social life occurred very recently, since the 18th century, as a direct consequence of the philosophy of enlightenment, the emergence of individualism, and the economic and political demands of industrialization and the French Revolution. Emile Durkheim (1956), the father of modern sociology, described this realignment in social relations as a change from mechanical solidarity (a natural byproduct of daily interaction with intimately known others) to organic solidarity (based on the rule-bound cooperation of strangers (see also Toennies, 1887/1957). The challenge of communication in our modern world of strangers is further exacerbated by the rapid development of information technology, where brief verbal messages sent in cyberspace increasingly replace face-to-face interactions (Semin, 1996; see also Chapter 2, this volume).

These new modes of verbal interaction present cognitive challenges that are only beginning to be understood (Forgas & Tan, 2013; see also Part 3, this volume). It is the first time in human history that social communication—once a natural, automatic process—has become problematic, and thus, an object of concern, reflection, and study (Goffman, 1972). It is perhaps no coincidence that the emergence of psychology, and social psychology in particular, as a science of interpersonal behavior so clearly coincides with the advent of anonymous mass societies. Although much of everyday communication continues to be guided by deep-seated, embodied internal mechanisms, the role of high-level reflective and inferential cognitive processes in communication has become evermore important.

TRADITIONAL THEORIES LINKING SOCIAL COGNITION AND COMMUNICATION

A glance at the historical origins of social psychology reveals that many pioneers were well aware of the close interdependence between social cognition and communication. However, rather interestingly from a historical perspective, the links between thinking and communication received less empirical attention than they deserve.

Symbolic interactionism. Symbolic interactionism emphasizes the uniquely human ability to distill symbolic representations from social experiences as the key mechanism that allows people to construct mental models that regulate interpersonal behavior and communication. Rooted in American pragmatism, the symbolic interactionist approach was developed by George Herbert Mead (1934) and his student Herbert Blumer. For Mead, social cognition and social behavior (such as communication) were not distinct, separate domains but intrinsically related. Mead argued that communication is guided by the symbolic mental representations and expectations formed by social actors based on their experience of past interpersonal episodes. Thus, cognitive models of how to communicate in any given situation are partly given and determined by prior experiences, and are partly the product of concurrent, constructive cognitive processes. Symbolic interactionism maintains that in order to understand communication and behavior, we have to analyze the meanings that people construct about their social world.

It is unfortunate that symbolic interactionism failed to stimulate much empirical work in social psychology, possibly due to the lack of suitable methodologies for studying individual symbolic representations at the time. The currently ascendant social cognitive paradigm has changed much of this, as it essentially addresses many of the same kinds of questions that were also of interest to Mead: How do mental and symbolic representations come to influence peoples' narratives and communicative behaviors? Recent social cognitive research has produced a range of ingenious techniques and empirical procedures that for the first time allow a rigorous empirical analysis of the links between mental processes and communication (Bless & Forgas, 2000; see also Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 7, this volume). And in turn, the empirical analysis of narratives contained in books, newspapers, and personal histories now allows us to investigate the underlying mental processes of individuals and groups (see Chapters 12, 13, 14, and 15, this volume).

Culture and the individual. Another important, yet often neglected historical approach that is highly relevant to contemporary theorizing about the links between social thinking and communication is associated with the name of Max Weber. Foremost among the classic sociologists, Weber was always interested in how social processes and individual cognitions interact. He assumed a close and direct link between how an individual thinks about and cognitively represents social situations, and their actual interpersonal behaviors and communications. For Weber, it was precisely these mental representations about the social world that provided the crucial link between understanding individual behaviors and the operation of large-scale sociocultural systems.

Perhaps the best example of Weber's cultural analysis is his theory linking the emergence of capitalism with the spread of the values and beliefs—and behaviors—associated with the protestant ethic. This work, linking the internal, mental and the external, social, and communicative realms, is profoundly social psychological in orientation. Its key emphasis is on individual social behaviors as they are influenced by shared ideas and social norms (see Chapters 16, 17, and 19, this volume). These mental representations in turn create and are the foundation of interpersonal relations and the operation of large-scale and enduring social systems. Weber (1947) assumes that it is the communication of individual beliefs and motives—for example, the spreading acceptance of the protestant ethic—that is the fundamental influence that ultimately shapes large-scale social structures and cultures such as capitalism.

Weber was also among the first to emphasize that a clear understanding of social interaction and communication must involve the study of externally observable behavior, as well as the subjectively perceived thoughts and meanings by the actor. This approach seeks to unify the insights derived from the social cognitive approach, with a genuine concern with real-life behavior and communication and its role in larger social systems. Weber, although he was not a social psychologist in the modem sense of the term, nevertheless pioneered a variety of ingenious techniques to obtain reliable empirical data about social cognition and communication. The careful empirical analysis of written and spoken texts is fundamentally Weberian in its approach, as Chapters 2, 12, 13, and 14, illustrate in this volume.

The phenomenological tradition. In discussing the links between social cognition and communication, the important work of classic phenomenological theoreticians such as Fritz Heider and Kurt Lewin deserve special emphasis. For example, Heider (1958) was among the first to explore the kind of information gathering strategies and cognitive processes on which social actors must necessarily rely as they plan and execute their interpersonal and communicative strategies. Heider's phenomenological theorizing produced some of the most productive empirical paradigms, including work on such key issues as person perception, attribut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Social Cognition and Communication: Background, Theories, and Research
• PART 1 The Interdependence of Social Cognition and Communication
• PART 2 Cognition and Communication in Dyadic Encounters
• PART 3 The Psychology of Narratives
• PART 4 The Political and Social Consequences of Communication and Cognition
• Index