Interpersonal Communication - Listening Skills - Communication Essay

Interpersonal Communication - Listening Skills - Communication apprehension, Compliance-gaining method or Social Exhange theory and relational currencies (p. 22 - Essay Example the communicator may ignore the fact that his/her request is unrealistic or extremely dominant, so the framework is not a remedy against one’s narrow-mindness or inability to empathize, i.e. extrapolate the other person’s situation on his/her own conditions and experience the same emotions and aspirations. It is also important to understand that those techniques should be used wisely, especially when combining some of them, as the sixteen strategies are quite diverse and often incompatible with each other. The situations, described by Trenholm and Jensen include the need for reaching consent with a senior, who will be asked for providing her basement for noisy party. Another case study employs gaining compliance with a person, who will be asked for small service – feeding the communicator’s cat for two days. Another case contains the situation, when it is necessary to ask a stranger for a service, i.e. impose to him certain behavior. As one might assume, the component of persuasion is presented in all cases, so the scholars, referring to appropriate investigations, conclude that communicators are expected to build their requests in a friendly and polite manner, which would make him/her attractive to an interlocutor. The first strategy, promise, is associated with basic human needs and deriving motivations, which include the reference to mercantile human nature as a universal law. Rewards are gained as positive reinforcement which stimulates individuals to go ahead with their useful deeds. On the contrary, threat is used in order to intimidate an interlocutor, so the main precondition for this strategy is trust to the communicator, or, in some sense, asymmetric relationship between the two persons (threats are often used with children, as they perceive negative reinforcement a bit stronger than reward). Expertise is one more usable strategy, as it points to communicator’s knowledge of positive consequence, which