Communication Accommodation Theory

Formulated by Howard Giles in the early 1970s (and refined with colleagues across different disciplines over the years), Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) attends to a fundamental dimension of human relationships, namely how people adjust their communication patterns vis-á-vis each other. More specifically, CAT lays out the conditions under which individuals will, to varying degrees, wish to reduce or emphasize the social distance between those with whom they are interacting (i.e., by accommodating or nonaccommodating, respectively). Although the theory indicates different ways of achieving these ends, converging toward or diverging away from another have been the major ones studied. CAT also attends to the social consequences, immediate as well as long term, for such convergent and divergent tactics. In what follows, the major reasons for and the outcomes of such accommodative acts are overviewed.

Accommodating or converging toward another can occur at numerous levels. Making a coffee that satisfies the known tastes of another (e.g., dark brown or very milky) would be an example, as would using cosmetics or dressing up to match someone's idiosyncratic preferences in fashion when going out together. Most research, however, has been devoted to the verbal and nonverbal parameters of communication, such as expressing opinions that are meant to approximate the political positions of others or laughing at their supposed humor. Although such acts can be consciously enacted and can require constant monitoring with [Page 266]subsequent adjustments, they can also emerge without much awareness, as is often the case in subtly shifting toward another's accent, posture, speech rate, voice quality, discursive style, and so forth. Mutual accommodations can engender a growing and positive relational identity—as it can among different aged (as well as socially disparate) relatives with respect to a strong sense of family identity.

The theory proposes that people converge toward or accommodate the communicative patterns of others the more they desire their approval, respect, cooperation, and compliance. Social power, thereby, figures prominently in CAT; organizational subordinates converge more to superordi-nates than vice versa, traditional females to males more than the converse, and so forth. Hence, tourists adopting the language, or even key words (e.g., “hello” or “thanks”), of their hosts' language, is known—certain caveats notwithstanding—to elicit favorable reactions in and valued support from many locals. In other words, accommodation is positively perceived and can even be socially effective beyond the single act; those who view their social networks as providing them an accommodative climate espouse more life satisfaction than those who experience nonaccommodative climates. Hence, a police officer who expends time in a traffic stop apparently listening to a violator's account of his or her actions and takes his or her perspective into account, interestingly, can lead to this motorist viewing all police officers more favorably. All this suggests that being seen to underaccom-modate another—for example, by staunchly maintaining and expressing one's religious ideology or blithely using English in a foreign non-Anglophone land—can be attributed negatively as self-centered, insensitive, noncaring, disrespectful, and so on. Crucially, however, CAT contends that people accommodate not necessarily where others' communication patterns actually are but where they believe them to be; stereotypes often dictate how others sound to us.

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