Theories About How People Construct Meaning

Chapter Seven

Symbolic Interactionism

• Rules Theory (Coordinated Management of Meaning Theory)– Barnett Pearce– Vernon Cronen

• Constructivism– George Kelly

Coordinated Management of Meaning

• “CMM is an interpretive theory that assumes human communication is rule guided and rule following. Rules theorists do not believe human behavior is strictly determined by external forces. Instead, they think that we learn broad social patterns of interpretation that are woven into cultural life, and that we use those to guide our communication” (141).

Hierarchy of Meanings

• We construct and interpret our experiences based on an incremental scale of meanings where higher levels of meaning provide the context for interpreting lower levels of meaning.

Hierarchy of Meanings

• Content: (utterance)• Speech Act: (context for the utterance)• Episode: (“routine of interaction”)• Relationships: (routine interaction with

particular others)• Autobiographies: (self concept that is

formed through communication)• Cultural Patterns: (Interpretations that are

structured by group norms)

Rules

• “Rules allow us to make sense of social interaction and guide our own communication so that we coordinate meanings with others” (145).

Rules

• Constitutive Rules– Constitutive rules help us decode the

meaning of particular actions (e.g. facial expressions, affective gestures).

– Common meanings are essential.

• Regulative Rules– Regulative rules guide our own actions by

helping us determine when and how we should interact.

Rules

• “When constitutive and regulative rules are coordinated, interaction tends to run smoothly and comfortably. That’s because the individuals agree on what various communications mean and on how to sequence their activities. But when individuals operate according to different constitutive and regulative rules, friction and misunderstandings often result” (147).

Logical Force

• Logical Force describes the compulsion we feel to act under a given social circumstance.– “The term force refers to the degree of which

we feel we must act or cannot act in particular ways. The term logical reminds us that our sense of obligation is tied to the logic of our overall hierarchy of meanings” (148).

Logical Force

• Sources of Logical Force:– Prior actions: (promises, maintenance of the

self concept)– Desired outcomes– Situational demands– Change

Strange Loops

• Strange Loops “are internal conversations by means of which individuals become trapped in destructive patterns of thinking” (149).– Addiction– Abuse

Constructivism

• Two influences– Symbolic Interactionism– Personal Construct Theory (George Kelly,

1955)

• Constructivism emphasizes the role of cognition in the create of meaning.

Schemata

• Cognitive schema are related clusters of ideas that reflect the way the brain sorts information.

Schemata

• Prototypes: “Prototypes, the broadest cognitive structures, are ideal or optimal examples of categories of people, situations, objects, and so forth” (153).

• Personal Constructs: “Personal yardsticks.” Personal constructs are bipolar, or opposite, scales of judgment” (e.g. attractive/unattractive) (153).

Schemata

• Stereotypes: Predictive generalizations.– “Stereotypes go beyond the description that

prototypes and personal constructs provide and make predictions about how a person will behave” (154).

• Scripts: Prescribed sequence of action.– “A script is a routine, or action sequence, that

we have in mind about a particular interaction” (154).

Cognitive Complexity

• “The concept of cognitive complexity refers to how elaborate or complex a person’s interpretive processes are along the three dimensions of differentiation, abstraction, and organization” (155).

Cognitive Complexity

• Differentiation: “It is measured by the number of distinct interpretations an individual uses to perceive and describe others. Presumably, more cognitively complex individuals use more constructs to interpret others than do less cognitively complex individuals” (155).

Cognitive Complexity

• Abstraction: “The dimension of cognitive complexity referred to as abstraction is the extent to which a person interprets others in terms of internal motives, personality traits, and character” (156).

• Organization: “The final facet of cognitive complexity is organization, which is the degree to which a person notices and is able to make sense of contradictory behaviors (156).

Person-Centeredness

• “A cognitively complex individual interprets others in detailed ways, distinguishes people from one another on multiple dimensions, and has insight into the psychological reasons behind specific behaviors and communication patterns” (157).