Mindfulness and Interpersonal Communication

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

Close examination reveals that many of the features listed above relate to expectations and their violations: expectations regarding the constituent features of messages and communicative situations; expectations about own and others' goals and plans; expectations about own and others' actions, the timing and sequencing of such actions, or both; and expectations about likely consequences of various anticipated actions. The remainder involve some kind of anticipated or actual failure--of goals, plans, or the implementations of plans, including mustering the effort to accomplish them--that in itself may also constitute a form of violated expectations. This warrants closer consideration of how expectancy violations and goal failures relate to mindfulness.

When individuals pursue their goals in social situations, fellow interactants expect them to speak and act in certain ways and not others. Of course, in none but the most formal and ritualistic social contexts do strict interaction protocols require the enactment of a singular action plan, for example, bowing in the presence of royalty. Even so, most social interaction situations entail a finite range of anticipated and socially appropriate conduct attached to them (Berger & Kellermann, 1994). Encountering an unfamiliar setting or routine, failing to bring about desired goals and subgoals, having completion of a planned course of action thwarted, or projecting that one's intended actions may have adverse effects-all of these circumstances should make interactants more mindful about their own and others' behavior.

Considerable evidence supports this conjecture. Interviewers encountering job applicants who display hyper- or hypo-involvement find such behavior unexpected, as do patients interacting with physicians who use very aggressive language (J. K. Burgoon, 1994; M. Burgoon & J. K. Burgoon, 1990). Whether the source of expectation violations is located in goal failure (Srull & Wyer, 1986), plan failure (Berger, 1995, 1997; Berger, Knowlton, & Abrahams, 1996), or deviations from situationally determined behavioral norms (J. K. Burgoon, 1978; J. K. Burgoon, Buller et al., 1995; Cappella & Greene, 1982), these violations lead to more careful monitoring of the behavioral stream (Newtson, 1973, 1976). Consequently, people tend to become more mindful of the details of action sequences when such violations occur (J. K. Burgoon & Walther, 1990; Langer, 1978, 1989; Vallacher & Wegner, 1985).

However, the arousal and affective reactions experienced as a result of these expectancy violations may themselves become the focus of the interaction, and their management may become the object of considerable goal-directed action by participants, with concomitant reductions in attentiveness to other matters. For example, socially anxious individuals may become so self-conscious of their own inadequacies during a job interview that they are unable to marshal the cognitive resources to recover from a first probing question by an interviewer. Furthermore, when message plans fail to bring about desired goal states, individuals show a propensity to alter lower level, less abstract plan elements rather than more global plan units (Berger, 1997; Berger et al., 1996). As an illustration, if passersby are asked to provide geographic directions to someone who then says he or she doesn't understand the first rendition of the directions, rarely do the direction givers alter the proposed route during the second renditi on. Instead, they repeat the same directions but say them more slowly and louder (Berger, 1997; Berger & diBattista, 1993). Furthermore, when teaching English as a second language, even experienced teachers, who should know better, tend to talk louder when their students fail to understand them. This potentially dysfunctional response is most likely due to the fact that it would be more cognitively demanding to alter message structure and content than to change vocal amplitude and speech rate (Berger, 1995, 1997; Berger et al., 1996).