Language and Social Behavior
Robert M. Krauss and Chi-Yue Chiu
Columbia University and The University of Hong-Kong
Acknowledgments: We have benefitted from discussions with Kay Deaux, Susan
Fussell, Julian Hochberg, Ying-yi Hong, and Lois Putnam. Yihsiu Chen, E. Tory
Higgins, Robert Remez, Gün Semin, and the Handbook’s editors read and commented
on an earlier version of this chapter. The advice, comments and suggestions we have
received are gratefully acknowledged, but the authors retain responsibility for such
errors, misapprehensions and misinterpretations as remain. We also acknowledge
support during the period this chapter was written from National Science Foundation
grant SBR-93-10586, and from the University Research Council of the University of
Hong Kong (Grant #HKU 162/95H).
Note: This is a pre-editing copy of a chapter that appears in In D.
Gilbert, S. Fiske & G. Lindsey (Eds.), Handbook of social
psychology (4h ed.), Vol. 2. (pp. 41-88). Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Language and Social Behavior
Language and Social Behavior
Language pervades social life. It is the principal vehicle for the transmission of
cultural knowledge, and the primary means by which we gain access to the contents of
others’ minds. Language is implicated in most of the phenomena that lie at the core of
social psychology: attitude change, social perception, personal identity, social
interaction, intergroup bias and stereotyping, attribution, and so on. Moreover, for
social psychologists, language typically is the medium by which subjects’ responses are
elicited, and in which they respond: in social psychological research, more often than
not, language plays a role in both stimulus and response.
Just as language use pervades social life, the elements of social life constitute an
intrinsic part of the way language is used. Linguists regard language as an abstract
structure that exists independently of specific instances of usage (much as the calculus is
a logico-mathematical structure that is independent of its application to concrete
problems), but any communicative exchange is situated in a social context that
constrains the linguistic forms participants use. How these participants define the social
situation, their perceptions of what others know, think and believe, and the claims they
make about their own and others’ identities will affect the form and content of their acts
of speaking.
Although this chapter focuses on language use, rather than language structure,
the ways languages can be used are constrained by the way they are constructed,
particularly the linguistic rules that govern the permissible (i.e., grammatical) usage
forms. Language has been defined as an abstract set of principles that specify the
relations between a sequence of sounds and a sequence of meanings. As often is the
case with pithy definitions of complex terms, this one is more epigrammatic than
informative. It omits much of what is required to understand the concept, and even
considered on its own limited terms, it is technically deficient. For example, the word
sound in the definition is used in a narrow technical sense, restricted to those sounds we
identify as speech. The sound of a door slamming may express the slammer’s
exasperation eloquently, but language conveys meaning in an importantly different
fashion. Moreover, the definition of sound must be expanded to allow consideration of
languages that are not spoken, such as sign languages used by the hearing-impaired,
and written language. Finally, of course, meaning is hardly a self-defining term.
For present purposes, it may be more helpful to think about language as a set of
complex, organized systems that operate in concert. A particular act of speaking can be
examined with respect to any of these systems (G. Miller, 1975), and each level of
analysis can have significance for social behavior. For example, languages are made up
of four systems—the phonological, the morphological, the syntactic, and the
semantic—which, taken together, constitute its grammar. The phonological system is
concerned with the analysis of an acoustic signal into a sequence of speech sounds
(consonants, vowels, syllables) that are distinctive for a particular language or dialect.
Out of the bewildering variety of sounds the human vocal tract is capable of producing,
each language selects a small subset (the range is from about 11 to 80) that constitute
that language’s phonemes, or elementary units of sound. The morphological system is
concerned with the way words and meaningful subwords are constructed out of these
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phonological elements. The syntactic system is concerned with the organization of
these morphological elements into higher level units—phrases and sentences. The
semantic system is concerned with the meanings of these higher level units.
At another level of analysis, acts of speaking can be regarded as actions intended
to accomplish a specific purpose by verbal means. Looked at this way, utterances can
be thought of as speech acts that can be identified in terms of their intended
purposes—assertions, questions, requests, etc. (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969, 1985). At
first glance it might seem that the type of act an utterance represents will be given by its
grammatical sentence type, but languages are not constructed in so simple a fashion.
English, for example, has an interrogative mode for asking questions, an imperative for
issuing commands, a declarative for making assertions, and so on. However, the
grammatical form does not determine the speech act an utterance represents. "Can you
tell me the time?" (as typically used) and "Do you know how to drive a car with a stickshift?" are both in the interrogative mode, but they constitute quite different speech
acts. "Yes" might be an adequate response to the latter, but the former is intended to be
understood as a request rather than a question, and "Yes" would be a defective answer.
Considerations of this sort require a distinction be drawn between the semantic or literal
meaning of an utterance and its intended meaning. Acts of speaking typically are
imbedded in a discourse made up of a coherently related sequence of such acts.
Conversation and narratives are two types of discourse, and each has a formal
structure that constrains participants’ acts of speaking.
This chapter will focus on the role language use plays in several areas of interest
to social psychologists. It is not intended as a chapter on language per se, although it
will be necessary to consider some of the principles and mechanisms that underlie
language use in order to discuss the relevance of language to a content area. Of course,
the nature of language is far from a settled matter, and different linguistic schools
disagree quite passionately about what constitutes the essence of the uniquely human
ability to use language. In the U.S. the dominant school of linguistics derives from the
generative-transformational theory of Noam Chomsky, and this viewpoint has been a
major influence in psycholinguistics, and in cognitive psychology more generally.
However, linguistic issues of interest to social psychologists tend more often to be
addressed by specialists in pragmatics, discourse analysis or sociolinguistics than by
transformational grammarians.
The sections that follow review theory and research in eight areas of social
psychology: interpersonal communication, coverbal behavior, culture and cognition,
attitude change, interpersonal relations, intergroup perception, social identity, and
gender. Each of the sections is written as a more-or-less self contained discussion,
although the later sections will draw upon linguistic concepts introduced earlier. We
believe that an understanding of the role of language use will illuminate the social
psychologist’s understanding of several phenomena of interest. We also believe that a
clearer understanding of the social nature of the situations in which language is used
will deepen our general understanding of the principles and mechanisms that underlie
language use, an issue that will be addressed in the concluding section.
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Language and Interpersonal Communication1
Linguists often say that language and communication are not the same thing,
and certainly that is true. People can and do communicate without language, and
species that don’t use language (which include all except Homo Sapiens) seem able to
communicate adequately for their purposes. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to
minimize the difference between the kinds of communication that can be accomplished
with and without language. The utility of language as a tool for communication seems
to lend itself to grandiose and sometimes vaporous pronouncements, but it is hardly an
exaggeration to say that the social order, as it is constituted in human societies, is
predicated on the capacity for linguistic communication, and without this capacity the
nature of human social life would be radically different. If language were nothing more
than a tool for communication, it would warrant social psychologists’ interest.
In the most general sense, communication involves exchanges of
representations. Sperber and Wilson describe communication as
… a process involving two information-processing devices. One device modifies
the physical environment of the other. As a result, the second device constructs
representations similar to the representations already stored in the first device
(Sperber & Wilson, 1986, p. 1).
In human communication, the information processing devices are people, the
modifications of the environment are (typically) the perturbations of air molecules
caused by speech, and the representations are mental representations. Sperber and
Wilson’s definition focuses on the central role of representations in communication,
while leaving open the question of precisely how the representations stored in one
device come to be constructed by the second device. Krauss and Fussell (1996) have
described four conceptions of interpersonal communication: the encoding/decoding
paradigm, the intentionalist paradigm, the perspective-taking paradigm, and the dialogic
paradigm. These paradigms2 provide different characterizations of the process by
which representations are conveyed.
The Encoding/Decoding Paradigm
In the Encoding/Decoding paradigm, representations are conveyed by means of a
code—a system that maps a set of signals onto a set of significates or meanings.3
1This
section owes a great deal to Krauss and Fussell (1996, which reviews social
psychological approaches to communication in much greater detail.
2By "paradigms" we mean broad theoretical perspectives reflected in
commonalties of assumptions and emphasis in the approaches different investigators
have taken in studying communication. In the Krauss and Fussell (1996) chapter, these
were referred to as "models."
3 In the simplest kind of code (e.g., Morse code), the mapping is one-to-one (for
every signal there is one and only one meaning and for every meaning there is one and
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Existence of the code allows the representations to be transformed into signals (encoded)
that can be transmitted, which in turn are transformed back into representations
(decoded) by the information processing device to which it is directed. In human
communication, the information processing devices are people and the code is
language, which allows speakers to create linguistic representations that incorporate the
relevant features of the mental representations they want to convey. By decoding the
linguistic representation, an addressee is able to construct a mental representation that
corresponds, at least in some respects, to the speaker’s mental representation.
Common to an encoding/decoding view of communication are two
assumptions. One is implicit in the concept of a code, namely, that the meaning of a
message is fully specified by its elements. The other assumption is that communication
consists of two autonomous and independent processes—encoding and decoding. As
general principles, both assumptions are defective. Granted that language can in certain
respects be likened to a code, and that both encoding and decoding processes are
involved in communication; nevertheless, encoding and decoding do not adequately
describe what occurs in communication. The grounds for this assertion will be spelled
out in the following sections, but to note just one example, it is often the case that the
same message will be understood to mean different things in different contexts.
Without making the context (more precisely, the relevant features of the context) part
of the code, a communication model that consists simply of encoding and decoding will
have difficulty explaining how the same encoding can at different times yield different
decodings. Moreover, even when context is held constant, the same message can mean
different things to different addressees, and there is considerable evidence to indicate
that when speakers design messages they attempt to take properties of their
addressees into account (Bell, 1980; H. Clark & Murphy, 1982; Fussell & Krauss, 1989a;
Graumann, 1989; Krauss & Fussell, 1991) .
The Intentionalist Paradigm
Considerations such as these have led to a distinction between a message’s literal
and nonliteral meanings. Although the distinction is not universally accepted,4 there is
only one signal), but more complicated arrangements are possible. The term code itself
is used by linguists and others concerned with language in a variety of different ways
(cf., Bernstein, 1962, 1975; D. G. Ellis & Hamilton, 1988) . We will use the term to refer to
the general notion of a mapping system.
4 Among those concerned with language, there is a lively debate as to the utility
of the literal/figurative distinction (Gibbs, 1984; Glucksberg, 1991; Katz, 1981).
According to Gibbs, the belief that sentences have meaning apart from any context is
based on an illusion:
To speak of a sentence’s literal meaning is to already have read it in light of some
purpose, to have engaged in an interpretation. What often appears to have been
the literal meaning of a sentence is just an occasion-specific meaning where the
context is so widely shared that there doesn’t seem to be a context at all (Gibbs,
1984, p. 296; see also Fish, 1980).
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consensus that the words in a sentence and the meanings those words are understood
to convey do not bear a fixed relationship—that the communicative use of language
requires participants to go beyond the words in extracting the speaker’s intended
meaning. In the Encoding/Decoding paradigm, meanings are properties of messages,
but an alternative view is that successful communication entails the exchange of
communicative intentions. In this view, messages are simply the vehicles by which such
exchanges are accomplished.
Communicative intentions cannot be mapped onto word strings in a one-to-one
fashion, as the Encoding/Decoding paradigm portrays the process. Rather, speakers
must select from a variety of potential alternative formulations the ones that most
felicitously express the meanings they want to convey.5 As a result, for the addressee,
decoding the literal meaning of a message is only a first step in the process of
comprehension; an additional step of inference is required to derive the communicative
intention that underlies it. Approaches that focus on the role of communicative
intentions in communication reflect what will be called the Intentionalist paradigm.
Fundamental to the intentionalist paradigm are two sets of ideas that are basic to
pragmatic theory: the cooperative principle and speech act theory.
Grice’s cooperative principles and the conversational maxims. The philosopher
H.P. Grice certainly was not the first to recognize that nonliteral meanings posed a
problem for theories of language use, but he was among the first to explicate the
processes that allow speakers to convey, and addressees to identify, communicative
intentions that are expressed nonliterally. His insight that the communicative use of
language rests on a set of implicit understandings among language users has had an
important influence in both linguistics and social psychology. In a set of influential
papers, Grice (1957, 1969, 1975) argued that conversation is an intrinsically cooperative
endeavor. To communicate participants will implicitly adhere to a set of conventions,
collectively termed the "Cooperative Principle," by making their messages conform to
four general rules or maxims: quality (they should be truthful), quantity (they should be
as informative as is required, but not more informative), relation (they should be
relevant), and manner (they should be clear, brief and orderly). Listeners, Grice argued,
expect speakers to adhere to these rules, and communicators utilize this expectation
when they produce and comprehend messages. When an utterance appears to violate
one or more of these maxims, the listener may conclude that the violation was
deliberate, and that the utterance was intended to convey something other than its
literal meaning. On this basis, an utterance like "It’s nice to see someone who find this
topic so stimulating," said about a student who has fallen asleep during a lecture, will be
understood to have been ironically intended.
Speech act theory. A second line of thought that has contributed to the
Intentionalist approach stems from work in the philosophy of language on what has
come to be called speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969, 1985). Any utterance can
5"Felicitously"
here means with due regard to the broad range of factors that
constrain usage in particular situations. These factors include social norms that govern
usage in that situation, aspects of the speaker-addressee relationship, information the
addressee does and does not possess, etc.
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be thought of as constituting three rather different types of acts: a locutionary act (the
act of uttering a specific sentence with a specific conventional meaning), an illocutionary
act (the act of demanding, asserting, promising, etc. through the use of a specific
locution), and a perlocutionary act (an attempt to have a particular effect on the
addressee). Fundamental to speech act theory is the idea that a variety of different
locutions can have the same illocutionary (and perlocutionary) force. Depending on
circumstances, a speaker could perform the act of requesting another to close a door by
saying "Shut the door," "Would you mind closing the door?" "Did you forget to shut the
door?" "Can you think of any reason we should keep the door open?" "I’m having
trouble hearing you because of all the noise in the hall," "Do you feel a draft?" etc.
Although each utterance has a different literal interpretation, all could be understood in
the appropriate context as a request to close the door. The illocutionary force of an
utterance corresponds to its intended meaning. When the locutionary and illocutionary
force of an utterance (i.e., its literal and intended meaning) are the same, the result is
termed a direct speech act; when an utterance’s locutionary and illocutionary force are
different (as was the case in all but the first example), the result is termed an indirect
speech act (Searle, 1985)
In principle, theoretical models that derive from an intentionalist approach
describe both the production and interpretation of utterances, but in practice research
has focused on comprehension, and virtually no experimental work has examined the
process by which speakers draw upon their knowledge of the cooperative principle and
speech acts in formulating messages. In the area of comprehension, an important
question concerns indirect speech acts. What have been termed "three-stage models" of
comprehension describe the process as follows: First, literal sentence meaning is
determined; then, the appropriateness of this literal meaning is assessed in light of
conversational principles and the context; finally, the intended meaning is identified on
the basis of the literal meaning and conversational principles. The predictions that
follow from a three-stage model have met with only limited empirical support. Such
nonliteral forms as indirect speech acts and figurative usage (e.g., metaphor, idiom) do
not consistently take longer to comprehend than their literal versions (Gibbs, 1982,
1984, Glucksberg, 1991; Glucksberg & Keysar, 1990), and an expression’s nonliteral
(metaphorical) meaning may be activated even when it is irrelevant to the subject’s task
(Glucksberg, in press).
Schwarz, Strack and their colleagues have applied this perspective to interactions
between experimenter and subject in social psychological research, and have shown
that discrepancies between an experimenter’s intended meaning and a subject’s
interpretation can be an important, unintended determinant of the subject’s response
(Bless, Strack, & Schwarz, 1993; Schwarz, Strack, Hilton, & Naderer, 1991; Strack &
Schwarz, in press; Strack, Schwarz, & Wänke, 1991) . In one such study, (Strack et al.,
1991) questionnaire respondents were asked to respond on a rating scale to two
questions: (a) "How happy are you with your life as a whole?" (b) "How satisfied are
you with your life as a whole?" In one condition the two items were asked in
succession, while in the other they appeared in separate apparently-unrelated
questionnaires. As one would expect, responses to the two items were correlated, but
the correlation was significantly higher when the two items appeared in different
questionnaires. Strack et al. explain this apparently paradoxical result by likening the
questionnaire to a communication situation in which the respondents expect the
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experimenter’s messages to be governed by the Gricean maxims. From such a
perspective, presenting the Happiness and Satisfaction questions in the same context
would induce respondents to base their answers on the distinctive aspects of the two
content domains, thereby attenuating the correlation. As Bless et al. (1993) note, the
standardized, inflexible format of experiments and structured interviews rarely allow
for the interactive determination of intended meaning. "As a consequence, subjects are
required to rely heavily on general rules, and even subtle cues may become
informationally loaded. The information extracted from the context may often not be
intended by the experimenter" (p. 149). The significance of this problem for survey
research is addressed by Schwarz, Groves and Shuman (this volume) .
The Perspective-taking Paradigm
For the Intentionalist paradigm, messages are vehicles that convey speakers’
communicative intentions. However, people’s perspectives often differ, and recipients
may employ different interpretive contexts in constructing the communicative intention
that underlies the message. As a result, the same message can convey different
meanings to different recipients. To deal with this problem, speakers attempt to take
their addressees’ perspectives into account when they formulate messages. In this
respect, the concrete and particular form a message takes may be as much attributable
to the addressee is as it is to the speaker (cf., Krauss, 1987).
The ideas that underlie the perspective-taking paradigm have a long history in
social psychology. Well over a half-century ago, George Herbert Mead observed that
human communication was predicated on people’s capacity to anticipate how others
would respond to their behavior (Mead, 1934). They accomplish this, Mead contended,
by taking the role of the other—by viewing themselves from the other person’s
perspective. Fundamental to the notion of perspective-taking is the assumption that
people experience the world differently, and communication requires that these
differences be taken into account. As Roger Brown put it: "Effective coding requires
that the point of view of the auditor be realistically imagined" (R. Brown, 1965).
Although the issue seldom is addressed directly, perspective-taking is implicit in
the Intentionalist approach. For example, the Gricean Maxim of Quantity instructs
speakers to make their contributions as informative as is required for the purposes of
the exchange, but to be sure their contributions are not more informative than is
required. However, the informativeness of a message can be specified only with
respect to a particular addressee; a message that is inadequately informative for one
addressee might be more informative than required for another. To formulate
mes…
