This chapter introduces the study of creating understanding. It explains how studying understanding contrasts with traditional approaches to studying human communication, which typically focus on outcomes that follow from communicating in particular ways, rather than how communication itself works, and why this is an important and fundamental topic in the study of communication.

For most of us, communicating is like breathing. We do it hundreds of times each day, and do so successfully with relatively little effort or thought. As children, we might have been explicitly told what a particular word means, or instructed in how to obey social norms (e.g., don’t yell in a library; say “please” and “thank you”). However, we were not explicitly taught how to communicate—that is, to share ideas, thoughts, and feelings with other people through our behavior—just like we are not taught how to breathe. Yet somehow, despite this lack of explicit instruction, we are effective communicators from a very young age.

Just as we do with breathing, we generally communicate without thinking or worrying about how it works. Despite feeling simple, however, communication is actually a quite complex, and in some ways amazing, phenomenon. Think about it: when we communicate, we are taking our thoughts—which at that point exist only in our own mind, and cannot be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled—and we are reaching into another person’s mind to create a copy of our thoughts. In so doing, we actually change the content of that other person’s thoughts—which, like our own thoughts, also cannot be seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled. We accomplish this remarkable feat by producing and processing a combination of sounds and physical behaviors. Sometimes these are codified and conventional (e.g., using a shared language), while other times they are improvised (e.g., using gestures or pantomime when there is no shared language). But how does all of this work? What actually happens when two people communicate?

This text is designed to address these issues. Specifically, it has been developed around two related questions:

• How does human communication work?
• What happens— biologically, cognitively, and socially—when we communicate?

Across this text, we will look at everyday behaviors and experiences (e.g., speaking, listening, making inferences about what others are thinking) through a scientific lens. This will often involve taking a step back and critically examining behaviors, activities, and thought processes that are so routine that they often go unnoticed. This may be challenging, but will ultimately give you a valuable new perspective on your own experiences, and a greater appreciation for the social world in which we all live.

Creating Understanding

Before proceeding any further, it is worthwhile to more precisely articulate what the focus of this text will be. In this text, we will be examining the physical and psychological activities in which people engage in order to create understanding in social interaction.

In this, we will be looking at people’s communicative activities across a range of different media and channels (e.g., between individuals, within small groups; face-to-face and online, etc.). Although we often talk about messages in these different forms or channels as if they are distinct (e.g., “mass media”, “computer-mediated communication”, “interpersonal communication”), people actually process messages using the same mental pathways and mechanisms regardless of the message’s medium or channel. Properties of communication media (the plural of “medium”) can constrain or enable the use of certain message features, which can change the physical form a message takes. However, the cognitive processes involved in communication are—to the best our current knowledge—fundamentally the same across these different media contexts. In this text, our focus is these fundamentals of human communication.

In this text, we will be looking at both the creation (i.e., production) and interpretation (i.e., reception and processing) of messages. People often talk about these as different “parts” of communication, However, in most human social interactions – and especially synchronous interactions like conversations – message production and reception are interrelated and intertwined on multiple levels (e.g., Pickering & Garrod, 2004; Pickering & Garrod, 2013). Although production and reception do, certainly, involve some differences, we contend that the traditional theoretical separation between “sender” and “receiver” in models of communication is, at best, artificial and overly simplistic; communication is fundamentally dyadic (see Chapter 2). Considering the similarities and interconnections, rather than the differences, between message production and reception is both more useful and more interesting if the goal is to understand how human communication works. As such, we will be examining the mental and physical endeavors involved in message creation and interpretation as we study creating understanding.

A Brief Historical Note

It might surprise you to learn that the scientific study of how people create understanding is relatively new to the field of communication. This is largely a result of the field’s history: the study of communication has its origins in the Ancient Greek’s study of rhetoric and public speaking. The focus of these efforts was determining how to construct arguments that effectively persuaded people—so the outcome that scholars emphasized, and cared about, was influence and persuasion, not understanding. In modern times, the growth and development of communication as an academic field was largely driven by interest in how media messages and propaganda influence people. In the latter half of the 20th century, interest in interpersonal communication grew—but the focus of most scholars’ inquiries was on relational influence (e.g., how we form and cultivate relationships with communication). Across all of this, researchers’ primary outcome of interest was influence—that is, how people were affected by communication—not understanding. In many ways, understanding has been taken for granted; scholars have assumed that people understood the messages whose effects they were studying.

As a result of this, understanding has not been an issue that communication scholars have paid much attention to (with a few exceptions). Even the term itself is not well-defined: the discipline does not have a widely accepted definition of understanding. Rather, it is usually treated as a primitive term, or a concept that so basic or fundamental that it is taken as “given” and not explicitly defined. It is only now, in the latter half of the 20th and in the early 21st century, that this topic has started to receive more attention. One reason for this may be increased interest in artificial intelligence (AI): as scientists try to get machines to think and act “intelligently”—which includes creating understanding with other entities—they have been prompted to probe how people actually do this. As interest in this question has grown, researchers in disciplines other than communication—among them anthropology, philosophy, cognitive psychology, education, and linguistics—have been actively contributing to this area, each in ways that reflect their own interests and orientation. One of the goals of this text is to develop a clear definition, and understanding(!), of the phenomenon of understanding for the discipline of communication.

Why Study Understanding?

Now that we have a clearer picture of what studying creating understanding will consist of, it is worth considering why this is a worthwhile topic to study, and how it relates to other topics and areas within and beyond the discipline of communication. In short, creating understanding is important to study because it is fundamental: as humans, it is fundamental to our everyday lives; as students and scholars, it is fundamental to the study of human communication.

First, the study of creating understanding is closely connected to our lived experiences as human beings. The activities involved in creating understanding are things we do every day, hundreds if not thousands of times, often without thinking about them. If creating understanding is something so basic that nearly anyone can do it, can it really be that interesting or important to study? Indeed, it is the very fact that these experiences are so widely shared—across the lifespan, across cultures, across time and space—that makes them so important to study. While it may sound grand, the study of creating understanding implicates literally every person in the world—past, present and future. As will hopefully become clear in this course, how humans communicate, and the skills required to communicate in this way, are also something essential to our species. The history of their development is intertwined with the evolution of homo sapiens (i.e., modern humans), and in turn the development of human civilization as we know it.

Second, as students and scholars interested in communication, creating understanding is a foundational topic. How can we say that we study communication if we do not try to explore and explain how the process of human communication actually works? A majority of research in the field of communication – which includes most of the topics covered in widely-taught courses like persuasion, interpersonal communication, relational communication, strategic communication, and media effects—does not actually address the process of human communication. Rather, this work examines outcomes that follow from communication: for example, changing attitudes or beliefs, building relationships, or managing impressions. In this work, the creation of understanding is taken for granted: researchers focused on these outcomes often assume that when people engage in social interaction, they understand what each other intends and immediately move on examining the supposed effects of the interaction. However, the creation of this shared understanding is, in fact, the foundation on which everything else sits. If researchers do not know what this foundation consists of, and how it is constructed, they risk making erroneous assumptions and/or constructing theoretical models on unstable ground. Thus, to both understand and responsibly study higher order effects of communication—such as interpersonal relations, conflict, social influence, or deception, among many others—it is important to understand its first-order effect, creating understanding.

The study of creating  understanding also gives us the opportunity to see how communication across a range of different contexts is fundamentally similar. In the field of communication (as in many fields), there is a tendency to create boundaries that define particular sub-areas. Entire books and courses are dedicated to “nonverbal communication”, separate and distinct from “verbal communication” (which, oddly, is not taught or written about widely). In reality, most human communication involves verbal and nonverbal components operating together. The separation of these two “types” of communication is an artifact of scholars’ attempts to organize the topics they study, rather than a distinction that is meaningful or functional in the real world.

Much of communication research has historically been organized by context: there are courses and books in organizational communication, health communication, political communication, family communication, etc. While there are certainly features of these contexts that shape the way that people interact, these divisions can give the impression that the process of human communication is somehow inherently different across these different contexts. In reality, it is not. People create understanding and share meaning using the same basic processes and mechanisms in all these settings; they just draw on particular resources to greater or lesser degrees depending on what the situation makes available. The study of creating understanding focuses on the basic processes and mechanisms that are shared across the topics that these sub-disciplines address. As such, it transcends these contextual divides, and can help us see common threads across diverse areas of study.

Third and finally, having insight into how people create understanding also has practical value in our everyday lives. Knowing how human communication works provides insights into where are how we are at risk for creating misunderstandings, and gives us ideas about how to prevent or mitigate such problems. Similarly, this knowledge can help us determine how to best (i.e., most effectively) craft and interpret messages in different situations and contexts, which is an important life skill. Finally, getting a sense of the complexity of human communication processes can help provide perspective when things do not go as we intend, and help us appreciate just how amazing it is that we are able to get someone else to experience what we are thinking, or move an idea from our head into someone else’s head, using something as simple as a stream of sounds (i.e., speech), the way we move our body (i.e., gestures, facial expressions) or a set of marks on a page (i.e., writing… like this!).

References

Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S. (2004). Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 169-226. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X04000056

Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S. (2013). An integrated theory of language production and comprehension. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(04), 329-347. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12001495