Some Factors in Effective Communication

Abstract

To determine the number of dimensions needed to account for behaviour in an instrumental communication task, verbal descriptions of 40 Munsell colour chips were elicited from four subjects. Later these same subjects tried to identify the chips on the basis of the descriptions. Every subject served both as speaker and listener for every other subject, including himself. Coombs' non-metric multi-dimensional scaling technique was used to analyse the 16 speaker-listener pairs, rank ordered for effectiveness of communication and two, possibly three, dimensions were found: (1) listening skill ; (2) skill in describing colours, both for self and other listeners ; and (3) response similarity with other subjects, as measured either by the degree of lexical similarity in the composition of verbal descriptions or by the degree of overlap of choices made in the identification of colour chips. These results were interpreted as evidence against the existence of a generalized uni-dimensional communication skill.