Write a note on Psychological barriers to communication.
PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS
These barriers are categorized in the way which effects the communication
psychologically. In other words the psychological barriers effects the
communication in three ways.
Emotionally.
Perceptually.
Selectivity.
Now we will discuss the given three psychological barriers.
i) Emotional Barriers:
As we know that emotions directly effects the communication. In other words the
success and failure of the communication also depends upon the emotions of a
communicator. The more the emotions of a communicator are devoted to the
communication, the more the more the communication would be effective and
helps in achieving the goal for the specific purpose.
This rule does not only applies on the communicator, but the on the
audience aswell. It depends on the audience’s response to the communication. If
the emotions of the audience are attached with the communicator the
communication would be successful but it goes fail in the in the opposite case. Its
psychology of a man that for effective communication the two individuals must be
emotionally attached, if this is not so, the communication will be ineffective so if it
there is one way communication or the communication between two or more than
two individuals, emotional attachment must be there to make the communication
effective. Now we will have some of the examples of emotional psychological
barriers.
Lets take an example of a political gathering, a politician standing and delivering
his speech to the audience who support his party, now among those people there
must be some people of the other political party, the people of his own party
would be at high morale during his speech and become hyper at his each word,
this is because they are emotionally attached to that leader, but the other hand
the people of his opposing party does not give a deaf ear to his words and take
them as a drama, so the communication to those people goes ineffective
between them while it will be effective between him and his party followers. Now
lets take an example of two brothers Ali and Abbas. Ali is elder than Abbas. Ali
forbade Abbas to meet his bad friends.
Emotions
Now there are two ways of saying so to his brother the one is the polite way and
the other is the harsh way. Now it depends on the emotional understanding of
those two brothers that which way would be accepted by Ali. But the way he
accept the orders of his elder brother is the effective way of their
communication. And there would be no emotional barrier among them and the
communication will be successful but in the other case if Abbas does not bears
the strictness of Ali he will refuse his orders and will continue with his doings, so
in this way there is a barrier in communication between them. These were some
of the examples of emotional psychological barriers. So there should be some
steps taken to avoid these barriers in communication.
ii) Perceptual Barriers:
These are the second type of psychological barriers. As people have different
and complex personalities and they belongs to different backgrounds, therefore,
they perceive things differently according to their own point of view which causes
hurdles in the way of communication sometimes the communication goes fail due
to these miss perceptions. There are further three cases of failure of
communication due to wrong perception. It also depends upon the frame of
reference of one’s mind which basically controls the perception of an individual.
The perceptual process
In first case, people perceive thinks differently sometimes they think totally
opposite to the thing which is being under discussion or being delivered to them.
Lets take an example of two friends discussing a matter on patriotism for their
country, the one says our country should be disputed by America so that there
would be some betterment in education, laws and jobs etc. on the other hand the
other friend taking it wrong and says “you are a rebel”, so this is the way the
second friend assumed according to his perception which goes wrong and the
discussion ends without any conclusion due to the miss perception of the second
friend, which is a psychological barrier existed between them hence the second
case of perceptual barrier takes place and the communication fails.
In second and third cases people sometimes fill in the information without
checking accuracy, for example, I am writing this article there might be some
points which I couldn’t understood exactly as they were taught to me but I am still
filling in the information according to my own experience, this is what I perceive
from the lecture delivered to me in the class. Hence perceptual barriers are due
to the different ideas and concept of people which they acquired from their lives
and experiences, so there should not be any wrong perception for achieving the
goal of communication.
Example: Here is an example of a complicated sign board which may cause a wrong perception to many of the travelers driving on the road.
iii) Selectivity:
A final set of psychological barriers exists because of competition for
peoples’ time and attention- "The selectivity block". we all are
bombarded with information. Sources, such as newspapers,
magazines, technical journals, reports, memo, letters, meetings, radio,
television, videotapes, computer printouts, terminal displays and
electronic mail. We simply cannot absorb all this information flowing
our way, so, we must screen it selectively.
One factor in the way people select is timing. Some messages that
may be effective at one time might be blocked or even detrimental at
another time. For example a letter of congratulation or condolence
sent out immediately after the event is more effective than one sent
later. A meeting about accident prevention gets more attention if it
follows an accident than if it precedes one. A report turned in late may
have a highly negative effect if your supervisor has been anxiously
awaiting it or may have little effect if he is busy with other matters. A
rush typing assignment may affect your secretary differently at 4:45
pm than at 9:30 am.
All of the information from these sources could not be absorbed as it is delivered to us.
Another selection factor is context. In one research experiment,
subjects were shown two identical pictures of a rail road train in a
station. One captioned ‘parting’ and the other ‘arriving’ on a scale
ranging from ‘sad’ to ‘happy’ the subjects tended towards ‘sad’ for the
first and ‘happy’ for the second. The subjects received the same data
but – the suggestiveness of the context- the captions influenced the
way they perceived the picture. In the business world, you might be
more apt to read an article if it appears in a magazine you respect or a
report if it is accompanied by a cover memo from your boss. Similarly,
you might tend to pay more attention to a presentation if it is held in a
boardroom or a well appointed conference room, or listen more
attentively to a sales talk in an elegant restaurant or hotel.
One more aspect of selectively, we tend to remember the extremes
and forget the middle ground. Think about comments you may have
gotten from a teacher, a coach or a boss. Most people remember that
most positive and the most negative and forget the neutral or middle
ground comments. Therefore, your communication may be blocked or
‘selected out’ simply because it does not contain startling positive or
negative news.
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