Mindfulness and Interpersonal Communication

Journal of Social Issues, Spring, 2000 by Judee K. Burgoon, Charles R. Berger, Vincent R. Waldron

Judee K. Burgoon [*]

Many social problems can be traced to interpersonal communication difficulties, just as many proposed interventions to solve social ills also depend on effective interpersonal communication. This article examines three potential relationships between states of mind and social interaction followed by illustrations from research related to five exemplar social issues--developing effective programs for solving workplace communication problems, training the public to detect scams and hoaxes, reducing stereotyping and cross-cultural misunderstanding, managing interpersonal conflict, and constructing effective public health campaigns. We conclude by considering the likely inhibiting and facilitating effects of mindfulness-mindlessness on socially relevant transactions.

That seemingly "mindless" communication occurs frequently comes as no surprise to even the casual observer of human interaction. Illustrative of a remarkable capacity for humans to dissociate thought and talk are these nuggets mined from the world of work:

"We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees." (from a major provider of communications services)

"As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday and employees will receive their cards in two weeks." (from a computer software corporation)

"What I need is a list of specific unknown problems we will encounter." (from a shipping company)

One can easily imagine the adverse repercussions of such communication, especially if less trivial examples, such as communication between air traffic controllers and pilots, were substituted for these humorous ones. Although much has been written about the consequences of mindless communication (see, e.g., J. K. Burgoon & Langer, 1995; Hample, 1992; Langer, 1992), it may prove more enlightening when considering social problems to focus on the mindful end of the mindless-mindful continuum. We will therefore address how greater mindfulness can be elicited in and strategically managed through interpersonal communication, with an eye toward how such behavior can ameliorate various social ills and accrue other social benefits. Preliminary to that analysis, we first clarify our conceptualization of mindfulness within the interpersonal interaction context. We then examine the role of mindfulness with respect to social interactions organized around such practical communication goals as detecting deception in work a nd public contexts, avoiding stereotyping and other biased social information, reducing conflict and intercultural misunderstandings, and creating effective public health campaigns for AIDS prevention.

Mindfulness in the Interpersonal Communication Domain

As individuals engage in social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication channels afford them a wealth of potential information. The content, structure, and sequencing of verbal messages, as well as the paralinguistic cues, gestures, facial expressions, body movements and cues provided by the physical environment that accompany verbal messages, all afford considerable grist for social actors' comprehension and interpretative mills. It is within this highly complex interpersonal communication matrix, one in which streams of social action and individual cognitive processes intertwine and run off rapidly, that we examine mindfulness-mindlessness.

Although mindfulness is often equated with actors producing, comprehending, and interpreting verbal and nonverbal messages in a deliberate, rational fashion that reflects not only forethought but also ongoing monitoring of the discursive stream, it would be a in is construal of the concept to equate mindfulness with conscious, planful, or strategic communication and mindlessness with thoughtless or habituated activity. Langer (1989) makes clear that mindfulness refers to active and fluid information processing, sensitivity to context and multiple perspectives, and ability to draw novel distinctions. This state of mind may be operative even as habituated communication subroutines are "run off" automatically. In fact, the very capacity to engage in the kinds of semiautomatic conduct that characterizes many routine aspects of interpersonal interaction may free the cognitive resources necessary to make the dynamic, contingent, and novel mental discriminations Langer envisions.

What, then, is the relationship between people's state of mind and their social interaction? Three different relationships are possible, which we illustrate with sample social issues. First, verbal and nonverbal communication patters may signal how mindful message senders or recipients are at any given point in time. Message form or content may indicate the presence or absence of flexible, conditional, cognitively complex, and creative thought processes on the part of message producer or message recipient. In the realm of physician-patient interaction, this might be manifested in the case of the physician who prescribed suppositories for a patient who proceeded to take them orally. This exchange might be taken as evidence of the physician's mindlessness, because she failed to anticipate the various ways patients use medications and thus neglected to instruct the patient in their proper use, or it could be viewed as the patient's mindlessness, because she failed to consider the range of alternative ways in wh ich medications might be taken, or both. In general, following routine scripts for prescribing and taking medicines easily leads to inadequate specificity and mindless responding. Asking less educated patients to paraphrase their understanding of a course of treatment could constitute an opposite case of communication-as-sign-of-mindfulness.