John O. Greene and Jenna McNallie
9Competence knowledge
Abstract: The focus of this chapter is upon the acquired knowledge resources that a person must possess in order to communicate in an effective and appropriate manner. Following a general overview of various memory systems (e.g., declarative memory, procedural memory), a process-based approach to categorizing requisite knowledge types is introduced. More specifically, five broad process categories are developed: 1. message production and processing resources, 2. social coordination resources, 3. self-regulatory resources, 4. resources involved in the negotiation of “social reality”, and 5. resources involved in the pursuit of task goals. Within each type, further sub-categories are identified and discussed. Following this review, the chapter addresses the fact that a person may possess perfectly adequate knowledge resources, and be motivated to act in a competent fashion, and yet still behave in suboptimal ways. This observation serves to foreground processes of memory retrieval and knowledge implementation which are treated in the context of second generation action assembly theory’s characterizations of “activation” and “assembly”. A final section raises the possibility of reconsidering the entire project of surveying “competence knowledge” by treating such knowledge resources not as the source of competent social behavior, but rather as the product of social action.
Keywords: communication competence, communication effectiveness, communication skill, communication skill training, goals-plans-action (GPA) models, interpersonal skill, message production, skill acquisition
Any attempt to organize a discussion of “competence knowledge” almost certainly requires some grounding or point of contact with the more general notion of what it means to be socially or communicatively competent. Unfortunately, as survey of this volume and other treatments (e.g., Hargie 2006; Wilson and Sabee 2003) reveals, the very nature of competence is a subject of considerable dispute. Indeed, one author (Phillips 1983: 25) has likened the task of defining competence to “trying to climb a greased pole”. Resolving the various definitional difficulties and controversies surrounding the topic is neither the focus nor project of this chapter, however, and we need only establish some working conception or definition as a point of departure for what follows.
The approach here, then, is to adopt what is perhaps the most generally recognized and well-established conception of competence – that centering on twin considerations of effectiveness and appropriateness (see Rubin 1990; Segrin and Givertz 2003; Spitzberg and Cupach 1984; Wiemann 1977).1 On this view, the competent communicator is able to behave in ways that further achievement of his or her ends while adhering to situational standards of proper social conduct.
It should be clear that there are factors other than what a person “knows” that impact the effectiveness and appropriateness of his or her social behavior. Restricting the focus of this chapter to the knowledge component of social competence is significant, then, because we shall have less to say about factors such as motivation and emotion that also play important roles in people’s social conduct. Regarding the role of motivational factors, consider that an individual may have a perfectly adequate grasp of what he or she should do in some particular context, but have little inclination to actually implement or act on that knowledge. In analogous fashion, emotional forces such as heightened anger or anxiety may override a person’s best understanding of how to behave in an effective and appropriate way.
It is also important to note at the outset that, on our construal of “knowledge”, we have chosen to focus on information that an individual has acquired in the course of, and as a result of, his or her lived experiences.2 Thus, we have, as much as possible, skirted innate dispositions such as personality traits (e.g., extraversion; see Costa and McCrae 1992; self-monitoring; see Gangestad and Snyder 2000) and behavioral propensities (e.g., styles of facial expression; see Ekman and Fries-en 1975), as well as cognitive processing abilities and characteristics associated with infancy/youth (see Halford 2005) and old age (see Kemper and Hummert 1997; Salthouse 2009), even though these factors clearly bear upon the effectiveness and appropriateness of one’s communicative activities.
This being said, although it is possible to distinguish a “knowledge” component of communication competence from other factors (thus making feasible a chapter focused on the former), it is important to recognize that the various pieces into which the “competence pie” can be sliced are, in fact, interrelated, and in what follows, while adhering to our primary focus on “competence knowledge”, here and there, we will necessarily (though certainly not comprehensively) touch upon related concerns.
1The concept of “competence knowledge” and the role of long-term memory
The significance of adopting the general working definition of communication competence outlined above is that it affords a succinct way of framing the focus of this chapter. If “competence” refers to effectiveness and appropriateness, then our project becomes one of asking what knowledge a person must acquire and possess in order to communicate in an effective and appropriate fashion. This seemingly straightforward characterization, in turn, is crucial because it directly implicates issues of long-term memory systems and processes. That is, if competence knowledge is something that is possessed by individual social actors (thus giving rise to individual differences in communicative proficiency), then questions of how people “possess” (retain, store, remember) information come to the fore.
1.1Long-term memory systems
Detailed exposition of the nature of long-term memory is obviously beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is necessary that we establish a basic framework and terminology to set the stage for the discussion that follows. There are a great many models and conceptions of the nature of long-term memory (see Tulving and Craik 2000), and although these models diverge in important ways, it is still possible to identify certain conceptual conventions with which every cognitivist is conversant and that are particularly germane to the issues at hand.
To begin, long-term memory (LTM) refers to a processing system that preserves a virtually limitless store of information, of various sorts, for indefinite spans (i.e., years, decades). LTM is distinguished from working memory (or short-term memory in some treatments) – a system where very limited amount of information is held for short durations (i.e., seconds), while that information is employed in an individual’s ongoing cognitive activities (see Miyake and Shah 1999).
LTM itself comprises multiple distinct subsystems. Most important in the context of the present discussion is the distinction between the declarative and procedural memory systems. Declarative memory is commonly taken to be “knowledge that” – i.e., the “facts” (correct or incorrect) that an individual has acquired through his or her experiences (e.g., water boils at 212° F). This declarative memory system, in turn, includes semantic and episodic stores. Semantic memory is thought to encompass one’s general world knowledge (e.g., the boiling point of water, word meanings, events of human history, and so on). Episodic memory, in contrast, refers to the store of one’s personal experiences (i.e, the “episodes” of one’s life – e.g., memory of the day a teacher explained that water boils at 212° or what “civil disobedience” means, or what you were doing when you first witnessed or heard of the events of 9/11/01).
Distinct from declarative memory (i.e., “knowledge that”), procedural memory is “knowledge how” – that is, memory for how to do things like drive a car, play the piano, or articulate the phonemes and words of one’s native language. The declarative/procedural memory-system distinction is significant for several reasons. Among these are that, while declarative knowledge can be acquired “all-at-once” (e.g., someone tells you something you did not previously know), procedural knowledge is acquired over time, through implementation and refinement (e.g., one learns to play a musical instrument over a period of years). Moreover, declarative information is typically available for verbal report – i.e., one can state the things he or she has learned about the world and recount his or her own experiences. In contrast, procedural knowledge (also termed implicit or tacit knowledge) very often is lost to verbalization – and if called upon to convey that information to another, a person may be forced to rely on demonstration rather than verbal description of how to carry out some activity.
Tracing the general contours of the declarative/procedural distinction is an important first step in explicating the nature of competence knowledge, and indeed, in what follows we will see that competent communication involves the interplay of both sorts of information. Moreover, it is also the case that in carrying out any particular skilled activity a person may, at one time, rely on declarative memory, and, at another, on procedural information. That is, an individual may first learn a set of facts for carrying out a skill, and, over time, establish procedural memory representations for executing that same activity (see Greene 2003).
2Domains of competence knowledge
With an overview of basic LTM systems in place we can turn to the question of what knowledge a person needs to possess in order to communicate in an appropriate and effective manner. Clearly, the specific information, understandings, and competencies required in the conduct of people’s social lives are numerous and diverse; as a result, they resist efforts at easy definition and classification. Moreover, it would certainly be possible to arrive at any number of perfectly adequate systematic and principled conceptual schemes for organizing a discussion of the topic at hand. Here we have sought to strike a balance between breadth and parsimony: Without allowing “types” of competence knowledge to proliferate unmanageably, we have adopted a scheme that is reasonably encompassing (with no claim of exhaustiveness).3 Our approach is to focus on the processes that a person must carry out in order to communicate in a competent manner. In what follows, then, we address knowledge resources involved in: 1. message production and processing, 2. social coordination, 3. self-regulation, 4. negotiation of “social reality”, and 5. pursuit of task goals (see Table 1).
2.1Message production and processing
We begin with those knowledge resources most directly involved in fundamental processes of expression and comprehension. The most intensively scrutinized knowledge types of this sort are those related to the verbal features of human behavior where there are rich research traditions focused on the language-processing and -production competencies of both children and adults (see Gervain and Mehler 2010; Greene, in press; Miller and Eimas 1995; Samuel 2011). Examples of these language-based knowledge resources are those involved in basic processes such as discrimination of phonemes, segmenting an essentially continuous stream of speech into lexical units, mapping from speech sounds to word meanings, use of prosodic cues (e.g., patterns of stress) in message processing, utilization of syntactic rules, and so on.
But language-based knowledge resources are not restricted to those involved in message production and processing at the level of sound units, words, and clauses. Other competence knowledge allows speakers and hearers to make, and comprehend, utterances as meaningful entries into ongoing conversations. Examples of knowledge of this sort include the resources captured in Grice’s (1975) classic treatment of “conversational maxims” – the assumptions that people hold about talk that allow them to make sense of what each other is saying, especially when a comment appears to violate one or more of those assumptions. Other examples of larger scale language-based resources are those that allow people to establish “local coherence” (e.g., Hobbs 1978) – that is, to track the connections between successive utterances even when, on the surface, they share no common lexical tokens (e.g., “We got a sitter for Saturday. I’ll bring the dessert.”). And, at a still larger level, other knowledge resources permit people to extract the overall gist, or “macrostructure”, of a story or conversation (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983).
No less important than language-based cognitive resources for effective and appropriate social conduct are parallel resources involved in the production and processing of the nonverbal components of interpersonal interactions. Indeed, it is often observed that the importance of nonverbal skills may exceed those of the verbal channel, as, for example, in cross-cultural contexts, where others may be quite willing to forbear limited second-language skills, but be much less tolerant of people who “don’t know how to act”.
Like language-based resources, those pertaining to nonverbal performance (both encoding and decoding) are very wide-ranging, incorporating the sweep of traditional divisions in the realm of nonverbal “channels” of behavior (e.g., kinesics, proxemics, haptics, oculesics, etc.; see Burgoon, Guerrero, and Manusov 2011). Thus, the competent communicator possesses (at least tacit) knowledge of appropriate gestures and facial expressions, norms regarding touching, interpersonal distance, eye gaze, and so on.
The fact that language-based message resources have received comparatively greater attention should not be taken as an indication that relatively little is known about nonverbal resources and competencies. Indeed, at least five major traditions of systematic study can be seen to inform our understanding of requisite nonverbal skills (or procedural knowledge). These include programs of research on: 1. nonverbal behaviors associated with more, and less, positive social impressions (see Spitzberg and Dillard 2002), 2. children’s developmental acquisition of message encoding and decoding abilities (see Feldman and Tyler 2006), 3. efforts to teach adult populations more effective or appropriate nonverbal skills (see L’Abate and Milan 1985; Riggio 1992), as, for example, programs to address encoding deficits among psychiatric patients (see Trower, Bryant, and Argyle 1978) or training to improve deception-detection accuracy (see Frank and Feeley 2003), 4. examinations of trait-like individual differences in nonverbal encoding and decoding performance (e.g., “nonverbal expressivity”, “emotional intelligence”; see Rosenthal 1979; Salovey, Brackett, and Mayer 2004), and 5. treatments of cultural differences in nonverbal behavior and interpretation (see Matsumoto 2006).
The third type of knowledge relevant to basic processes of message production and comprehension involves what might be termed “conceptual frames” – generalized memory representations of categories or events extracted from specific experiences. Doubtless the sorts of conceptual frames most familiar to communication scholars are notions of “schemata” and “scripts” (see Kellerman and Lim 2008; Unz 2008) that have been widely invoked in the study of a variety of communication phenomena (see Roskos-Ewoldsen and Monahan 2007). But conceptual frames also encompass understandings less propositional (i.e., conceptually based, as in standard treatments of schematic representations of people, relationships, events, etc.) and more sensorimotor in nature (i.e., aspects of perceptual and bodily experiences; see Johnson 1987).
A final category of knowledge resources involved in the most fundamental dynamics of message-making and processing is “topical” or “content” knowledge – i.e., one’s command or understanding of a particular subject area (e.g., botany, cooking, Renaissance art). The basic idea here is that the more knowledgeable an individual is in some particular subject matter, the more likely it is that he or she will be better able to both produce and comprehend messages pertaining to that topic. The point would appear to be true beyond gainsaying – we would expect that, on balance, those physicians, physicists, and philosophers with the greatest grasp of their fields of study would be best equipped to discourse on relevant topics (and to follow the discourses of their peers).
Systematic examination of the nature and role of topical knowledge is perhaps most advanced in the fields of education and teacher training, where, based on Shulman’s (1986) seminal treatment, effective instruction is thought to involve the conjunction of mastery of content and pedagogical technique to produce a tripartite amalgam of “content knowledge”, “pedagogical knowledge”, and “pedagogical content knowledge” – a formulation that has been adopted by scholars in the field of communication proper (e.g., Book 1989).
A second broad category of knowledge resources includes those involved in coordinating or interweaving one’s own actions with those of his or her conversational partners. It is these fundamental regulatory activities that Wiemann (1977) identified as the sine qua non (‘without which there is nothing’) of communication competence. Individuals who possess knowledge of this sort are more likely to engage in interactions in which they feel “in sync” or “on the same page” as their interlocutors (see Greene and Herbers 2011), and, conversely, skill deficits in this domain may contribute to strained, even draining, social encounters (Finkel et al. 2006).
As with the basic building blocks involved in message production and processing discussed in the preceding section, it is possible to identify a number of specific knowledge types involved in effective and appropriate social coordination. These include knowledge of appropriate greeting and leave-taking behaviors (see Knuf 1990/1991) and the, typically tacit, command (or “understanding-in-action”) of the elegant system of rules governing conversational turn-taking, including resolution of interruptions and talk-overs (see Knapp and Hall 2010: 423–426; McLaughlin 1984).
A second group of social-coordination resources involves understandings (again, often tacit) of how to make entries into ongoing conversations that are relevant and sensible to one’s interlocutor(s). There is a well-established tradition of research in communication science and cognate disciplines bearing on the conversational activities by which people accomplish the co-construction of talk and action (i.e., studies in the “Language and Social Interaction”, or “LSI”, tradition; see Sanders, Fitch, and Pomerantz 2000), but in the main scholars working in this area have eschewed notions of individual skill, instead framing their project as an examination of jointly produced interaction sequences. Nevertheless, Sanders (2003), working within the LSI perspective, has argued that people do differ in the quality of their social-coordination performance, and hence, that individual knowledge resources regarding discursive practices are brought to bear when people interact. More specifically, his analysis gives emphasis to “responsiveness” (i.e., whether [and to what extent] an entry into the conversation is responsive to something that has come before in the interaction) and “anticipatoriness” (i.e., foresight regarding the interactional consequences of a conversational entry) as essential elements of social coordination.
2.3Self-regulation
A third category of knowledge resources are those involved in monitoring and managing one’s own actions and activities. This category is quite broad, and it can be seen to encompass both self-regulatory skills (i.e., procedural knowledge) and declarative self-referent conceptions. With respect to the former, self-regulatory procedural knowledge resources are perhaps most prominently involved in manifestations of emotional control, composure, and decorum. Doubtless the best known example of knowledge resources of this sort is found in Ekman and Fries-en’s (1975) treatment of display rules – techniques for managing expressions of emotion in socially appropriate ways. Thus, individuals may simulate an emotion that they don’t actually feel, mask a felt emotion, intensify or deintensify an emotional state, and so on.
Regulatory resources of a very different sort involve self-relevant cognitions such as self-concept, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. These (and other) self-relevant constructs are characterized by empirical associations (e.g., people who believe that they possess many positive attributes tend also to have high self-esteem), but there are conceptual distinctions that merit discussion. Self-concept refers to the entire constellation of beliefs a person might hold about his or her social roles (e.g., parent, spouse), personal attributes (e.g., hard-working, honest), and so on (see Baumeister 1998). In contrast to this very large repository of self-relevant beliefs, one’s working self-concept encompasses those particular aspects of self that are relevant and available at any particular time (see Markus and Kunda 1986). Distinct from one’s beliefs about him- or herself, self-esteem refers to a person’s overall evaluation of self (in essence, one’s valuation or liking of self). Finally, primarily rooted in the work of Albert Bandura and his associates (see Bandura 2006), self-efficacy concerns an individual’s perception of his or her ability to engage in and accomplish some task-directed pursuit.
The roles of self-relevant cognitions in guiding and shaping social conduct are numerous and far-reaching. In part, self-conceptions play a key role in determining what identity goals and ideals an individual will seek to pursue (see Gollwitzer and Wicklund 1985). In similar fashion, salient aspects of the self are prominent drivers of one’s verbal and nonverbal self-presentational behaviors (see section 2.4). Moreover, long-established lines of research show that motivations for accuracy, consistency, and enhancement of self-perceptions are involved in a wide array of social decisions and behaviors (see Baumeister 1998; Fiske and Taylor 2013).
A different set of mechanisms bearing on social competence involves self-esteem and self-efficacy. In general, people with positive self-evaluations and perceptions of personal efficacy are more likely to engage in, and persist at, challenging activities (see Carver and Scheier 1998). Beyond this, and of particular importance in the context of the current discussion, self-esteem and self-efficacy are (inversely) related to the experience of social anxiety, with its attendant performance decrements (Patterson and Ritts 1997).
Beyond memory representations underlying manifestation of decorum, composure, and control and the various types of self-relevant cognitions that bear on social conduct, there is a third body of self-regulatory knowledge resources with a long history of systematic investigation in the social and behavioral sciences. As early as 1935, Gordon Allport recognized the importance of the attitude construct for understanding human behavior, and although most conceptions of attitudes give greatest emphasis to their evaluative nature (see Eagly and Chaiken 1993), it is also the case that attitudes serve a self-regulatory function in shaping one’s behavior, particularly in the case of attitudes about how an individual should, or should not, comport him- or herself (see Ajzen 1985). Moreover, attitudes of this sort are likely to be most potent in their self-regulatory role when they are readily accessible from memory (Arpan, Rhodes, and Roskos-Ewoldsen 2007).
2.4Negotiation of “social reality”
A fourth group of knowledge resources essential to competent social interaction involves those employed in the presentation and negotiation of “social reality” – that is, the participants’ conceptions of their individual identities, their interpersonal relationship, the nature of the social situation, and so on. The idea here is that in the course of everyday interaction each participant implicitly or, sometimes, explicitly “presents” his or her view of self, of the other, of their relationship, etc. Often interactants’ respective construals of social reality will overlap to a considerable degree, but this is not necessarily the case, and where perspectives differ, communication may be problematic. As examples, a person who views her interlocutor as a peer and on equal footing may feel that the other is being “bossy” or condescending; one who sees a relationship as intimate or romantic may encounter difficulties when the other sees him simply as a friend; and problems may arise when one participant characterizes a group meeting as a “work session” and another as a “bull session”.
Of the five overarching categories of competence knowledge discussed here, this is probably the broadest (and certainly it is the most extensively studied and theorized by scholars in the field of Communication proper). This group of memory resources includes knowledge structures involved in accurate and nuanced social perception (of people, relationships, and events). As in the classic constructivist framework in Communication (see Burleson and Bodie 2008), individuals with more differentiated and sophisticated knowledge representations should presumably have an advantage when accuracy in social perception is especially germane (see Burleson and Caplan 1998).
Complementing the role of the memory representations involved in social perception (i.e., input processing) are the representations involved in behavioral production. If input-processing structures give rise to more (or less) accurate and sophisticated social perceptions, then the memory structures comprising the output system permit a person to act on those perceptions in more (or less) competent ways. On the output side of the system, then, are those knowledge resources underlying the wide range of skills and abilities pertaining to effective and appropriate self-presentation (see: Metts and Grohskopf 2003; Schlenker 2003), including verbal self-disclosures (see Tardy and Dindia 2006) and nonverbal behaviors enacted in pursuit of face and image goals (see DePaulo 1992). Other examples of identity-relevant skills involve strategies for mitigating embarrassment and other negative repercussions arising from flawed social performances (see Scott and Lyman 1968; Semin and Manstead 1983).
Beyond the individual’s own role and identity concerns, other aspects of “enactment” knowledge relevant to social-reality presentation/negotiation processes are essentially alter-centric in the sense that they involve knowledge pertaining to providing support for the “face and line” (Goffman 1967) of the other. Examples here would include conveying attentiveness/interest, encouragement, respect, and so on (see Simon 2007; Mackenzie and Wallace, 2011; Trees, Kerssen-Griep, and Hess 2009). Along these same lines, a particularly fertile area of research in the field of Communication in recent years has centered on skills in providing emotional support and comfort to another (see MacGeorge, Feng, and Burleson 2011). Beyond the knowledge resources pertaining to skill sets such as these, perhaps the most widely known and influential treatment of strategies for addressing alter-identity concerns is found in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) seminal analysis of means for remediating “face threatening acts”.
No less an element of “social reality” than each person’s construal of his or her own, and the other’s, identity, is each interactant’s construal of the nature of their interpersonal relationship. One aspect of the relationally relevant knowledge possessed by competent communicators involves “relational schemas” – i.e., memory representations of types of relationships (e.g., parent–child; roommates; romantic partners) and their various attributes, including appropriate behaviors for enacting such relationships (Andersen 1993). Moreover, because relationships are not static, people also possess “scripts” – representations of typical or expected sequences of behavior as individuals come together or grow apart (see Honeycutt and Cantrill 2001).
The discussion in the preceding paragraph gave emphasis to understandings based on relationship types and stages, but beyond knowledge related to categories and sequences, it is possible to think about relationships in terms of dimensions – continua along which one relationship can be distinguished from another (e.g., satisfying–unsatisfying; cooperative–competitive; etc.). Obviously, human relationships differ (and are perceived by their participants to differ) in countless ways. At the same time, a long tradition of research and theorizing indicates that the complexities of interpersonal relationships reflect a relatively small number of underlying dimensions (see Burgoon and Hale 1984), with continua of affiliation (including intimacy, affection, etc.) and dominance (power, status, etc.) being especially salient in the negotiation of social reality (Dillard, Solomon, and Palmer 1999). With respect to the affiliation dimension of interpersonal relationships, competence knowledge includes a grasp of how, both verbally (Andersen and Guerrero 1998) and nonverbally (see Burgoon et al. 1984; Patterson 1983), intimacy is communicated, although, as with many of the knowledge resources discussed here, such knowledge may only be implicitly possessed and used (Palmer and Simmons 1995). In similar fashion, the competent communicator possesses skills and understandings of how power/dominance is displayed and negotiated in social interaction (Dunbar and Abra 2010; Hall, Coats, and LeBeau 2005).
As previously indicated, yet another aspect of social reality involves participants’ construals of the nature of the social situation. To a considerable extent, the knowledge resources involved in recognizing situational exigencies and enacting appropriate behaviors are those pertaining to social conventions – e.g., the rules, norms, and scripts (see: Kellermann and Lim 2008; Shimanoff 1980; Yanovitzky and Rimal 2006) operative in various social settings. Thus, the competent communicator understands (at some level) the nature of the situation (e.g., class lecture, fraternity party, wedding) and is able to act in ways that are in keeping with the demands of such a social context.
Although a command of social conventions is a key element of the competent communicator’s repertoire, there is another “layer” of knowledge resources that comes into play in the presentation and negotiation of social situations (and social reality, more generally). The most sophisticated, and competent, communicators are able not simply to follow social conventions, but, in conjunction with their interlocutors, to actively construct and modify conventional standards in pursuit of their ends. This idea is clearly exemplified in the work on “message design logics” (e.g., O’Keefe 1988), which identifies three increasingly sophisticated ways of reasoning about constructing messages. Individuals employing an “expressive design logic” view social interaction as an opportunity to express their thoughts and feelings, even if doing so might be inappropriate or rude. More competent communicators, operating with a “conventional design logic”, apprehend social exchanges as “games played by rules”. Finally, and most relevant to the point being developed here, people following a “rhetorical design logic” understand interpersonal interaction as a context in which consensus (about identities, meanings, and ways of proceeding) is co-constructed by the participants.
There is yet another particularly important set of knowledge resources bearing on the negotiation of social reality that has garnered considerable attention among Communication scholars. As was noted at the outset of this section, inherent in the very idea of “presentation and negotiation of social reality” is the possibility that interlocutors’ respective construals of identities, relationships, and so on, may be at odds. In those situations, skills at managing or resolving differences in perspective may come to the fore. Among this group of knowledge resources, then, are those pertaining to: 1. assertiveness and 2. conflict management.
Assertiveness has been defined in a variety of ways (see Rakos 1991, 2006; Wilson and Gallois 1993), but generally it is taken to include behaviors such as refusing requests, expressing opinions, requests for behavior change on the part of another, and so. Consistent with the perspective sketched at the outset of this chapter, assertiveness is a learned skill rather than a personality disposition, and is often depicted as falling midway along a continuum bounded at one end by passivity (i.e., non-assertiveness) and at the other by aggressiveness – and to be superior to either of these extremes with respect to both personal and relational outcomes. At a more fine-grained level of analysis, an extensive research literature centers on the verbal and nonverbal characteristics of more and less skillful assertion and on techniques for assertiveness training (see Rakos 1991).
As with assertiveness, where perspectives regarding salient aspects of social reality are at odds, techniques for managing conflict may be particularly important components of the competent communicator’s knowledge repertoire. Intuition and experience suggest that conflict can be done “well” or “poorly”, but the literature on what counts as “skillful” conflict management is nuanced and complex, and in some cases research findings fly in the face of commonsense understandings (see Roloff and Chiles 2011). Nevertheless, it is possible to offer some very general observations about the features of behavior that tend to characterize more competent conflict interchanges (with the understanding that these will not hold in every case).
The behaviors enacted during conflict episodes lend themselves to any number of typologies and conceptual schemes, but there is some consensus (see Canary 2003) that these behaviors reflect two principal underlying dimensions: 1. direct– indirect (reflecting the degree to which one engages his or her interlocutor), and 2. cooperation–competition (reflecting the degree to which conflict behaviors are integrative versus distributive). Crossing these two dimensions yields four clusters of conflict-management behaviors: 1. direct/cooperative (e.g., sharing information, problem-solving), 2. direct/negative (e.g., blaming, threatening), 3. indirect/positive (e.g., agreeing to disagree; accepting differences), and 4. indirect/negative (e.g., stonewalling, active avoidance; see Cupach, Chapter 14).
Research generally indicates that negative, competitive conflict strategies are dysfunctional (although the impact of cooperative strategies is not so uniformly positive or potent as one might suppose; see Roloff and Chiles 2011). Thus, among the knowledge resources of competent communicators are those that allow him or her to pursue courses of action other than coercion, personal criticism, and the like. In similar fashion, the competent communicator is able to draw upon a skill repertoire (including self-regulatory resources; see Section 2.3) that provides alternatives to, or overrides, nonverbal expressions of disgust, contempt, and so on that have been shown to be particularly corrosive in interpersonal relationships (see Kelly, Fincham, and Beach 2003). Finally, research on conflict episodes in intimate relationships demonstrates that interactions in distressed or dissatisfied couples tends to be characterized by patterns of negative escalation in which exchanges become increasingly hostile (see Gottman 1994). More satisfied couples, in contrast, are able to recognize such destructive patterns and to draw upon techniques for defusing such episodes.
2.5Task pursuit
The final group of knowledge resources examined here involves those employed in pursuit of one’s instrumental objectives (e.g., to make a sale, secure assistance, borrow a cup of sugar). One subset of this category pertains to goal setting – i.e., what objectives should, or might, a person pursue in a given situation. The competent communicator is more likely to set appropriate goals, given the characteristics of his or her interlocutor, their relationship, and the nature of the social setting (see Wilson and Feng 2007). Both Wilson (e.g., 1995) and Meyer (e.g., 1997) have developed models of goal setting that draw upon common conceptions of associative network structures in LTM. In these models, individuals are assumed to have acquired memory links between features of social situations and goals appropriate to settings of that sort such that goal representations are activated when the corresponding situations are encountered.
Distinct from the goals that people set for themselves in interactions with others are the plans that they develop for achieving those goals. There has been a great deal of work devoted to explicating the nature of plans and planning, both as they relate to communication and to other domains of human activity (see Berger 1997; Greene and Graves 2007). Plans are cognitive representations of a sequence of steps for achieving some end state. They are held to vary in a number of ways, including: 1. the number of steps (and intermediate states) specified in the plan, 2. the level of detail and abstraction in which actions are represented, and 3. the specification of contingencies or alternative courses of action. Plans may be stored in LTM as relatively intact and complete entities (as in the case of the aforementioned conception of “scripts”), or they may be constructed as needed from simpler means–ends knowledge relationships held in memory. As might be expected, individuals who are able to draw upon more adequate planning resources, and who are motivated and capable of formulating plans better suited to the exigencies of the situation, enjoy an advantage in acting in an effective and appropriate manner.
Beyond the memory resources involved in goal-setting and planning are those employed in editing potential conversational moves. Consider that a person may arrive at a specification of an utterance for accomplishing his or her goals, but then, on the basis of acquired memory resources, suppress or reject that entry into the conversation because of its possible implications. Meyer’s (1997) model of message encoding mentioned above addresses precisely this aspect of talk in pursuit of interaction goals. Another prominent treatment is found in Hample and Dallinger’s work (e.g., 1987, 1990) on “cognitive editing”. They propose that the decision to enact or suppress conversational moves involves considerations of: 1. effectiveness (including concerns that a tactic is too negative to use), 2. person-centered factors (implications for each individual and their relationship), and 3. discourse competence, i.e., the truthfulness and relevance of a potential message.
3Representation of competence knowledge
To this point our discussion has centered on the types of knowledge that an individual must possess in order to behave in an effective and appropriate manner. In essence we have concerned ourselves with the question of cognitive content. Distinct from content considerations are issues of cognitive structure, i.e., how it is that competence information is represented in memory. At least four properties of memory representations require mention in this context (see Greene 1984, 2000). First, it is commonly recognized that the information utilized in the production of thought and action must be represented in a modular fashion – i.e., relatively small “packets” that permit any particular element to be flexibly employed in a variety of ways. Second, the content of these modular elements must reflect a range of levels of abstraction – some, for example, specifying sensorimotor codes for moving in a coordinated fashion and pronouncing the phonemes of one’s language, others coding rules of syntax and grammar, and still others pertaining to abstract conceptions of self, others, and “proper” social conduct. Third, while recognizing the principle of modular representation, it is also commonly held that larger configurations of memory elements may develop when those elements are repeatedly accessed and combined. These larger configurations of action specifications are thought to underlie the production of habits and routines that run off seemingly without awareness or conscious control. Finally, as a function of recency and frequency of use, memory structures are thought to vary in strength such that “stronger” elements are more readily brought to bear in one’s ongoing activities.
4Competence knowledge in use: Processes of retrieval and integration
Beyond considerations of content and representation, any treatment of “competence knowledge” must accord a place for the processes that operate over LTM structures. On one hand, functionalism as an approach to understanding human behavior requires specification of relevant processes (see Greene and Dorrance Hall 2013), and moreover, as Greene and Geddes (1993) illustrated, a person may have perfectly adequate knowledge resources, and be motivated to implement what he or she knows, and yet still behave in suboptimal ways.
Consider the depiction of competence knowledge developed to this point: The competent social actor must possess a very large store of acquired knowledge (some of it tacit, some available to verbal report), held in memory in representational systems that range in levels of abstraction. Moreover, no knowledge repository, no matter how large, could possibly suffice as a “file-drawer” from which the social actor simply retrieves a competent response. Rather, any treatment of “competence knowledge” must accommodate the fact that appropriate and effective communication requires something more than pulling up a canned response: There is no encyclopedia, or even cookbook, for what to do and say. Instead, in response to social exigencies, the competent communicator thinks, says, and does things that he or she has never thought, enacted, or witnessed before.
At minimum, then, addressing the topic of competence knowledge requires consideration of the nature of two fundamental processes. On one hand, there must be some process by which knowledge held in LTM is selectively retrieved such that appropriate memory content is more likely to come to the fore. Second, there must be some process by which elemental knowledge units, ranging across levels of abstraction, are combined, or integrated, in the production of behavior.
The best known specification of these fundamental processes of retrieval and integration in the Communication literature is that given in second generation action assembly theory (AAT2; Greene 1997; 2000). According to AAT2, the memory content employed in message production is held in “procedural records” – modular units representing associations between features of: 1. action, 2. outcomes associated with those action features, and 3. situational features that are relevant to that same action – outcome relationship (i.e., the conditions under which the action–outcome relationship tends to hold). The retrieval of particular action specifications, then, involves “activation” – where the activation level of an action feature is incremented when the individual arrives at goals that correspond to the outcomes coded in a record and situational conditions that correspond to the situational features in the record.
The upshot of the operation of the activation process is that, at any moment, a great many action features (think on the order of thousands) will be activated above their resting levels, thereby ushering in “assembly”, or the integration phase of message production. According to AAT2, assembly is essentially a process of “coalition formation” – activated action features that coincide with or complement other action features form coalitions. Those action features that do not find their way into coalitions quickly decay back to their resting levels. Most coalitions never enter consciousness, nor are they manifested in overt behavior – though neither consciousness nor overt manifestation is required for the other. In contrast to lay conceptions of human behavior where thought and action are seen to be relatively seamless and coherent (see Greene 2000), the depiction of behavioral production in AAT2 is of a chaotic, disjointed system – one whose properties are particularly relevant for understanding more (and less) competent social action.
5Competence knowledge as product
From the outset we have framed our project as a survey of what knowledge a person must acquire, possess, and in the end, be able to implement, in order to communicate in an effective and appropriate fashion. But, we would be remiss in our task if in this review we neglected mention of a very different way of apprehending the term “competence knowledge”. In essence, the treatment to this point has centered on knowledge resources as the fountainhead or ultimate source of competent social action. In contrast, one could take the term “competence knowledge” to refer to the product of effective and appropriate thought and action. On this construal, competence knowledge refers to ideational content, possessed either by an individual or group, that arises from the information-processing and message-making activities of one, or more, persons.
Most obviously, this alternative take on competence knowledge involves the information that an individual has acquired (i.e., learned) as a result of his or her skills at message reception, interpretation, and storage. Thus, relative to their less competent counterparts, more communicatively competent students are likely to acquire a more complete command of course content. Similarly, individuals with greater listening skills, person-perception skills, and so on, are more likely to acquire more, and more sophisticated, insights about their interlocutors. And, as a third example, pertaining to the output side of the information-processing system, enhanced message-production skills may allow people to formulate message-relevant ideations that would elude their less competent counterparts (see Morgan et al. 2009).
Moving beyond the individual’s knowledge and understandings, competence-knowledge-as-product also incorporates ideational content generated by a dyad or group as a result of the skills possessed by one or more of the participants. The classic example of this sort of dynamic would be the long-established tradition of research and training on group problem-solving and decision-making (see Hirokawa and Poole 1996). Here the root assumption is that communication skills will contribute to more adequate group processes and outcomes.4 A second example, of a slightly different sort, hinges on the notion that dyads or groups may collaborate not to address task-related objectives, but rather to justify or legitimate their attitudes or actions. An illustration of this type of activity is found among groups of smokers who very commonly work together to formulate rationalizations for continued smoking – and thereby assuage their concerns.
6A look to the future
As rich and diverse as research and theorizing about competence knowledge has been to date, it is no doubt the case that the breadth of work pertaining to this topic will only continue to expand. Particularly noteworthy in this regard are the implications of increasing exposure to social media on the various knowledge domains examined in this chapter. Already, tantalizing avenues of inquiry are emerging. For example, a burgeoning body of work examining Facebook exposure (time spent, number of friends) and use of other social networking sites indicates complex relationships with the sorts of self-relevant knowledge resources discussed above (e.g., Gentile et al. 2012; Kalpidou, Costin, and Morris 2011; Kim and Lee 2011). In a different vein, a study by Uhls and her associates (Uhls et al. 2014) demonstrated that, among preteens, just five days without exposure to electronic media (but in the presence of other children) significantly improved people’s ability to process nonverbal cues of emotion. It seems reasonable to expect that the continuing development, and adoption, of new technologies will be accompanied by studies of the impact of those technologies on social competence knowledge.
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