Effective Communication & Cause / Effect Beliefs

 

Distortions showing up in our communication come in several different forms and can absolutely plaque our ability to effectively communicate. Once such distortion that rears it’s ugly head often enough is in falsely attributed cause and effect statements. The false attribution is based on erroneously formulated beliefs at the subconscious level and as such often go unchecked. Effective communication skills are necessary in order to neutralize the damaging effects these may have. Allow me to give you a quick example to illustrate my point:

 

Let's say that your at the office when all of a sudden your boss comes running in screaming that the project deadline has been moved up!  You need to run over to this meeting right away in order to rearrange the schedules and make sure that you're going to meet the new deadline.  Without a second to lose, you run from your office to the conference room and make sure that everything is okay.  Unfortunately, you didn't have a second to stop and call your wife to let her know that you would be home late for dinner. 

When the meeting finished, rather than calling her you rushed to your car and drove home as quickly as you could.  All the while hoping to salvage any semblance of a family meal.  As soon as you come to the door you're greeted with a really unhappy wife… When you ask her what's wrong, she replies with "you came home late because you don't love me".  This my friends is a falsely attributed cause and effect statement.  In your wife's mind atleast at this moment she believes that your tardiness is due to the fact that you don't love her.  Now we both know that this is incorrect (well at least I think it’s incorrect :-).  Before we go further, let's talk about the psychology of this.

In evolutionary psychology it's well known that the brain  that was able to make stronger and more accurate predictions based on it’s surroundings stood a much better chance of living longer.  In other words, the quicker a brain could establish cause-and-effect relationships in it’s environment, the better the body’s chances were to survive. This meant spreading more genes…

 

As a result, we are the recipients of brains that are extremely sensitive to finding possible causes that they can attribute occurring events to.  The good and bad news is that this can happen in the blink of an eye.  Whether these causes are the actual cause of the effect may be a totally different story.  There are several studies that show both humans and animals alike will attribute the cause of a particular event to completely arbitrary objects or actions because they happen to be there at the same time.  Take the person who won't step on a crack in the sidewalk because last time they did they became ill…

 

In now knowing this, what do you do?  Your wife has just told you that you're being late is because you don't love her.  Of course there are many times when these cause and effect beliefs are very real and accurate.  The reality of the matter is though that you were pressured by your boss and really had no other choice.  In fact, you're putting up with the crap you get from your boss BECAUSE you love your wife.  Unfortunately,  simply telling her this would add best be a futile effort to pacify her fears and anxiety. 

 

More importantly, she most likely doesn’t know why she actually feels this way and as a result the “cause” is awarded to your tardiness. Feelings like this are usually based on past experiences such as watching a cheating father come home late time and again… or stories from a friend who’s perpetually late husband wound up leaving her. So what do you do? How can she communicate more effectively? How can you help her to communicate more effectively?

 

Running into a scenario where someone poses you with what is clearly an incorrect cause and effect statement can be frustrating.  As such, handling this appropriately can take quite a bit of effort and tact. There are indeed ways that you can go about neutralizing these statements without ruffling someone else's feathers. 

 

It is also very important to be aware of these types of statements in your own communication.  Cause-and-effect statements many times can be metaphorical, but depending on the recipient of your communication they may very well be construed as literal.  Choosing your words carefully is important. 

 

How do you handle these types of statements?  How can you work with your own thought process to be certain that you're not communicating ineffectively?  We talk about this and a whole host of other communication techniques in my series "The Evolved Communicator", please visit my site to learn more.

 

David J. Parnell

 

 

Mind Reading in Communication

 

In following yesterday post on The Culprits of Miscommunication, we will begin by addressing our linguistic or non-verbal “distortions”. The actual distortion per se is not necessarily in the original message or information that shows up in your speech as much as it is in the translation of your message. Keeping in mind that your brain is constantly, relentlessly trying to establish pattern and predictability in your surroundings, it is no wonder communication distortions occur.

 

“Mind Reading” is one such distortion and can occur in your communication partner’s translation of your message. For instance, let’s say you are out on a date and things seem to be going swimmingly… Your date seems to be really into you, but as usual your starting to run out of things to say. Searching your mind you remember a story that a friend told you earlier that day about a date gone wrong for them. All though it is a bit racy, you go for it anyway… What the heck, things seem comfortable enough.

 

Well as you get to the end of your story, your dates demeanor changes suddenly and once the check comes they split… What the heck happened? You only told a story about a friend of yours… More on this is a bit, let’s get to the science of it.

 

The mammalian population has been gifted with what are known as “mirror neurons” in our brains and their sole responsibility is to mimic or imitate the person/animal that we are engaged with. When I say mimic, this doesn’t necessarily mean actually performing the same action as them, but at a minimum internally/mentally mimicking them… the result is the ability to “feel” internally what they are feeling/experiencing at the time. The benefits to this are evident. If we choose to do so, we can learn and implement skills we see. This also facilitates powerful socializing and networking tools we have such as compassion, empathy and teamwork.

 

Along with this network of mirror neurons, we have a hormone running through us called oxytocin that, although much more prevalent in women, has shown in experiments to greatly increase our ability to “mind read”. Oxytocin is much more concentrated in women as one it’s main functions surrounds the facilitation of reproduction and birth bonding. We are not referring to ESP here, but oxytocin does aid in our ability to more accurately predict what someone is feeling based on our own sensory acuity. This is our reading of their facial expressions, body language, verbiage, etc…

 

From a psychological stand point, we can only view and understand messages through our own frame of reference. Our frame of reference is analogous to a mental filter through which we “see” the world. When we receive linguistic and nonverbal communication alike, our brain instantly compares that information to our stored knowledge and experience. In this way and only in this way are we able to “understand” the messages we are receiving. As a result, we have an inherently limited capacity to interpret our surroundings. All three of the above mechanisms combine facilitate our capacity to “mind read” during our interactions. Unfortunately, we are only correct a certain percentage of the time… and if it isn’t 100%, we can run into problems.

 

OK, back to the date… Now, you were only telling a story that you thought was funny in hopes to prevent the weird awkward silence that both of you have been dreading. You were hoping to simply get a laugh out of her… Let’s look at it from your date’s point of view.

 

Earlier that week she had been on another date with some creepy guy… right before he tried to grab her and make out with her he told her a story very similar to yours… In fact, his facial expressions kind of looked like yours while you were telling that story… So what does this mean? In short, she “felt” like you were going to try something more than simply telling a story. She performed a mind read... Although it was inaccurate, it inevitably happened and your left holding the check and nothing but a bruised sense of self… Less than ideal?

 

Worthy of note is that this does NOT happen consciously, these are all messages and interpretations happening at the nonconscious level. Without top-down executive control, this will simply “happen” and people (including you) will react automatically and  turn the rest of your communication into history…

 

How do you fix this? Good question and this is something that I get into specifically in my series “The Evolved Communicator”. Please visit me to learn more.

 

David J. Parnell | Communication Expert

The Evolved Communication Blog

 

The Culprits of Miscommunication

 

 

Following yesterdays post on your brain’s processing function, we will begin to delve further into the “reality” that these attentional processes create in your own world. Now, while the focus of your attention is being directed per se by the two major processes we discussed yesterday, it is not necessarily being dissected, evaluated acutely and then purged of unwanted “material” for efficient communication. In other words, a great deal of information is stored that is by no means necessary or even relevant for your survival or thriving success for that matter. So although there is a great deal of purging going on during the initial attentionally biased processing, there is still a massive information glut stored in your brain on a daily basis.

 

Now our brain has developed and implemented an AMAZINGLY efficient and effective storage, retrieval and re-presentation process in what is known as LANGUAGE. This may seem less than epiphanic, however most people do not know the extent to which language literally constructs their internalized mental world. When I tell you to think of a tree, you will hear the word “tree”, you will say the word “tree” internally, your brain will call upon all of the thousands or millions of concepts surrounding the word “tree” and create a mentally constructed image of a “tree” and then a mental check will occur verifying that “yes, this is indeed a tree”. There is much internal dialogue and communication occurring during this process and the entire movement per se is facilitated and directed by the word “tree”.

 

Now, let’s extrapolate that out… How about I ask you to guide me in making a decision as to whether or not my significant other and I should have a baby right now… Oh boy is there a lot going on inside your head… The amount of constructing going on internally is huge… You will internally represent a baby, child rearing, schooling, disciplinary challenges, feeding, driving them to soccer practice, etc… Along with all of the visual, auditory and kinesthetic representations will come all of your values, rules and belief systems that surround child rearing. These especially my friends are EXCLUSIVELY represented in language based terms. These rules, values and beliefs are the literal glue that hold your world together… allowing you to make sense of things. Well you get the point here, there is a ridiculously large amount of informational processing occurring that is language based and all of this will be done almost instantly to provide an answer to the question I posed.

 

Rules, regulations, values and beliefs for the most part are subject matter for another time. Here we will stay focused on the gaps if representing your mental world to the others you are interacting with. Let’s revisit the tree… Now if I ask you to tell me “what a tree looks like”, you will most likely say something along the lines of “well it is tall with green leaves and a brown trunk”…

 

In adhering to the least energy principle (which we will evaluate in another post) you will give me just enough information to answer the question… as it (the question) has been presented by me (which may very well have gaps of it’s own).

 

Now, does this accurately represent all of the knowledge you have of a tree? Hardly… There are differently shaped leaves, with different colors, or needles instead of leaves and some have hard chunky bark where as others have almost skin and some are white at the base whereas others may be gray and the leaves have a vein like structure to them and so on…

 

So what does all of this mean? In the large crevasse between the comprehensive battery of knowledge you have stored internally and the actual representation of that knowledge to another human being whether written or orally, stands three categorically problematic systems.  They are generalizations, distortions and deletions… These three gremlins per se are almost exclusively the culprits of every unintentional miscommunication on face of the planet… Our only defense it the ability to recognize them and defeat them with inquisition.

 

Moving forward we will begin to look at the micro components of each system and how we can effectively recognize and sterilize these gaps for effective and clear communication.

Communicating Information and the Brain's History

Yesterday we spoke briefly of the limitations on the brains processing power and how this affects our ability to communicate. To fully understand what information our brains decide is worth paying attention to, let’s talk a bit more in depth about what our brain does and why.

 

Hundreds of thousands of years ago the ancestors of modern man roamed the earth with little else running through their mind but eating and staying out of harms way so that they would have the ability to spread their genes… In fact, they really didn’t have the capacity for cognitive thought, at least not the way we (modern man) think.

 

Morning would role around and greet them with a sensation that to them meant find food. They didn’t know to call it hunger because language didn’t exist. During their foraging if something moved unexpectedly, the burning sensation in their chest caused them to run and don’t look back… And every chance they got, when they would see a woman… well, you know what they would try… And later, when the sun went down, they went to sleep so that they could do it all over again. There was no communication because it didn’t exist. Now this went on for a long time, hundreds of thousands of years… and the result is a brain that is amazingly good at keeping us safe from danger so that we may live long enough to have sex and spread our genes. It took millions of years to develop what we will call our “old” brain.

 

Eventually, while foraging one of these guys randomly hit a squirrel with a stick and killed it for food… voila, they learned how to use a tool. Their family ate better, lived longer and was better able to spread their genes as a result. The prefrontal cortex grew a little from this. Then another one dropped some seeds near their cave mistakenly… a few months later some plants grew and they ate them… farming was invented. Their family ate better, lived longer and was better able to spread their genes. The prefrontal cortex grew a little more. Then another one let out a quick shrill when scared while hunting… this warned his fellow hunters so they could avoid danger and language was born. These guys learned to communicate; their prefrontal grew even more….

 

Now fast forward to today… all of this farming, future planning and communicating has developed a comparatively massive prefrontal cortex that gives us what we know as cognition and/or consciousness. This is what gives us our top-down executive control.

 

Our brain serves two major stimuli processing functions. First, it nonconsciously seeks predictability and pattern. This has evolved to be the best way to keep the individual alive long enough to propagate their genes. As a result, for the most part our “old brain only makes us conscious of difference, or events/actions that veer from an established pattern. This is why you can drive to work and not even think about it until you see a car swerving ahead of you… it broke “pattern” and your mind is registering this so that you can appropriately deal with it. Second, you have your working memory component that interacts with your prefrontal cortex and is a major determinant of your visual attention. This holds relevant and functioning “concepts” that are of importance to you so that it may notify you when something of significance comes into your site. This is due to the wonderfully evolved prefrontal cortex which gives us the magically ability to understand the future and language among other things. In summary, one keeps us safe, the other helps us navigate the world in a focused manner.

 

Now, the point of this lesson in history is to illustrate that we have two major functions going on cerebrally at any given time. These two functions are what is guiding our attention and therefore what and how our brain is processing stimuli. This has a large role in determining how and what we communicate to people. Now this is an amazing system and although it has it’s bugs that will be worked out as time goes on… it works pretty well. The inextricable side effect of this is that when events occur around you, you not only will NOT register and store the entirety of the event, you will only be able to communicate it back in your own personally biased way. This is incredibly important to understand in communicating with each other. There are predictable “gaps” in communication that result from this and by being aware of them, we equip ourselves with amazing tools to communicate with clarity when necessary. Tomorrow we will begin to talk about the specific gaps, how to recognize them and what we can to remedy this.

David J. Parnell

Communication Expert

The Science of Effective Communication

The brain takes in massive amounts of information every second through our senses. The exact amount seems to be an object of debate to the scientific community. If you search around a "bit" you will find numbers ranging anywhere from 2 million to 400 million bits of information per seconds. What is a bit? Well the exact "amount" that a bit represents is not important for our discussion, nor is the specific amount of information that the body/mind processes per second. Suffice it to say that our brain handles a MASSIVE amount of information every second... mostly through our visual system. We take in, process, react/act upon, store and communicate as much of that information as possible. We're actually pretty good at it too... That being said, there is WAY too much for us to deal with and store it all... our head would explode... well, not literally but we would lose our cognitive abilities due to "clogging" effects.

This is important to know because in order to effectively interact with and communicate in the world, every second our brains will determine what information is useful and necessary, process and store it and eject the rest. Now lets all agree on one thing, our brains are amazing... You may think that yours fails you here and there, but as an organ, it is second to none. That being said, there are some inherent challenges with our selection, processing and storing regiment that can cause us difficulty in our daily endeavors. In the days to come we are going to talk about what our brain is REALLY working to do on a daily basis, how it does that and then get into the specifics of how these processes show up in our language. By understanding the science and psychology behind this, you will be well on your way to becoming an effective communicator.

David J. Parnell

Communication Expert

Definition of Futility

 

 

I had never heard him cry before…. And I hope never to hear it again. There was no easing into this. Like getting hit by a bucket of cold water and getting yanked from your walk of sleep. How can you even prepare? Inexperience is cold and cruel… like a statue, it has no empathy.

 

Although only 15 seconds or so, it was the longest call I had ever taken… As soon as I picked up I heard his voice trembling and he didn’t need to say a thing, I already knew. “I think she is going… you had better get here…” He could barely get it out. I knew he was trying to be strong, he wanted to be strong… be a man.

 

Suddenly, my life had been sifted through the finest of filters. On the other end he stood, impatiently waiting to catch me. Infinitely strong, with undeniable authority… his lesson is sharp, hard and cold and will easily cut through the hardest of steel. Wielding the strength of an angel… I can see him frothing at the mouth with unrelenting drive to dole out his cosmically dictated lesson.

 

Instantly, as if it had been with me all of my life… like the friend who greets me every morning and tucks me in at night, the completeness of knowing that nothing else had ever really mattered became my label, my shame.

 

The futility of everything we had fought over… every single time I decided to let the call pass without an answer. Every time she needed help and I only offered excuses. No longer would I have the pleasure, the delight of hearing her voice… I would never have the privilege of helping her, comforting her, easing her pain again.

 

As I look out the window and gaze through the rain I realize that I have become comfortable with my dread. It has been here for too long and for the first time I can hear him off in the distance. No matter how fast I drive, the clopping of the hoofs grow louder and louder. I can’t out run him and he won’t out run me… He has ridden all night, through the storm and with clinical focus he comes. He won’t be stopped until he has fulfilled his duty. Finality has ridden tirelessly, through this driving storm to deliver his message and he won’t be denied…

 

With the comparable irony of the setting sun, although I hate him I drive relentlessly to meet him. I will not be his companion on his long ride home, not this time… He has come to steal a piece of me, weaken me, leave me unwhole. This will be our first meeting but will not be our last.

 

I will be there with her… just this one last time I will stand with her, defend her… I will yell and scream fight and battle for her with all of the authority and strength of a wisper. Together we will define futility…

 

David J. Parnell

Communication Expert

Model Citizen, Model Lover, Model Blog...

With the invent of peer-to-peer systems, the way in which we communicate and share both media and information has taken a paradigm shift.  Networks such as Napster, LimeWire and Bit Torrent along with Blogs, Myspace and Face Book have created a strong push to understand the motivating factors that keep people logging in and providing information.  If a system does not have enough people logging in and providing information or media for exchange, the system will inherently provide poor service resulting in member loss.  As a network loses members there will be less information and media for exchange.  There is somewhat of a chicken before the egg issue here. Researchers have been trying to solve this by more thoroughly understanding the motivation strategies that keep people logging in. There are number of related social psychology theories that are being considered important in researching this.

 

1.  Reciprocation theory.  People will need to benefit from their participation in any peer-to-peer network or for any other interaction for that matter.  The network will not be sustainable unless it provides benefits that outweigh the costs of time, energy and resource expenditure by the members.  A couple of questions to be considered with how to appropriately reward members are how to measure the members participation to appropriately reward them and what should the rewards actually be.  The users need to think of the rewards as useful otherwise they won't contribute.

 

2.  Consistency theory.  Once people communicate a public commitment to perform an act they are much more likely to follow through with that act.  This avenue is possible in peer-to-peer communities but the question that remains is how specifically to induce the member’s public commitment.

 

3.  Social validation.  One of the fundamental ways that people decide how they're going to act or react in a particular situation is to locate at what others have done before them.  If a sizable group of their peers have already decided to engage in this, then they are much more likely to engage in it themselves.  In most peer-to-peer communities a small portion of the members are the active contributors whereas the rest of the population is considered to be "free riders".  As a result it is not necessarily a good idea to expose all of the activity in a peer-to-peer network.  Regardless of the success of the network the disjunct between how many people are actually contributing and how many people are perceived to be contributing may have a very negative effect on new members coming in. 

 

4.  Persuasiveness of liking.  It has clearly been found that people are much more likely to say yes to a solicitation when it's communicated from a friend or relative or someone else that they like.  The question is how can you stimulate existing members of the community to invite their friends.  A reward-based system that motivates this behavior would need to be put into place in order to do this.

 

5.  Discreet emotions.  What we mainly want to focus on here is the emotion of fear.  An extremely negative emotion for people is the fear of potentially losing something that they already possess.  So the theory is that inducing the possibility of privilege loss and then providing information with how to avoid this problem should increase participation.

 

 

Many of these theories have been employed in one way shape or form by most of the major peer-to-peer systems on the Internet today.  Although some have been more successful than others, none of them have attempted to integrate the above theories in a way to allow the proper meshing of them.  As a result even the most successful networks have seen negative side effects despite their successes. 

 

So the question becomes what might be the best model for motivation in a peer-to-peer network? This very question has been posed and seemingly answered by some professors at the University of Saskatchewan.  Due to theoretical conflict between certain theories, they proposed a model that is rooted in only two of the theories listed above.  They are the reciprocation theory and the discrete emotion of fear.  In sticking with the reciprocation theory they look to develop a reward system that is appropriate to the time and resource cost to the member.  Following up this reward system is the fear of losing those rewards and the social status that have been earned by their participation.  As a result the theory is that this system will feed itself from both ends and create a snowball effect in their peer-to-peer network.  So the team did just this... 

 

They set up a peer-to-peer network that simply rewarded the active participants in the initial launch stage allowing them to gain more services and as a result momentum in the beginning.  A number of weeks into the development of the network they instituted a tiered membership that allowed active participants to gain incrementally and progressively better services.  Along with this they were able to gain publicly visible social status within the network through the user interface.  This instituted an inherently existent fear-based module rooted in the potential for the individuals losing the services and social status they've already earned.

 

What you think happened almost immediately upon implementation of this hierarchical reward system?  If you guessed that it exploded, your correct.  The increase in contributions by the members increased by approximately 70% the week that this was instituted.  Along with this, nearly half of the users began to check their accounts weekly to make sure their contributions were did not drop so as to retain privileges.  Of all the participants actually 58% communicated that they tried to upgrade their memberships and out of the members who were checking their memberships on a weekly basis, 93% of them were working to upgrade their memberships.  The results speak for themselves... 

 

So what does this mean for you when I?  In setting up a Blog or a forum we are in effect developing a mini peer-to-peer network.  In an ideal scenario we are providing a service by communicating useful information to the people and in return we are hoping to get logins and communication back from other people. How can you implement the conceptual frame work from the model above to your Blog? The model proposed can and should be used as a determining factor in how you're going to set up and run your Blog if you are looking to maximize it’s effectiveness.

David J. Parnell