Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Creating Understanding: How Communicating Aligns Minds

Creating Understanding: How Communicating Aligns Minds

Gasiorek, Jessica
Aune, R. Kelly
Giles, Howard

Paperback

Series: Language as Social Action, Book 23

General Sociology

ISBN10: 1433168154
ISBN13: 9781433168154
Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publi
Published: Dec 14 2020
Pages: 172
Weight: 0.56
Height: 0.40 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Winner of the Jake Harwood Outstanding Book Award (2022).

What, exactly, is understanding? And how do people create, maintain, and manipulate states of understanding via communication? This book addresses these questions, drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship in cognitive science, communication, psychology, and pragmatics. Rejecting classic descriptions of communication as sending and receiving messages, this book proposes a novel perspective that depicts communication as a process in which interactants construct, test, and refine mental modes of a joint experience on the basis of the meme states (mental representations) activated by stimuli in social interactions. It explains how this process, when successful, results in interactants' mental models aligning, or becoming entrained--in other words, in creating a state of understanding. This framework is grounded in a set of foundational observations about evolved human cognition that highlight people's intrinsic social orientation, predisposition toward efficiency, and use of predictive interference-making. These principles are also used to explain how codified systems (codes) emerge in extended or repeated interactions in which people endeavor to create understanding. Integrating and synthesizing research across disciplines, this book offers communication scholars and students a theoretical framework that will transform the way they see understanding, communication, and social connection.

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