Why Human Communication Fails

human communication fails:

•Language differences. On the Internet, for example, the lingua franca is badly written and poorly understood English. Some people use it as their native language; other learned some of it from various sources. In any case, whatever you say will be interpreted in a myriad of ways, whether you use idiomatic English or not.

•Cultural differences. Whatever you assume about the recipients of your message, the wider the audience, the more of them will fail to meet your assumptions. On the Internet, this virtually guarantees you will be misunderstood. What you intend to say as a neutral matter of fact will be interpreted (by different people) as a detestable political opinion, a horrendous blasphemy, and a lovely piece of poetry.

•Personal differences. Any assumption about the prior knowledge on the subject matter fails for any reasonably large audience. Whatever you try to explain about the genetics of colors will be incomprehensible to most people, since they have a very vague idea of what "genes" are (in written communication you might just manage to distinguish them from Jeans), and "dominance" is just Greek or sex to them.

•Just having some data lost. The listener does not pay attention at a critical moment, and he misses something indispensable. In the worst, and usual, case he does not know he missed it.

Remember that the laws of statistics are against you: even if the probabilities of failures were small when taken individually (they aren't), for success you would need a situation where none of them happens. A single misunderstanding in any essential area destroys the message. If you know some arithmetics, you can see that the odds are really against you. Just take a simple example where communication can fail for twenty different reasons (which is a huge underestimate). Assuming that the probability of failure is just 0.1 for each of them (unrealistically optimistic), calculations show that you'll succeed with the probability (1-0.1) to the power 20, which is about 12%.

Things are actually much worse. The discussion above is based on a simplistic model of communication which is very popular, and often taken as self-evident. That model could be characterized as teaching by feeding: there's a teacher (someone who communicates) and a pupil (a recipient of communication), and communication is a process of transferring some information from the teacher's mind in the pupil's mind. At the extreme, this means making the pupil memorize what the teacher says or a text in a book. The difficulty of communication would then consist basically just of the noise in the line of communication.

In reality, communication is much more complicated and diffuse. Consider a simple case where someone (A) is explaining to someone else (B) how to find a particular place; and assume that they speak the same language and nothing in the environment disturbs the communication; and assume that A really knows the way. To communicate, A must convert his knowledge, which is something invisible and intangible in his mind, into words, drawings, gestures, or whatever means he is about to use. It is the visible and audible data that gets "transferred" (if it gets - remember that this is a simplified case). Then B tries to process that data and construct a mental model of what he has to do to reach the place. It would be very naïve to assume that this process is simply the reversal of the process that took place when A formulated the message.

This can be presented diagrammatically as follows:
idea in A's mind --> a formulated message (e.g. sentence) --> transfer mechanism (e.g. speech and hearing) --> idea in B's mind
Each transformation (depicted as "-->") brings its own contribution to the probability of a failure.

When communication takes place through a translation, serious additional complications are caused. Quite often translations are made incompetently or sloppily in a haste. But even the most competent and careful translator is an additional component of the chain and inevitably distorts the message more or less. Professional translators often demonstrate law 3 well. In fact, they might even think they should "improve" the message instead of doing that by accident or by necessity (e.g. the necessity of adding interpretation to the message due to lack of sufficiently indefinite words in the target language).

So it's not just a matter of components of a message being in great danger of getting corrupted - words misheard, gestures misinterpreted, sentence constructs misparsed and so on. In our simple example, even if B gets all components of the message correctly, he needs to merge them with the information he already has. If the instructions begin with "go to the bus station", he needs to know how to get there first. In the worst case, he thinks he knows that well but doesn't. If the message contains an instruction to drive straight ahead, B will be really puzzled when the road bifurcates in a Y-like manner. (It was always clear to A what driving straight ahead means there.) All messages are unavoidably incomplete: in order to be of finite length, they must presume some prior knowledge in the recipient's side. (In fact, even if your message told everything, it wouldn't help; the recipient forgets what has read as he reads forward.) Presuming means guessing, more or less. By accident, you might guess right.

But it's not just the "teacher" that guesses wrong and omits indispensable details. Quite often, and very regularly e.g. in people's cries for help on Usenet, the person who needs information formulates his question so that no meaningful answer is possible. "Please help me, my computer is broken!" And the questioner often implies a specific approach to solving his ultimate problem and asks how to solve a technical problem; it usually happens that the technical problem is unsolvable (the approach leads to a dead end), but how can anyone help when the real question hasn't even been asked?