Agreeing is not enough

Abstract

Collaborative interaction pervades many everyday practices: work meetings, innovation and product design, education and arts. Previous studies have pointed to the central role of acknowledgement and acceptance for the success of joint action, by creating affiliation and signaling understanding. We argue that various forms of explicit miscommunication are just as critical to challenge, negotiate and integrate individual contributions in collaborative creative activities. Through qualitative microanalysis of spontaneous coordination in collective creative LEGO constructions, we individuate three interactional styles:inclusive, characterized by acknowledgment and praise;instructional, characterized by self-repair; andintegrative, characterized by widespread self- and other-repair. We then investigate how different interaction styles leave distinct material traces in the resulting LEGO models. The inclusive interaction style generally results in concatenations of individual contributions with little coherence and core narrative. The instructional style produces coherent, but largely individually driven models. Finally, the integrative style generates more innovative models, synthesizing individual contributions in shared narratives or schemas.

Cognitive Processing of Miscommunication in Interactive Listening: An Evaluation of Listener Indecision and Cognitive Effort

“…This suggests that the effect of miscommunication on subsequent communication is influenced not only by the type of miscommunication but also by how salient the miscommunication is made by the context and speaker specific proclivities associated with miscommunicating. These results are consistent with findings from Bjørndahl et al's (2015) study suggesting that making a miscommunication explicit is important for adaptation. This is likely because the cue that makes the miscommunication salient (i.e., in the case of the current experiment, a penalty or a salient visual change) may have acted as a cue to disengage automatic language processes to engage more effortful processes needed to recruit more cognitive resources, in line with heuristic-systematic models of information processing (Chaiken et al, 1989) and the one-bit model proposed by Brennen et al (2010).…”

“…In the current context, the listener may be confused by the pseudo-confederate's use of ambiguous language. However, when the consequence of the infelicitous ambiguity is not made explicit, the miscommunication may have little impact on listeners' cognition and decision making (Bjørndahl et al, 2015). In this task, we intend to show that by penalizing the listener (i.e., use of a red X), this should create a context in which listeners are negatively impacted for guessing incorrectly, likely to result in task disengagement (as discussed by Mehta & Zhu, 2009).…”

“…Miscommunication often goes unnoticed and could have little impact on communication unless it creates some type of explicit consequence for the interlocutor (e.g., request for clarification, disagreement, etc., Bjørndahl et al, 2015;Brennan & Schober, 2001;Mills, 2014). We, therefore, consider how differences in language processing effort may be impacted by feedback that results in an explicit consequence while preventing the initiation of a repair.…”

“…Critically, for a listener to address a miscommunication, a triggering cue (c.f., Brennan, Galati, & Kuhlen, 2010;Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989) might need to be present for it [the miscommunication] to be noticed (see Bjørndahl, Fusaroli, Østergaard, & Tylén, 2015), and it is possible that context (e.g., speaker contexts) may drive heuristics (i.e., cognitive shortcuts) associated with handling the communication breakdown. At present, there are no known theoretical accounts regarding what happens to cognitive and decision making processes when a listener misunderstands what a speaker says.…”

“…Despite these findings, it is less clear whether listeners take into account why speakers are sometimes confusing through their use of ambiguity, and whether or not this impacts their processing heuristics and approach to communication. In order for miscommunication to be noticed, its consequences may need to become evident (Bjørndahl et al, 2015). In a scenario in which a miscommunication and its consequences are recognized, heuristics may drive the way we process the incoming information.…”