Communication Skills Theories

Disciplinary Developments

Amid the breadth and diversity of investigations of communication skill, certain key events and people stand out. Some of these concern the development of broad intellectual traditions and fields of study. For example, because skills are learned rather than innate, the scientific study of learning processes that began in the late 19th century bears directly on issues of skilled performance. The study of learning has, itself, undergone various transformations in perspective, progressing through the now familiar epochs of behaviorism (based on classical conditioning) in the early part of the 20th century, radical behaviorism (based on operant conditioning, most commonly associated with B. F. Skinner) in the middle of that century, and cognitivism during the past 50 years. Other pertinent threads are found in examinations of changes in children's cognitive abilities as reflected in the rise of developmental psychology in the 1920s and 1930s (with Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and others) and the study of child language acquisition, which began to flower in the late 1950s. In a similar way, personality psychology, as represented in pioneering work of people like Gordon Allport in the 1930s, laid the groundwork for a tradition of examining the role of individual differences in behavioral proficiency that continues to the present.

Among these broad disciplinary developments, three others are particularly relevant. Studies of social influence, group and normative forces, empathy, and so on had occupied researchers since the early 1900s, but in the years immediately following World War II, led by scholars like Kurt Lewin, social psychology entered something of a golden age that saw the development of many of the classic concepts and theories that continue to infuse that field. Most pertinent to concerns with communication skills is that in the early 1970s, a particular branch of social psychology emerged. Social cognition placed emphasis on perception of others, attributions concerning their behavior, and memory for what they said and did—with the [Page 136]attendant assumption that these processes could be systematically biased or flawed.

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