Editors' Introduction: Miscommunication

Healey, Patrick G. T.; Ruiter, Jan P. de; Mills, Gregory

doi:10.1111/tops.12340

Cited by 32 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…As we noted above, this possibility cannot explain the results of the current study, but it may explain other occurrences of repair avoidance such as some of the ones we documented when discussing the footage of the 2018 study (Galantucci et al, 2018). In other words, as pointed out by Healey, De Ruiter, and Mills (2018), the study of miscommunication is a promising avenue for future research.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Repair Avoidance: When Faithful Informational Exchanges Don't Matter That Much

et al. 2020

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Common-sense intuition suggests that, when people are engaged in informational exchanges, they communicate so as to be reasonably sure that they perform the exchanges faithfully. Over the years, we have found evidence suggesting that this intuition, which is woven into several influential theories of human communication, may be misleading. We first summarize this evidence and discuss its potential limitations. Then, we present a new study that addresses the potential limitations. A confederate instructed participants to "pick up the skask" from a tray containing six objects and move it to a specific location. Since skask is a non-word invented by us, participants had to ask for clarification to perform the instruction faithfully. In contradiction with the intuition that people pursue faithfulness when engaged in informational exchanges, 29 of the 48 participants we tested performed the instruction without asking for clarification. We identified a possible cause for this behavior, which occurred more frequently when avoiding the clarification was unlikely to result in an overt consequence (an error in the execution of the instruction that could be noticed by the confederate or the experimenter). Other factors such as individual differences and the specific interpersonal dynamics of the experimental settings, if they played a role at all, did it to an extent that is unlikely to be comparable to that of the role played by overt consequences. Considered together, our various assessments of the extent to which people engage in faithful informational exchanges converge on a simple conclusion: Communicating faithfully is a substantially demanding task, and people often fail at it. We discuss the implications of this conclusion and speculate on its relevance for understanding the evolutionary past of human communication.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Repair Avoidance: When Faithful Informational Exchanges Don't Matter That Much

et al. 2020

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“…The evidence presented here is limited but suggests an association between repair and improved patient outcomes that supports the proposal that repair is a key mechanism for building shared understanding in clinical interactions. Evidence from other studies of communication beyond medicine also suggests that conversations characterized by widespread self-and other-repair lead to improved understanding (e.g., Brennan & Schober, 2001;Brennan, Galati, & Kuhlen, 2010;Healey, 2008;Healey et al 2018) and creativity (Bjørndahl, Fusaroli, Østergaard, & Tyl en, 2015) across diverse interactive tasks. Taken together, these findings point toward the role of repair processes, that could be interpreted as communication difficulties or miscommunication, in improving both the quality and outcomes of communication.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Miscommunication in Doctor–Patient Communication

McCabe

Healey

2018

Topics in Cognitive Science

Self Cite

108

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The effectiveness of medical treatment depends on the quality of the patient–clinician relationship. It has been proposed that this depends on the extent to which the patient and clinician build a shared understanding of illness and treatment. Here, we use the tools of conversation analysis (CA) to explore this idea in the context of psychiatric consultations. The CA “repair” framework provides an analysis of the processes people use to deal with problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding. These problems are especially critical in the treatment of psychosis where patients and health care professionals need to communicate about the disputed meaning of hallucinations and delusion. Patients do not feel understood, they are frequently non‐adherent with treatment, and many have poor outcomes. We present an overview of two studies focusing on the role of repair as a mechanism for producing and clarifying meaning in psychiatrist–patient communication and its association with treatment outcomes. The first study shows patient clarification or repair of psychiatrists’ talk is associated with better patient adherence to treatment. The second study shows that training which emphasizes the importance of building an understanding of patients’ psychotic experiences increases psychiatrists’ self‐repair. We propose that psychiatrists are working harder to make their talk understandable and acceptable to the patient by taking the patient's perspective into account. We conclude that these findings provide evidence that repair is an important mechanism for building shared understanding in doctor–patient communication and contributes to better therapeutic relationships and treatment adherence. The conversation analytic account of repair is currently the most sophisticated empirical model for analyzing how people construct shared meaning and understanding. Repair appears to reflect greater commitment to and engagement in communication and improve both the quality and outcomes of communication. Reducing potential miscommunication between psychiatrists and their patients with psychosis is a low‐cost means of enhancing treatment from both the psychiatrist and patient perspective. Given that misunderstanding and miscommunication are particularly problematic in psychosis, this is critical for improving the longer term outcomes of treatment for these patients who often have poor relationships with psychiatrists and health care services more widely.

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“…Repair is ubiquitous in human conversation and has been recognized as a key empirical model to investigate how individuals negotiate shared understanding [26][27][28]. The publicly observable correlates of repair are reflective of underlying processes like self-monitoring and other-monitoring, and of cooperative motivations like joint commitment [29] and an orientation to understanding and sharing intentions [30].…”

Section: Empirical Manifestations Of Repair In Humansmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coordinating social action: A primer for the cross-species investigation of communicative repair

Heesen¹,

Fröhlich²,

Sievers³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Human joint action is inherently cooperative, manifested in the collaborative efforts of participants to minimize communicative trouble through interactive repair. Although interactive repair requires sophisticated cognitive abilities, it can be dissected into basic building blocks shared with nonhuman animal species. A review of the primate literature shows that interactionally contingent signal sequences are at least common among species of nonhuman great apes, suggesting a gradual evolution of repair. To pioneer a cross-species assessment of repair this paper aims at (i) identifying necessary precursors of human interactive repair; (ii) proposing a coding framework for its comparative study in humans and nonhuman species; and (iii) using this framework to analyse examples of interactions of humans (adults/children) and nonhuman great apes. We hope this paper will serve as a primer for cross-species comparisons on dealing with communicative breakdowns.

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Editors' Introduction: Miscommunication

Cited by 32 publications

References 67 publications

Repair Avoidance: When Faithful Informational Exchanges Don't Matter That Much

Repair Avoidance: When Faithful Informational Exchanges Don't Matter That Much

Miscommunication in Doctor–Patient Communication

Coordinating social action: A primer for the cross-species investigation of communicative repair

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