Communication Accommodation Theory

Abstract

Imagine a conversation between an older male professor of British origin, a male African American undergraduate student, and a female postdoctoral student from Switzerland taking place in an American University. Think of the variety of social dimensions involved in this situation: gender, culture and ethnicity, social and occupational status, age, and so forth. How are the different personal and social identities negotiated during the interaction? Who changes his or her communicative style to accommodate whom? What are the outcomes of such accommodating behaviors on the relationship between the interactants? In what follows, we shall make frequent use of this scenario. Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) provides a wide-ranging framework aimed at predicting and explaining many of the adjustments individuals make to create, maintain, or decrease social distance in interaction. It explores the different ways in which we accommodate our communication, our motivations for doing so, and the consequences. CAT addresses interpersonal communication issues, yet also links it with the larger context of the intergroup stakes of an encounter. In other words, sometimes our communications are driven by our personal identities as Janet or Richard while at others-and sometimes within the very same interaction-our words, nonverbals, and demeanor are fueled, instead and almost entirely, by our social identities as members of groups; that is Janet now speaks not so much as the individual Janet but as someone who represents communication scholars to groups of chemists, biologists, and physicists. Since its inception in the early 1970s, CAT has undergone several conceptual refinements and theoretical elaborations, as exemplified by moves from speech into the nonlinguistic (Giles, Mulac, Bradac, & Johnson, 1987). Originally a sociopsychological model exploring accent and 293

The Conversational Chameleon

“…From this perspective, the mimicker accommodates and converges with the partner of the interaction (Giles, 2008), which leads the mimickee to the feeling of affiliation. Such behavior performed by the mimicker signals full comprehension (Gallois, Ogay, & Giles, 2005;Gasiorek & Giles, 2012), mutual empathy, and common social identities (Harwood, Soliz, & Lin, 2006), thus causing the mimickee to be more vulnerable to requests made by the mimicker, as a result of mimicry evoking the feeling that there is a better mutual understanding/trust (Maddux, Mullen, & Galinsky, 2008;Swaab et al, 2011) between them than actually exists. Understanding the difference between communication accommodation theory and the mimicry phenomenon is key to understanding each theory's relevance in social interactions.…”

Communicatively Managing Religious Identity Difference in Parent-Child Relationships: The Role of Accommodative and Nonaccommodative Communication

“…Whereas accommodative communication attempts to meet the conversational partner's needs, nonaccommodative behaviors fail, intentionally or unwittingly, to incorporate the partner's identity and communicative needs into the interaction (Gallois et al, 2005;Harwood, 2000). Three behaviors specific to religious talk within families are highlighted in the present study based on previous intergroup research (e.g., Harwood, 2000;Soliz, Thorson, & Rittenour, 2009) and relevance to the current context: inappropriate self-disclosure, emphasizing divergent values, and giving unwanted advice.…”

“…Communication is at the heart of the management of difference in interactions, and researchers have relied on Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) as a guiding theory of the communication behaviors related to intergroup contact in various contexts (Gallois, Ogay, & Giles, 2005). At its core, CAT underscores the degree to which communication can be a catalyst for interpersonal affiliation or, conversely, a means of amplifying or maintaining distinctiveness and social distance.…”

“…Accommodative behaviors are those communication behaviors that acknowledge and respect the conversational partner's perceived interpersonal and divergent group characteristics through linguistic, paralinguistic, discursive, and nonlinguistic adaptation (Gallois et al, 2005;Harwood, 2000). There are numerous ways to categorize accommodative behaviors such as the degree to which one manages discourse by selecting appropriate topics of conversation, controls the conversation through body language and interruptions, and adapts the selection and delivery of verbal communication to increase interpretability (Harwood, Soliz, & Lin, 2006); the interpretation of what is considered to be accommodative is dependent upon the context and skill of the communicators.…”

Depression explanatory models of primary care patients and doctors: Relationship with self-stigma, communication effectiveness, and recovery

“…As an intergroup theory of interpersonal communication, CAT uniquely offers a different perspective from other models of language and social interaction, which tend to focus mainly on the interpersonal aspects of communication (Gallois & Giles, 2015). An intergroup approach takes into account how communication behaviour is influenced by the power differentials that exist between groups.…”