(Mis)Understanding:




Misunderstanding might be the result of innocent assumptions, a lack of
information, or a failure to communicate explicitly.
o Misunderstandings of this nature are mostly easy to correct and are
not taken personally.
Misunderstandings in relationship conflicts – misunderstanding mixes feely
with disagreement.
o This type of misunderstanding is not so easily dismissed as an error
resulting from incomplete information.
o It often occurs despite the fact that the people are intimately familiar
with the issue and each other.
Close relationships are often the source of the most persistent and troubling
misunderstandings.
The adopted perspective emphasizes the interaction of interpersonal
perception, interpersonal communication, and interpersonal relationships.
o Perception, communication, and relationships are the same
phenomenon viewed from different angles; however, they are usually
ordered in a particular way.
The Nature of Understanding and Misunderstanding:
 Understanding is the congruence between one person’s meta-perspective
(estimate of the partner’s perspective) and the other person’s direct
perspective (what the other person actually thinks).
 Understanding is highly abstract, subject to various interpretations, and
difficult to operationalize.
o Any difficulties encountered in identifying a person’s perspective are
multiplied when considering mutual understanding.
 Understanding and related concepts have been investigated in the context of
trait patterns, self-concepts, conflict issues, communicative intentions,
feelings, and immediate thoughts.
 Understanding has many levels.
o Relationships can reflect understanding in some areas and
misunderstanding in others.
 Common use of the term understanding has a few misleading implications.
o Misunderstanding is relatively simple and unmotivated.
 Misunderstanding results from a variety of sources, some of
which are simple, whereas others are subtle and persistent.
o One sort of misunderstanding results from a lack of mutual
knowledge or a shared communication code.
 These situations could be called innocent misunderstandings
because the motivations of the parties have little to do with the
source of misunderstanding.
 Generally simple and often trivial.
o When multiple goals are in alignment, communication is
straightforward and usually leads to greater understanding.
 Egocentric and altruistic goals influence how people attend to,
process, and ignore information during interactions.
o The accuracy of understanding is an individual process.
 Interpretation is an individual process; understanding is
inherently relational.
 Direct perspectives should not be regarded as a faithful
representation of actual thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or
communicative intentions.
 Direct perspectives are filtered, distorted, strategically
reported, and otherwise translated in much the same manner
as metaperspectives as they are transformed from live
experience to accounts of that experience.
o Another misleading implication is that understanding is a benchmark
for good or effective communication.
o The relationship between understanding and satisfaction/adjustment
is complicated by two basic considerations.
 There is a need to balance multiple, often conflicting goals in
communication.
 Although some understanding is probably inherent to
effective communication, the effort to balance
competing goals inevitably leads to a degree of
censorship, obfuscation, selective interpretation, and
limited understanding, even in well-adjusted
relationships.
 There are many areas in which understanding could be
assessed.
 The association between understanding and
relationship satisfaction seems to rest on the context
and domain of understanding.
o Fondness for the partner is often associated with an inflated
expectation of agreement and unrealistically positive or optimistic
perceptions.
 These positive illusions or “benevolent misconceptions”
preserve and enhance relationship satisfaction because “reality
so often falls short of a person’s hopes.”
 “Thos who are disillusioned or unhappy with their
relationships may [in certain respects] perceive their
relationships in a realistic, even-handed, and hence, pessimistic
fashion.”
 Misunderstanding is a normal and expected consequence of
communication, and there are also instances where
misunderstanding might reduce irreconcilable conflict and
preserve needed optimism in relationships.
Interpersonal Properties of Perception:
 Because interpersonal perceptions are formed and maintained in particular
relationships, the key features of this context naturally affect their structure.
 There are at least four such features that contribute to misunderstanding:
o The biasing effects of familiarity and intimacy.
o Inherent and strategic ambiguity in communication.
o The tendency to regard ambiguous inferences with certainty.
o Narrative and rhetorical influences on interpersonal perceptions.
 Familiarity and Bias:
o Some of the difficulties involved in understanding another person are
situational, the most apparent difficulty being a lack of familiarity,
mutual knowledge, experiential background, or shared vocabulary.
o Misunderstandings that result from a lack of familiarity are common
with strangers.
o With increased familiarity and closeness, there is an increase in the
amount of information one has about another person, which should
facilitate understanding.
o Friends develop an intersubjective meaning context, in which they
draw on shared memories of previous events to anticipate the other’s
thoughts.
 Friends also develop more complex and integrated knowledge
structures that facilitate retrieval and learning of information
about the other.
 Ambiguity:
o Another factor contributing to misunderstanding in close
relationships is the ambiguity of interpersonal communication.
o This emphasis neglects the more subtle and difficult aspects of
communication.
o Communication is sometimes viewed as a mechanical process of
transplanting ideas from the head of one person to another using
words.
o “An inferential game in which individuals do their best to make sense
of sketchy patterns of sights, sounds, and markings on paper.”
o Communication achieves only partial success.
 All instances of communication are potentially problematic
because explicit codes, such as language, are incomplete.
o Several considerations further complicate interpretations:
 A great variety of linguistic expressions may perform a given
illocutionary or relationship act.
 Speech acts are often expressed indirectly.
 Relationship-level meaning is mostly implicit and analogic and
is not readily translatable into words.
o Strategic ambiguity in communication reflects the multiple goals of
individuals in interactions.


o Ambiguity invites selectivity.
 The more ambiguous the message, the less constrained the
listener is in furnishing an interpretation.
o The impact of explicit communication on understanding is complex
and is mediated partly by the ambiguity of the referent.
Certainty:
o The significance of ambiguity in communication is magnified by a
companion phenomenon, which is the tendency of perceivers to give
little self-reflective attention to sources of ambiguity and bias.
 People routinely make strong inferences about others in
ambiguous circumstances, with little acknowledgment of their
perceptions as inferences.
 Inferences about communication are insulated from
subsequence re-evaluation and they elicit stronger reactions
because they are not seen as inferences at all, but as objective
observations.
 Certainty, predictability, and understanding are expected in
close relationships, so people are even more likely to regard
their inferences with certainty in this context.
o The characteristics of interpersonal communication contribute to the
insensitivity often shown toward ambiguity and bias.
 Even simple exchanges require numerous coordinated
decisions in real time.
 The complexity of communication virtually requires an
unquestioning stance toward routine inference, because it is
not possible to consciously attend to more than a tiny
percentage of the inferences and decisions involved in
interpersonal communication without constant disruptions
and digressions in the flow of conversation.
o All communication requires intentionality attributions because formal
coding rules alone are not sufficient to determine a speaker’s
meaning.
o A lack of feedback regarding the occurrence of misunderstanding.
 People do not seek complete understanding of others – they
seek a partial understanding that is adequate for their own
interaction goals.
o The tendency to regard communication with certainty is not
problematic in and of itself.
 It becomes problematic in certain contexts.
 The same tendencies that generally provide a functional basis
for managing the complexity of interaction most of the time
become maladaptive at other times because they short circuit
the formation of more flexible and reflective communication
strategies.
Narrative and Rhetorical Properties of Perception:
o Perceptions reflect the goals and requirements of particular
communication episodes.
 Interpersonal perceptions are not passive, detached
observations, but rather accounts that are constructed to
manage and cope with a complex and involving stimulus.
 Communication helps to shape interpersonal perception.
o Particular types of communication episodes are expected to
encourage or inhibit understanding.
 Communication reinforces divergent thinking.
o In order to engage and hold the listener’s attention, a story should be
both simple and dramatic.
 In order to receive the listener’s approval, a story should be
plausible.
o The joint rendering of accounts increases the likelihood of mutual
understanding by making the elements explicit.
 The difficulty is that individual narratives are often hard to
reconcile, so jointly authored accounts can be fragmented and
incoherent.
o Interpersonal argument:
 In some respects, arguments increase understanding in the
same manner as joint storytelling.
 Construction and rehearsal of arguments leads to a more
extreme and one-sided perception of relationship issues.
 Reflects the general tendency to make self-serving
attributions when self-esteem is threatened.
 Rhetorical influences on interpersonal perception, which are
cognitive and communicative demands of the interpersonal
setting in which arguments occur.
o Perspective-taking ability may increase an individual’s persuasive
competence.
 The cognitive demands of communications during argument
limit one’s ability to take the perspective of others.
 Perspective taking requires temporary suppression of one’s
own perspective, which is especially difficult in a stressful and
cognitively demanding environment.
o Considerable mulling often takes place as a carryover from previous
arguments and as an effort to bolster one’s position in anticipation of
future episodes.
 Mulling often has the effect of making perspectives on conflict
more extreme, particularly when people anticipate a future
interaction in which they primarily convey rather than receive
information.
o When an argument ensues with little objective provocation and
escalates rapidly, this is a sign that one of both parties have previously
been carrying on the argument internally.
Misunderstanding Relationship Conflicts:
 Conflicts are nearly always seen differently from the perspectives of different
parties.
 Relationship conflicts are often one-sided affairs, in which the parties neither
participate in the same issues nor observe the same sequence of events.
 Characteristics of the communicative context help to account for
misunderstanding and selectivity of interpersonal perception.
o Ambiguity, confusion, and disorganization are important, basic
features of relationship conflicts.
 The Studies:
o There seem to be three main trends in the online perceptions of
communication in these studies, which help to account for
misunderstanding of relationship conflicts.
 Actor-partner differences in the way communicative intentions
are assigned.
 Selective monitoring of different elements of the
communication process.
 Limited complexity of thoughts associated with
communication.
 Attributing Communicative Intentions:
o Attributions of blame or responsibility were implied by the
disparaging tone of other inferences.
o The spouses in physically aggressive marriages attributed more
avoidance to their partner, less avoidance to self, and more
constructive engagement to self, when compared with the
nonaggressive spouses.
 Selective Monitoring of Communication:
o Misunderstanding in relationship conflicts often seems to result from
differential monitoring of the stimulus field.
 People are usually not thinking about the same thing at the
same time, so they assign meaning to the behavioral stream
using different constructs.
 Direct perspectives and metaperspectives are simply
irrelevant to one another.
o Differential monitoring of content and relationship aspects of
communication.
 Complexity of Inferences About Communication:
o Although selective attention in communication is unavoidable, it is
possible to calibrate and adjust for differences in perception by
shifting to a higher metalevel by anticipating how the partner is
processing the interaction.
o Spontaneous interpersonal perceptions are often framed with
certainty and show little self-reflective attention to potential sources
of bias.
o Direct perspectives generally appeared more complex than
metaperspectives.
 Even when there was understanding, metaperspectives were
often stripped down by comparison with direct perspectives.
o The greater elaboration of direct perspectives reflects the perceiver’s
efforts at encoding arguments.
 Metaperspectives often convey the general sentiments of
others, but omit contextualizing information, such as the
partner’s rationale for his or her direct perspective.
 The omitted information relates to the partner’s selfjustifications or persuasive arguments, but not to the
perceiver’s own goals.
 Although in most cases direct perspectives appear more
complex than metaperspectives, there appear to be frequent
exceptions in parent-adolescent relationships.
o Family members appear to use their own direct perspective as a basis
for understanding the perspective of others, either by assimilation or
contrast.
 There may be a generational basis to projection and contrast
tendencies in family interactions.
 Generational and developmental differences between parents
and adolescents make this a particularly confusing and difficult
context of interpersonal context of interpersonal perception.
Conclusion:
 Every social situation involves many suppositions about what other people
think, feel, know, expect, and intend.
 There is an ironic contrast between the seeming transparency and great
difficulty sometimes associated with communication, particularly in close
relationships.
 Because language has a common surface and private base, it is both very easy
and very difficult for people to understand one another.
 We are used to thinking about misunderstanding in a certain way – as a
temporary problem that occurs particularly in unfamiliar situation where we
lack the basic implements of understanding, such as mutual knowledge,
common background or a shared code.
o Misunderstanding is more appropriately seen as a normal state that
occurs in varying ways and degrees in all communicative situations.
 Several features of the interpersonal context of perception help to explain the
persistence of misunderstanding in close relationships.
o Familiarity increases knowledge of another person, but erodes
objectivity.
o Communication is characterized by multiple goals and levels of
meaning.
These complexities account for the inherent and strategic
ambiguity of communication, which is particularly felt in the
case of relationship conflicts.
 The complexity of issues and confusing structure of
relationship conflicts invite even greater selectivity of
inference.
o The complexity of online communication requires an unquestioning
stance toward most inferences.
 This normative tendency is frequently extended to contexts
where it is non-adaptive.
o Interpersonal perceptions are simplified and sharpened in response
to narrative and rhetorical goals in communication.
 In relationship conflicts, individuals may interpret one
another’s communicative behavior based on separate but
interdependent narratives.
 Metaperspectives are also stripped down in a manner that
serves that perceiver’s efforts at encoding arguments.
The persistence of misunderstanding in close relationships relates to the
complexity and ambiguity of interpersonal communication on the one hand
and the certainty and simplicity of most interpersonal perception on the
other.

