Communication Accommodation Theory

A highly objective theory in the tradition of socio-psychological.

Theorist: Howard Giles (at UCSB)

Assumption: While we talk with someone from a different background, we aim to achieve mutual understanding. So we accommodate the conversation to understand each other.

Accommodation: Movement toward or away from others by changing your communication behavior.

e.g., different places; different generations;

It’s a about “Social Distance”: How similar or different we are from one another.

1. Strategies for communication accommodation

• Convergence: Adapting communication to become more smilar to another person.
• The hardest one.
• Happen less commonly. But happen more in a closer relationship.
• e.g., Discourse management: Choose appropriate topics, you choose to talk about in your conversation - You’re managing the discourse.
• Divergence: Accentuating the differences between you and another person.
  • Usually, divergence happens more. Because we tend to do what we are comfortable with.
• Maintainance: persisting in your original communication style.
• Counteraccommodation: Excessive concern for vocal clarity or amplification.

2. The core of CAT: Out communicative differences and similarities are deeply intertwined with our group identities

Personal Identity ———————– Social Identity

Personal Identity: Characteristics that make an individual unique and autonomous.

Social (group) identity: Characteristics or categories that define us a part of a large socail group (e.g., ethnicity)

Identity Saliance: Likelihood a given identity will be active across contexts; based on the idea that identities get ranked in a hierarchy and higher ranked identities are more likely to be emphasized or enacted

3. Different Motivations for Convergence and Divergence

Desire for Approval (Personal Identity) -> Convergence -> Positive Response

Need for Distinctiveness (Social Identity) -> Divergence - > Negative Response

4. Initial Orientation: Predict whether their concerns for personal identity or social identity will be salient.

The following five will make people rely on social identity.

• Collectivistic cultural context (we-centered)
• Distressing history of interaction.
• Steoreotypes
• Norms for treatment of group.
• High group-solidarity/group dependence.

5. Critiques

• CAT does not have relative simplicity
• CAT is not falsifiable.

Face Negotiation Theory

A highly objective theory in the tradition of socio-psychological tradition

Theorist: Stella Ting-Toomey

Cultural differences conflict.

• Face: the projected self-image of oneself in a relational situation, or our public self-image.
• Facework: specific verbal and nonverbal messages that help to maintain and restore face loss, and to uphold and honor face gain.

1. Type of culture: Collectivistic & Individualistic Cultures can be distinguished by perceptions of self, goals, and duty.

Individualistic: I-centered.

Collectivistic: We-centered.

2. Type of self-construal

Self-construal is the degree to which people conceive of themselves as autonomous from or connected to others.

Even for people in individualistic culture, they an have collectivistic self-construal. Vice Versa.

3. Type of face concern: Face concern regard for self-face, other-face, or mutual face (concern for both parties’ images, and/or image of the relationship)

• Face-restoration: Self-concerned facework strategy used to preserve autonomy.
• Face-giving: Other-concerned facework strategy used to defend and support another person’s need for inclusion

4. Type of conflict management

Three primary conflict management styles: dominance, avoidance, integration

Self-face -> Dominance

Other-face -> Avoidance

Mutual-face -> Integration (win-win)

e.g., Interdependent self-construal -> Other-face concern -> Apologies -> Forgiveness -> Mutual-face

5. Critiques

• Measures are imprecise
• People are part of multiple cultures at the same time.