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Communication and Cognition

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Noise as Miscommunication

ABSTRACT

In early models of communication, noise was included as a component to account for distortions of the message. Though retained up to the present, the concept of noise does not account for miscommunication. Miscommunication is largely a cognitive matter. One of the principle reasons for miscommunication, especially in intercultural exchanges, is null experience. To account for miscommunication in models of it cognitive abilities need to be weighted in terms of the degree to which they are assimilative or accommodative.

 

In early models of communication, noise was included as a component to account for distortions of the message.

Colin Cherry in On Human Communication, writes

Disturbances may take on many forms in practical channels. In radio reception there may be the sporadic impulsive noise of "atmospherics"; on the telephone, there may be similar crackling and hissing noises, owing to electric disturbances; a television picture may occasionally be spoiled by a splash of white dots, caused by motor-car ignition systems. There is another kind of noise of a somewhat different nature, often called "cross-talk," which can arise on faulty telephone lines, resulting in a third voice's breaking in upon the conversation. In a sense, conversation with a friend at a noisy party provides an example of a speech channel subjected to disturbance by the cross-talk of other people's speech. (199).

When Cherry returns to "the cocktail party problem" in the section on "Cognition and Recognition," he is mostly concerned with human beings ability to "filter out" the cross-talk. Granting that Cherry is giving an account of successful human communication based on a computational model, the only obstacle to it is external noise. Though we cannot fault him for not taking up miscommunication in a work on communication, the mind/computer analogy does not offer much to account for miscommunication.

The term is retained up to the present though it does not account for miscommunication.

DeVito is the prototypical communication textbook author in this section of C-CS sic ne he has authored a remarkable number of them. This suggests that quite a few students of communication have been introduced to its study by them. It is not a minor matter then, that his model of communication is computational. Not surprisingly, his model includes the component, noise. His conception of noise is not altered in the various editions. In the most recent, Interpersonal Messages: Communication and Relationship Skills (2008): "Noise is anything that interferes with your receiving a message. Just as messages may be auditory or visual, noise, too, comes in both auditory and visual forms" (12). He distinguishes four types of noise:

He adds that the concept of "signal-to-noise ratio" is useful if one takes "signal" to mean information useful to someone and "noise" to mean information that is not useful.

As Lakoff and Johnson would be quick to point out, DeVito extends the ordinary meaning of the word "noise" metaphorically to include physiological, psychological, and semantic "interference." Noise in the first sense (physical noise) refers to interference coming from outside the communication matrix. It most commonly refers to sound interfering with hearing. The listener is not responsible for this interference. Unfortunately, when this sense of noise is applied analogously to physiological, psychological, and semantic contexts, it carries with it the connotation of "not the fault of the listener" (the receiver of the message). While this is not problematic in the case of physiological noise, it is in the psychological and semantic domains.

This infelicity is captured by the use of the concept "signal-to-noise ratio." If what is being communicated to receivers is not "useful," it is not their fault. This is not a "useful" approach to take if the project is to develop "relationship skills." If we consider DeVito's instances of psychological noise—preconceptions, inattention, bias, prejudice, close-mindedness, and extreme emotionalism—the same point can be made. For example, if a receiver regards a "message" as a preconceived opinion, a biased position, a prejudiced view, close-minded, or extremely emotional, he or she has every right to be "inattentive." Similarly, if the senders' message is derived from a different meaning systems, different language, dialect, or contains jargon, ambiguity, arcane terms, receivers can disregard it without blame. This is a recipe for miscommunication not an account of its conditions.

Of course, DeVito is not saying that miscommunication is not the fault of the receiver. However, to describe preconceptions, bias, prejudice, close-mindedness, and emotion as "internal interferences" to communication is misleading. Take prejudice as a case in point. Prejudging someone as in instances of stereotyping someone is a active process. It is not that a stereotype in someone's mind interferes with that person's better judgment. It is that the person's cognitive ability to assess events in the world is "faulty" because it does not take into account all aspects of the experience. To say that something interfered with their judgments and distorted them is like saying that the pitcher's fast ball interfered with the batter's hitting the ball.

Miscommunication is largely a cognitive matter

The mind-as-machine, computational model of communication provides a very limited model of miscommunication. This has not been a theoretical issue because, like Colin Cherry, most communication researchers are more concerned about successful communication than unsuccessful communication.

The problem with the emphasis on successful communication is that in everyday life more communications are unsuccessful than successful. If we take as an index of success that the messages sent are understood by the persons who receive them, most communications are partial. Given the extent to which receivers misunderstand senders, it is something of a miracle that we can cooperate and collaborate with others.ftn

The claim that miscommunications outnumber communications in everyday exchanges may seem outrageous. But, consider the following commonplace circumstances:

This list could go on indefinitely. Even if the claim that miscommunications outnumber communications in everyday exchanges is not true, it is surely the case that miscommunication is largely an internal cognitive matter rather than an external physical or semantic one. And, although, physiological defects are in some sense "internal," they are in another "external" interferences with cognition. DeVito offers loss of vision, hearing loss, articulation problems, and memory loss as instances of physiological noise. These are all limitations on cognition. The analogy of the loss of sight, hearing, or memory to noise works only in the sense that it limits cognition. Not being able to see a sign on a door is not generally regarded as an instance of miscommunication but as an instance of non-communication. The differences between these two phenomenon is considerable. They are not synonyms.

One of the principle reasons for miscommunication, especially in intercultural exchanges, is null experience.

The truism that persons cannot understand each other unless they share similar experiences. For someone who has never written a computer program, it is difficult to understand how the pleasure in making it work compensates for the incredibly repetitious trial and error coding and recoding it takes. The gap in non-programmer's experience makes it difficult to link tedious repetition with pleasure. On the other hand, if the non-programmer is a gardener who grows flowers from innumerable tiny seeds that have to be carefully sorted into trays or pots and then repotted, the relationship between tedium and pleasure in programming can be understood analogously.

The concept of an "gap" fits easily into a network model of the mind.fn2A gap is "an open or empty space in or between things" (Wordnet). Considering that experiences are stored in memory systems, it is possible to speak of a gap in a memory system when it is compared to another. Generally we store "mental models" of the actual world as we experience it. Communicating depends upon modeling the world in which we live with other people and matching our models with theirs. A corollary to the truism that persons cannot understand each other unless they share similar experiences is that everyone has "gaps" in their mental models of the world. These can be called "experience gaps." In the context of communication, these gaps offer no information to the working memory that matches the missing experience.fn3

The term "gap" unlike the term "noise" is not a phenomenon "external" to cognition. It is, so to speak, a missing piece in the meaning puzzle. If we consider the components of a communication in isolation from each other, it would not seem to be relevant to speak of something in a receiver that was missing. But, if we look at an interpersonal exchange as a communication matrix, in the receiver's relationship to the sender, there is a gap in the experiences stored in his or her memory. Experience gaps lead to miscommunication because receivers have to fill these gaps to understand the text/messages sent to them but do not remember experiences that match.

By contrast with the term "noise," the term "gap" implicates receivers. In understanding the world in which you live, gaps in mental models of it are a liability. If persons regard some aspect of the world as useless to model, they decide to do so and are responsible for whatever consequences come of it.

To account for miscommunication in models of it cognitive abilities need to be weighted in terms of the degree to which they are assimilative or accommodative.

Null experiences do not account for pre-conceptions, bias, prejudice, or close-mindedness. How one copes cognitively with experiences has to be considered as well. In his Psychology of Intelligence, Jean Piaget offers a distinction about the way we process experiences cognitively. He argues that experiences are internalized either by assimilation or by accommodation. In his view, persons usually process experiences in order to understand them by assimilating them to their existing cognitive frameworks. Alternately, persons can process NEW experiences by accommodating them, that is, by modifying their existing cognitive frameworks. Unfortunately, persons can assimilate new experience to existing frameworks even though they do not match. This is what happens in instances we call preconceiving, prejudging, and close-mindedness. Our tendency to assimilate experiences to available cognitive frameworks is closely connected to our belief-systems. Since our beliefs are important to us, we sometimes hold onto to them by making experiences that might contradict them into confirmations of them. Similarly, our value system make our beliefs resonate with particular emotional charges. If some discourse does not readily confirm our beliefs and values, our minds easily wander. And, if someone else is ardent about their beliefs, we might shut out their views if we do not resonate in the same way.

From the point of view of this entry, miscommunication is a neglected area of research.

jjs

 

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Notes:

n1 .We are accustomed to measuring successful communication in situations that are concrete and practical. For example, building a house where persons give and take instructions about how to do it. However, when communications are more abstract and not specifically tied to experiences, the extent to which communications succeed is dramatically reduced. Another area in which communication is minimal is in ordinary interpersonal relations—especially in when the parties differ in gender, age, race, culture, religion, politics, and so on...

fn2 .The debate over the computational vs. connectionist models is well describe by Paul Thagard in his Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science and Michael Dawson in his Understanding Cognitive Science. Both argue that the models do not contradict each other. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson disagree in their Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. See Communication as a Cognitive Science for a discussion of this controversy ...

fn3 .From the perspective of memory systems, an experience gap is a "null experience," that is, an empty "space" in the receiver's memory. Like mental spaces, an empty one is a metaphoric aid to conceptualizing how the mind works. ...

 

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