Coordination of knowledge in communication: Effects of speakers' assumptions about what others know.

Abstract

Two pairs of studies examined effects of perspective taking in communication, using a 2-stage methodology that first obtained people's estimates of the recognizability to others of specific stimuli (public figures and everyday objects) and then examined the effects of these estimates on message formulation in a referential communication task. Ss were good at estimating stimulus identifiability but were biased in the direction of their own knowledge. The amount of information in a referring expression varied inversely with the perceived likelihood that addressees could identify the target stimulus. However, effects were less strong than anticipated. Although communicators do take others' knowledge into account, the extent to which they do so involves a trade-off with other sorts of information in the communicative situation.

Thinking about You: Perspective Taking, Perceived Restraint, and Performance

“…From the standpoint of communication, a very basic amount of perspective taking is necessary for any interpersonal conversation (Krauss, 2001). It is widely accepted that perspective taking is necessary for effective communication because speakers must take into account what a listener knows when deciding how to formulate a message (Fussell & Krauss, 1992 In psychology, perspective taking has been primarily examined in the context of empathy and helping behavior (Batson, 1998;Batson, Turk, Shaw & Klein, 1995;Eisenberg & Miller, 1987;Parker and Axtell, 2001). Social psychologists suggest that perspective taking can also evoke positive behaviors during interactions through non-strategic, empathy-related processes (Batson et al, 1995).…”

“…Drawing on the communications approach to perspective taking (e.g., Fussell & Krauss, 1992), we argue that perspective taking is likely to enhance communication by allowing the perspective taker to better tailor his/ her message to the knowledge, goals and concerns of others. In turn, attending to the concerns of others may not only enable perspective takers to transfer knowledge in a non-threatening manner Perspective Taking and Perceived Restraint 9 (Williams, 2007), but also motivate their colleagues to respond with flexibility and extra-role behaviors that can increase efficiency (Hoffman et al, 2007 for review of extra-role behavior).…”

“…Scholars in the field of communications investigate perspective taking in speaker-listener dyads (Fussell & Krauss, 1992). From the standpoint of communication, a very basic amount of perspective taking is necessary for any interpersonal conversation (Krauss, 2001).…”

language impairment and colour categories

“…S&B's is not an ecologically valid task; it is not a canonical problem that our prelinguistic ancestors encountered, for which language evolved as the solution. And even if we trained contemporary animals to do something like it (as some comparative psychologists have done, e.g., Leavens et al 1996), it would not be a linguistic task -indeed it would hardly even be a categorization task, but more like a joint multiple-choice task requiring some "mind-reading" (Premack & Woodruff 1978;Tomasello 1999) plus some coordination (Fussell & Krauss 1992;Markman & Makin 1998).…”

Is alignment always the result of automatic priming?

“…When asked the latter question in an exotic (nonlocal) dialect, Bostonians also gave more detailed directions. Fussell & Krauss (1992) found that the number of words used in the initial reference to a photo of a landmark in an interactive coordination task was a function of the landmark's perceived identifiability-the more identifiable the landmark was thought to be, the fewer the words used to refer to it. It is not clear how priming could account for these results or those of host of similar studies (see Krauss & Fussell, 1996, for a review).…”