8 Verbal Dynamics in the Small Group

The most obvious yet elusive component of small group communication is the spoken word.  Words lie at the very heart of who and what people are.  Their ability to represent the world symbolically gives humans the capacity to foresee event, to reflect on past experiences, to plan, to make decisions, and to consciously control their own behavior.  Words are the tools with which people make sense of the world and share that sense with others.

Words as barriers to communication:

While words can empower people to create new realities and to influence attitudes and behaviors, they can also impede a process as well as facilitate it.  While speech communication gives individuals access to the ideas and inner worlds of other group members, it can also, intentionally or unintentionally, set up barriers to effective communication; words affect group climate.

As you grew up you can probably remember chanting “sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me.”  Even as you uttered these lines you knew you were using a lie to protect yourself.  You often unwittingly communicate in ways that threaten and make other feel defensive.  When group members feel a need to protect themselves, they shift their attention from the group’s goal to their own personal goal of self-protection, thus creating a barrier to effective group process.  Some more subtle but pervasive word barriers are bypassing, allness, and fact-inference confusion.

Bypassing:  the meanings of the words you use seem so obvious to you that you assume those words suggest the same meanings to others.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Bypassing takes place when two people assign different meanings to the same word.  Many words are open to an almost limitless number of interpretations.  Consider for example, the words love, respect, and communication.  You may know precisely what you mean when you say that the department’s account is “seriously overdrawn,” but how are others to interpret that?  How serious is “seriously”?

According to some estimates the 500 most frequently used words in the English language have over 14,000 dictionary definitions.  Considering that a dictionary definition reflects only a tiny percentage of all possible meanings for a word and that people from different cultures and with different experiences interpret words differently, it’s amazing that people can understand one another at all.

In groups the problem of bypassing is compounded by the number of people involved; the possibility for multiple misunderstandings is always present.  This points to the importance of good feedback among group members.  Feedback is any response by listeners that lets speakers know whether they have been understood accurately.  To overcome word barriers people must understand that words are subjective.  They need to check that what they understand from others is really what those others intend.

Allness: allness statements are simple but untrue generalizations.  You’ve probably heard such statements as “Women are smarter than men,” “Men can run faster than women,” and “Football players are stupid.”  These statements are convenient but they simply are not accurate.  The danger of allness statements is that you might begin to believe them and to prejudge other people unfairly based on them.  Therefore, be careful not to overgeneralize; remember that each individual is unique.

Fact-inference confusion: this problem occurs when people respond to something as if it were something they have actually observed when, in reality, it is merely a conclusion they have drawn.  While statements of fact can be made only after direct observation, inference can be made before, during, or after an occurrence – no observation is necessary.  The key distinction is that in statements of inference people can speculate about and interpret what they think occurred.  Suppose for example, you heard someone comment, “”Men are better than women at math.”  If this statement were true it would mean that all men and women were tested and that the results indicated that men are better in math than women.  The statement is, in reality, an inference.  If the speaker is summarizing research that has investigated the issue, he or she should say “Some studies have found that….” Rather than “It’s a fact that….”  The first statement more accurately describes reality than does the second.  Like bypassing and allness statements, fact-inference confusion can lead to inaccuracy and misunderstanding.