Interpersonal Communication Theories

Brief History

The academic study of communication is both very old, tracing its roots back to the ancient Greek philosophers, and relatively new, with most universities recognizing communication as a separate department only within the past 40 years. The study of communication as a separate discipline was strongly influenced by researchers in psychology, sociology, anthropology, English and rhetoric, and linguistics. Much of the early work by researchers interested in communication focused on mass communication issues and attitude changes. This focus on persuasion issues eventually began to wane, and researchers started to examine other areas of research. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a social scientific approach to the study of human communication emerged as communication researchers began to investigate the interactional patterns of personal relationships.

Given the diverse influences on the development of the communication field, not surprising is that the first books written about IPC were not written by communication scholars. In the 1950s, Ray Birdwhistell and Edward T. Hall, both anthropologists, published books on the interpersonal nature of nonverbal communication. In 1958, psychologist Fritz Heider's book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, examined attribution theory in close relationships. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Erving Goffman, a sociologist, published books about how communication can be used to affect perceptions and manage interactions. His book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, examined how people create roles for themselves and use communication to shape impressions. The ideas in these books, combined with the social upheaval of the 1960s, had an [Page 547]effect on Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin, and Don Jackson, who, as researchers at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, were also influenced by Gregory Bateson's interests in systems theories and his research program on understanding human nature and the role of communication in mental illness. Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson, in their 1967 book The Pragmatics of Human Communication, noted that relationships are systems within which people develop and adapt their interaction patterns. This book, now a classic of communication study, helped establish the study of communication in relationships as an important discipline.

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