Expectancy Violations Theory: Summary

Expectancy Violations Theory or EVT is a theory developed by Judee Burgoon which seeks to explain factors in our communication with other people that leads us to decide how we will react.

EVT is rooted on the study of proxemics which according to Edward Hall is the study of people's use of space as a special elaboration of culture.

EVT is composed of three main concepts which are all interconnected to form one theory-EVT.

Expectancy

Expectancy is defined as what we expect the person we are conversing with, to do. For example if I am a VIP, I would expect that people will respect me therefore, they will stay at a respectable distance away from me. Expectancy are determined by several factors:1)By context which is the cultural conversational norm.2)by relationship which is how open you are to the person you are conversing with.3)By Communicator Characteristics which can refer to the characteristics of the person whom you are conversing with and which causes you to like the person therefore resulting in better communication.

Violation Valence

When you're expectancy of a person is not satisfied and what your conversation partner did was deviant from what you expected, we call that a violation; which leads us to Violation Valence. Violation Valence or VV(my personal abbreviation) refers to how we measure the degree of the violation committed. VV can be positive or negative. For example, a person behaved differently from how you expected him to behave. For example he may have rubbed his palm across your face, a gesture you didn't expect from him, therefore, he committed a violation. Now you determine whether you liked what he did or not-which can give you a positive or negative VV, after which you can now decide how to react.

However, not all violations are easily decoded and according to EVT, when the meaning of an action is unclear, we interpret the violation according to how the violator can affect our lives.

Communicator Reward Valence

Do you ever wonder why even if we are roughhoused by some people, we don't get back at them? One reason would be because we think that we can achieve more if we don't offend them. This is illustrated by the Communicator Reward Valence or CRV(my own abbreviation). CRV presents that we do a mental audit of our likely gains and losses if we react in a certain way. If we think that gains would outweigh the losses, then we react in a way that is appealing to the person we are communicating with. This explains why for example, our boss scolds us yet we remain passive because we know that by being so, we can retain our jobs and if we don't, we get fired.


These concepts make up the theory of EVT and these can help us in our daily socializing. For example, I learned that the more you know a person. the more you can afford to commit violations without offending the person. However, if we don't know a person that well yet, then we better adhere to the social norms set by society.

Symbolic Interactionism: Summary

George Herbert Meade was the first who proposed the ideas that form up the theory of Symbolic Interationism. However it was a student of his, Herbert Blumer who gathered all his ideas together into a book. It was also Herbert Blumer who coined the term Symbolic Interationism which I will term SI for this blog.

There are three core principles of SI: The construction of Social Reality, The Construction of Meaning, and The Process of taking the role of the Other. These three core principles of SI deal with meaning, language, and thought respectively. Let’s talk about these principles one by one.

The Construction of Social Reality: Meaning

Blumer bases this principle on the premise that humans act toward people or things on the basis of the meanings they assign to those people or things. A person who sees another person in a certain light will act accordingly.
As an example, let me give this quote I received on text messaging; “how do you define a trashcan? To a toddler, it’s just a shelf for his ugly toys; to a pupil, it’s where she keeps her bad test papers; to a teenager; it’s a basketcase for the letters of an ex-lover; but to a street child, it’s the source of food for everyday living.” A trashcan is a single object, yet it can have several definitions according to different people; and to each of these people, their definition of the trashcan is the true definition of the trashcan. Furthermore, a collection of these definitions make up a person’s reality.

The Source of Meaning: Language

This simply suggests that meaning is formed by social interaction of individuals. As I mentioned in the pervious concept, each person has his own perception of certain things, objects etc. By interaction with another person, one can then see how the other person perceives a certain object, thing etc. For example, I define the word chair as a thing to sit on. Then I find out that my family also perceives the word chair in the same way. After that I find out, that the entire population of Davao City perceives the word chair in the same way that I do. Therefore, the word chair will be universally accepted in Davao city as referring to something which we sit on. In connection to this, if a collection of people perceive one object in the same way, then this perception becomes reality to them.
As Blumer stated, Meaning is negotiated through the use of language-hence the term symbolic interactionism.

The Process of Taking the Role of the Other: Thought

Blumer’s third premise is that an individual’s interpretation of symbols is modified by is or her own thought processes. Interactionists claim that thinking is like having an inner conversation otherwise called minding. Humans have the ability to think things through and therefore, they derive meanings from what they think.
However, we must have language before we can think coherently therefore; we must learn to interact symbolically. Furthermore, according to Griffin’s book, we must have social stimulation and exposure so that we can learn to grasp abstract symbols that we use in minding.

Mead also introduced the concept of taking the role of the other. Humans take the viewpoint of another person to better understand things. It is better understood as standing in another person’s shoes.

The Self

The three concepts stated above are all interconnected, and together they form the concept of self. Mead argues that there are two aspects of self. The me and the I. The I is instinctive. It is spontaneous, unrehearsed and impulsive. It is the part of self that causes us to do something even though we can’t provide a good explanation why we did it. In contrast, the me is the image of self seen in the looking-glass-which is a person’s image as seen through other people’s eyes. The me is therefore our image according to how other people sees us. The me conforms to society and its rules. The community forms the me to suit it’s structure.

How to lose a Guy in 10 days: Analysis

The movie How to lose a Guy in 10 days depicts the journey of a woman who wanted to make a guy fall in love with her then make him ditch her. The twist of the story is that the guy whom she picked had the task of making her fall in love with him. In the end though, they both fell in love with each other.

Let us analyze the movie by the core concepts of EVT.


The movie's storyline is heavy with EVT-inspired scenes. In their first meeting, the guy expects the girl to be cool because she knew how to create the image. She didn't immediately invade his private space, yet she portrayed an image that she also liked the guy. However as the week progressed, she began invading his space more and more and also portrayed out-of-context behavior, therefore leading to our next topic, violation valence.

As the girl tries to make the guy ditch her, she displays behavior that has great negative value of violation valence. By applying EVT, we can see that the behavior she displays-which is commonly regarded as bad behavior in American society-has great negative violation valence. If the guy have not been tasked to make her fall in love with him, he would have ditched her completely because of she was violating every rule in the how-to-get-a-guy book.

Communication reward valence now comes into the picture. The guy doesn't want to ditch the girl even if she was committing a lot of social violations because he knew that he had more to gain if he kept her and make her fall in love with him. As the prospect of the gains he would receive from keeping her far outweighs the losses he would get, he tried very hard not to ditch her.

Is Parsimony always a good thing?

First let us define parsimony. In Griffin's book The Idea of theory, he defined parsimony as the simplest explanation of a given phenomenon.(Griffin 41-42).

Let us then go to the main question. Is parsimony always a good thing? Yes, I believe so. You may ask, why? Because parsimony enables the theory presented to be easily understood by anyone who reads it.

First and foremost, you construct a theory to explain certain things/events that occur here in our planet. From the key word “explain”, we can gather that the aim of the theory is to lay out in plain words how and why the thing/event happened. If you use intricate explanations with a lot of “looping” sentences, it might cause the reader to misunderstand the meaning of the message. If this happens, your main objective-which is for your theory to be understood by all- will fail. For example, you construct a theory that seeks to explain how the sun refuses to shine. (NOTE: the theory I will present is NOT based on facts but is purely of my own imagination.)

e.g. Chapter 1:Why the sun refuses to shine. (complex version)

*example start*

As we all know the sun is made up of highly volatile, extremely unpredictable gases that may bubble up and shoot out of its interior core in highly minute particles that expand as the outer exterior of the sun shines down on them. This shooting out of the particles, which we may call as sundance, causes the sun to lighten up therefore causing the shooting rays to reach the earth's orbit within a tenth of a millimiter. This causes extreme fragmentations of light rays that shine as they are reflected by the ozone layer.

However in certain subjective instances, master gases within the interior core of the sun clamp down on the pores that open to its outer surface. This prevents the other gases from bubbling up and shooting out of its core. This phenomena is termed sundays. In the occasion that this event occurs, the interior gases cannot reach the outer surface of the sun therefore stopping the whole process of producing light.

*example end*

The reader of this “theory” would probably be like, “uhhhh, can you say that again?”

Second, one might argue that certain theories require intricate explanations to fully and effectively present their theory. However, there is what I call complex simplicity and unneeded complexity. By complex simplicity, I only mean that though the theory might require an intricate explanation, there is a way to strip down the theory to its essentials and use simple words to explain. There is no use to use scientific words that only the scientific community will understand. Moreover, if there is a real need need to use these words, a simple explanation of the term could clear everything up. By unneeded complexity, I mean using high words even though they are unneeded therefore causing to theory to be more complex than it should be.

With these things presented, I can conclude that yes, parsimony is always a good thing.

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Bedazzled

(0.^). This was how my face looked like while I was figuring out how this blogspot thing works. You see, this is the first time I've ever to been to this kind of site and frankly, I don't know which button to click! T_T. But anyway, I think I got the hang of it now(At least I think I do cause I reached this far).=) Next thing I gotta do is figure out where the url of this blog can be found. Damn it all! I wish for a minute I was studying Com Sci(Im joking Sir Dennis!).=)