Minimize Pseudo-Conflict with these Three Strategies

Pseudo-conflict is when two people have a perceived misunderstanding about the compatibility of their goals but, in fact, their goals are quite compatible. So how do you minimize this?

1. Check your perceptions by asking for clarification of what you don't understand.
2. Listen between the lines by looking for puzzled or quizzical facial expressions of your partner.
3. Establish a supportive rather than defensive climate for conversation by avoiding calculating, controlling, using manipulative strategies, being aloof, acting superior or rigidly asserting that you're always right.

Have you experienced pseudo-conflict? What was the outcome? And, how do you think these strategies can help?

When Conflict Becomes Personal

There is no doubt that you will experience conflict in your relationships. And you may have already faced conflict. But when it becomes personal, what do you do?

1. Try to steer the ego conflict back to simple conflict. In other words, stay focused on issues rather than personalities.
2. Make the issue a problem to be solved, not a battle to be won.
3. Write down what you want to say.
4. When things get personal, make not to reciprocate.

Now that you know four ways to redirect personal conflict back to issue conflict, can you remember a time when conflict got personal, how would have these strategies helped?

Seven Benefits of Conflict in Relationships

Believe it or not, conflict is a good thing. While this might seem counter-intuitive, there are five reasons why conflict can actually help a relationship grow.

1. Conflict helps us focus attention on problems that may need to be solved.
2. Conflict clarifies what may need to be changed.
3. Conflict focuses our attention on what is important to you and your partner.
4. Conflict helps clarify who you are and the values you hold.
5. Conflict helps you learn more about your partner.
6. Conflicts keep relationships interesting.
7. Conflict strengthens relationships by increasing your confidence that you can manage and resolve disagreements.

Which five of these benefits do you think are most important in a relationship, and why are they important?

Five Stages of Relational Escalation

There are five stages through which relationship mature. Can you identify a relationship in your life and pinpoint, based on these five stages  where that relationship may be?

1. Preinteraction awareness is the stage where we observe someone or even talk with others about the person we are attracted to without having any direct interaction. We may use passive strategies, like observing the other person, to gain information or we might use active strategies like asking other people about the person we are attracted to. 
2. Acquaintance awareness is one of the first turning points in a relationship where are might ask the other person standard questions during the first four minutes of conversation, sticking to safe and superficial topics and presenting a public self to the other person.
3. Exploration awareness is where we begin to share more in-depth information about each other. There will be little physical contact and limited amounts of time spent together. This stage can happen along with the initiation stage. Communication becomes easier in this stage and a large amount of low-risk disclosure occurs.
4. Intensification awareness is the stage where we start to depend on each other for self confirmation and engage in more risky self-disclosure. We spend more time together, increase the variety of activities we share, adopt a more personal physical distance, engage in more physical contact, and personalize language. We may start to label stages of the relationship, such as dating, or becoming one's BFF. 
5. Intimacy awareness is the final stage of relational maturity. Communication becomes highly personalized and synchronized, we become "open books" to the other. This is where you start hearing bells in your ear for women, and men begin to feel an iron ankle chain and ball being attached to their bodies. 

Are these an accurate explanation of how relationships form? Do forming relationship through computer-mediated communication follow the same path? Explain?

How Does Social Exchange Theory Explain Relationships

Social exchange theory is an economic model of human behavior that is used to explain how people arrive at decisions in a variety of social situations. The theory basically argues that people seek the greatest amount of reward with the least amount of cost when deciding whether to initiate, maintain, or end a relationship.

One dimension of this decision are the immediate rewards and costs of a relationship. Immediate rewards and costs are what we get now for being in a relationship.

Forecasted rewards and costs are based on our predictions about the potential of a relationship or its future outlook.

Cumulative rewards and costs represent the total rewards and costs accrued over the duration of the relationship. Perhaps things are going well, but maybe the relationship has had more pain and hardship overall. Or the opposite could be true. Expected rewards and costs are found in our comparison of this relationship with other relationships or our ideal of a relationship. If we have few relationships and they haven't been very good, then we have low expectations.

Think about your past and present relationships in the context of social exchange theory, do you have low or high expectations? If you have low expectations, how do you think social exchange theory can help you develop higher awareness of your relational history and prepare for a better future?

Check out: Relational Communication

Five Reasons Why People Lie

Have you ever wondered why people lie? We all do it, you know. According some researchers there are two general types of lies:

• Altruistic lying occurs when we don't want someone to be hurt. We may want to protect their self-image, like telling them they look nice when they really look like a bum. 
• Self-serving lies are designed to help us gain personally from the deception or to avoid an undesirable consequence.

While there are two broad categories of lying, there are five reasons why we lie:

1. People lie to avoid harm or loss of resources.
2. People lie to protect their self-image.
3. People lie for entertainment.
4. People lie to protect another person's resources, self-image, or safety.
5. People lie to gain tangible or intangible resources.

Okay, so now you know why we lie, can you think of any specific examples where you have lied and why you lied in the context of our discussion here? Please share them, and add anything else you might have learned about lying from your textbook.

You can read more about lying in your textbook. Check out pp. 324-325.

How Does Culture Influence Language

Do you say pop, soda, or coke? What do you call the three meals you eat each day? While these questions may semm silly at first, the power of culture influencing our language is significant. What cultural distinctions might influence langage?

There are several online resources, but you might want to start with your book. See chapter 6. But to give you a richer expeience and understand of language and culture in the context of interpersonal communication, I want to share other resources with you:

• How Language and Culture Affect the Meaning of Words
• How Culture Influences Languages

Think about how culture affects and influences language, then discuss some cultural distinctions that might influence language. Please post your comment here.

What Is Your Listening Style

 A listening style is the perferred way of making sense out of messages you receive from others. There are four different listening styles:

• People-oriented listeners will typically empathize and search for common areas of interest between them and the person with whom they are engaged. And a people-oriented listener will be more comfortable when interacting in small groups and in face-to-face conversations.
• Action-oriented listeners like information well-organized, error-free and delivered in "sound bites," or short declarative statements. While they listen, however, action-oriented listeners may be skeptical of what they hear initially, which means that they will typically second-guess the underlying motive of the message to determine whether it is true or false.
• Content-oriented listeners are comfortable listening to complex, detailed information. They are most interested in facts, details, and evidence in a message, otherwise they can become sekeptical and reject the message. They are more comfortable engaging in listening  and learning about issues, participating in arguments (debate) and are concerned with a speaker's accuracy and credibility. 
• Time-oriented listeners like messages delivered  succintly and thwy are most interested in bottom line statements and perfer bulleted talking points.

Understanding your listening style will help you communicate more effectively with others. By understand the various listening styles, you can adjust your approach to listening and gathering information. This exercise will help you do that. Here are some questions to get you started:

1. During the next 24 to 48 hours, keep a listening journal that describes the following:
2. Particular listening situations incxluding the goal, the time of day, and the content/reason for listening, and they style used.
3. After your journal is complete, discuss the listening style in which you were most comfortable?
4. When did you find you used a particular listening style?

You might find "Charting your Listening Cycle" on pp. 154 particularlly helpful.

When you have completed your journaling, please provide you feedback to this question:

What is the effect of your listening energy cycle on the type of listening you can do successfully?

Post your answers here, then let's discuss in class.

How Does Personalty Affect Your Communication Style

We talked about how self-concept and self-esteem affect how you communicate. Understanding our personality type, in other words, specific characteristics, traits and attributes of our personality can also teach us in several ways, such as, how we how we perceive the world and make decisions.

Here's you assignment, if you so choose to take it:

Take the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and discuss how your personality affects the way you communicate, then discuss how knowing the attributes of your personality can help you more effectively communicate with others.

These are link to help you research your personality:

• High-Level Description of the Sixteen Personality Types 
• Type Logic   
• Similar Minds
  

How Do We Communicate in Chat Rooms

Interpersonal communication is governed by rules, and these rules can be extended to social media as well. I'd like to collect your thoughts and observations of a particular chat room. Here's what you need to do:

• Find an appropriate chat room you feel comfortable entering.
• Log into the chat room.
• Observe the chat room activity and look for the evidence of social rules governing the environment and take note of the.
• Enter the conversation once you feel comfortable that you're aware of the social rules.
• After some time of interaction with those in the chat room, create an opportunity to break the rules you observed.  What happened? 
• Write about your experience in the comment section.