Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, our architect is Cindy Gallois. Cindy Gallois is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland. She served as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and was Associate Dean from 2003 to 2007. Professor Gallois was Founding Director of the Center for Social Research and Communication after finishing her term as President of the University of Queensland's academic board. Her research focuses on intergroup language and communication, especially in health, organizational and intercultural contexts. She has published more than 200 articles, chapters and books on these topics, as well as supervising more than 40 doctoral students in psychology, health, communication, and related disciplines. Over the past 20 years, she has contributed to the development and extension of Communication Accommodation Theory, the leading theory of intergroup communication. Today our architect is going to be interviewed by Bernadette Watson, a professor of intergroup health communication at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. And here is Bernadette Watson.
Hello, everyone. My name is Bernadette Watson. I am thrilled to be involved in this ICA initiative called Architects of Communication Scholarship. It is my great pleasure to introduce and interview Emeritus Professor Cindy Gallois, who was my PhD advisor, and has been my mentor for over 20 years. Professor Cindy Gallois has achieved so much during her academic career. She has the gift of bringing language, theory and psychology to life. And this ability has meant she's been very important to so many current scholars. Professor Gallois is a recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including but not limited to, the fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, a fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychologists USA, Charter Fellow International Academy of Intercultural Relations USA, Fellow of the International Communication Association ICA, fellow of the International Association of Language and Social Psychology, and a recipient of the John Turner medal from the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists. And most recently, she was the recipient of the Robert C Gardner Award for Outstanding Scholar in Bilingualism for the International Association of Language and Social Psychology. So without any further ado, welcome Professor Cindy Gallois.
Thank you. And my goodness, what an introduction.
Well deserved, Cindy. So I'd like you to tell me a little bit about how you became involved in communication and psychology starting from your early college life.
In my very early days, I was two things at once. On the one hand, I was a language student. I was bilingual in French and English, so I was very interested in the study of language and in the study of linguistics, But I actually wanted to be a doctor as well, like so many people around the place. We all ended up in our fields by falling away from a desire to be a doctor. And I developed much more of an interest in psychology, and in fact, the communication part of psychology, social psychology. So that by the time I finished university, I knew that I wanted to be a psychologist. And by the time I went back to do my PhD, after a few years away in Europe, teaching language, I had decided that I wanted to do social psychology of communication. And it didn't take very long after I met my PhD supervisor, and after I started my PhD at the University of Florida, to figure out that what I really wanted to do was was intergroup communication, look at the way that communication creates rivalry and conflict or alternatively friendship and liking.
Thank you, Cindy. So can you tell me who your intellectual mentors were? I imagine, for example, your PhD supervisor would have been one.
Yes. My PhD supervisor Norman Markel, an amazing man, actually a man who had a very similar career to me in a way and so in a sense, I guess, he led me into it. He was trained as a psychologist, actually, in his case, a clinical psychologist, and he actually practiced, which I had never done as a clinician, and then got very interested in language and speech and moved over and by the time I met him, even though I was a psychology student, he had a position in the Communication Department at Florida. Because he was a psychologist, he was able to supervise me. So I actually had started that mix of communication and social psychology. Right from almost the first day that I started my master's degree. And it's continued ever since.
And are there any other mentors or intellectual influences?
Norm was certainly the first. And he was in, in many ways, the only mentor I had as a student. Because I was a psych student, doing a field that was rare in psychology, it was hard to find role models and mentors. After that, probably Howie Giles. I heard about him not long after I finished my PhD and that approach that he had, which was A. very interdisciplinary and B. very involved in the actual practice of communication really appealed to me. So I picked up Communication Accommodation Theory, and that whole way of looking at things and intergroup communication more generally.Those would be the main two over the years. Howie’s been a mentor for so many years.
So how did you make the connection?
I would like to say I got in touch with him. I'm not sure if that was actually what happened. But somehow, or other we got in touch with each other. And I certainly knew about his work. And I was very, very impressed with his work in Communication Accommodation Theory, which is, of course, much older than my career. He was well established in that area by the time I became a student, and certainly by the time I finished. And even though I had been coming from bilingualism, and looking at accommodation in that way, it turned out that that was just a kind of big example of accommodation, which happens all over the place. And so it was very easy to sort of move into that sphere. So he became probably my biggest intellectual mentor since my PhD. I mean, there have been others, people in psychology and people in communication, but those would be the real standouts.
As a more general question, what's the highlight for you for communication? Where's it had the most impact in your work?
Oh, well, all my work is communication. And in fact, I'm inclined to say to people, everything is communication. Because I'm a social psychologist, it worries me a bit that many of my colleagues in social psychology know so little about communication. They don't remember that everything in social behavior is mediated by communication, we can't do any of it without talking and communicating with, at least ourselves. A lot of social psychology has really almost excluded other people from the equation and just looked at a single person. One thing about being in communication is that you can never do that. You always have to remember that there's got to be someone else around. You can imagine communication, of course, but that's very derivative on real communication with real other people. Communication permeates everything we do. And I think even people often in the field of communication, particularly if they're in the areas like Mass Comm, they can forget that it permeates every aspect of social behavior, every aspect of interpersonal behavior. Communication isn't, yes, it's people talking to each other, but it's not just that. And people come with a huge history, but there's a dynamic of communication that happens. Conversations develop, they go in a particular direction. The fact that you come from different races, or different social groups, or whatever, may or may not make a huge difference. And I think social psychologists because they don't look at those conversational dynamics in any kind of detail, or with any kind of sophistication, most of the time, they can forget that they can put too much on the antecedents too much on the fact that we come from the same or different races or genders, or whatever, and not enough on how the actual communication develops, which is, of course, very complicated.
So it's the big picture that they miss, sort of making the connections.
Yeah. So for example, you and I could have a conversation, we could be coming from different races, different everything, and yet, it could be a perfectly pleasant perfectly interpersonal. Now that's very predictable, which way it will go. But social psych can't predict it very well, because their theories don't take that into account very much.
And I do think psychology, like other disciplines, doesn't tend to be interdisciplinary.
That's exactly right. Which is why most psychologists, including most social psychologists don't do communication, which is probably just as well. But to think you can study say, attitude change, without studying communication, I think you're leaving an awful lot of very important stuff out. And that's what happens in social psychology. And again, you know, I think as time goes on, more and more social psychologists understand that and do get some sophistication in communication.
So that leads me to ask, you have studied many areas, you know, not just most recently, you've been into health, but before that many, many areas. And I think it's because communication is everywhere. Would you like to talk about those areas in which have meant the most to you?
Probably the first area that I was involved in, which was bilingual communication across languages,and the way that changes us, that was very important to me when I was younger. I mean, it still is, but it was very important to me then because I was a bilingual, and I had realized how different I was when I was speaking one language or the other language. You know, my values changed, my personality changed. I was more extroverted in one language and not so much in the other and everything about me just became different. I thought this is kind of very weird. There are two Cindys out there, which one is the real one? And of course, once you start thinking like that, you realize that personality is largely a social construction. And I began to think, okay, you know, what is this thing called personality? It's a series of styles we have in various contexts, and they may or may not connect up. If the contexts connect up, then the styles connect up. So people who have a life where they're basically dealing with the same people all the time, and going from one context to another, they have a very integrated kind of approach, style and personality. But another person, and a bilingual is a good example of it, who changes everything, when they change language, they change all their friends, they change their social context, they may change their personality, that's a different matter.
So let me ask you a few sort of bigger questions that are more abstract. In your area of research, what do you think are the big intellectual questions for communication scholars to address in the next decade?
Well, I think, you know, they're the perennial questions, because I don't think we've answered them yet, at least in the field of intergroup communication. What are the triggers to conflict? What are the triggers to rivalry? What are the triggers to friendship and liking? What are the consequences of communicating in a friendly way versus a hostile way? What are the consequences of accommodating? The behavioral consequences but also the social consequences. Does it actually have a big impact on say, lasting friendships? Or, you know, and I mean, that goes to questions like, Why are most of our friends so similar to us? People don't often think about that as a communication issue. Even people in communication don't think of it as a communication issue. But in fact, it is. The people who are similar to us communicate in a similar way, they use the same language, they often use the same speech style, they understand the little communication moves that we make. But I would love to take that one level deeper and say, Okay, why is that? Because I think there's been a lot of, I think, fairly glib and naive research around those issues. You know, if you look like people, you like them better, basic bedrock theory. And of course, it works, it predicts extremely well. And I guess I would argue that it's the communication similarity. Tt's the fact that we talk a lot. The other person could be eight feet tall, or four feet tall, and you know, the other sex, all kinds of different things. But if they talk like you, if they communicate the way you do, then you'll like them. You know, you'll have an easy time with them, etc. And if they don't, even if they're your identical twin, in many ways, you won't like them. So I think we've scratched the surface of that area. We're starting to ask the questions, and we're starting to know what the questions are. But I think there's a huge challenge in the next few years to actually addressing those questions in a meaningful way. One of the things that's held the field of communication back over the years in my view, is the lack of capacity to look at the details of behavior. Looking at the details of behavior is actually quite hard. If you actually want to look at what people say and do, then there isn't any way to do it, except to look at what they actually say and do. And we're only just starting to get ways of actually measuring behavior in an automated way. When I was a young student, I had to sit down and actually record by hand the details of conversations, looking at videotapes, one frame at a time. And that's a tedious, boring, hard, laborious process. And so people have tended to avoid that and look at the easier option of giving people a questionnaire, which is great. I mean, I'm not knocking questionnaires, I think you can get a lot of interesting information off of that. But what you can't get is what people actually say and do in a conversation. They don't know what they did. They know what they intended. They don't know what the other person did. They know what the impact was, but they don't actually know what the behavior was. You've just got to sit there and measure it. And we're only just starting now to get ways of doing that that are sufficiently automated, that people don't get discouraged after two minutes and go on to something easier. And that's been a huge, huge problem over the years.
And I suspect part of that resistance is that there's the pressure of time and publish. So people take shortcuts.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yes, there are career pressures, there are external pressures. You got to get publications out, etc. But there are also, it's just boring. It's very, very tempting not to do those hard options just because they're so hard. I mean, the incentives, the external incentives will have to be pretty strong. But I think it's getting easier. And that's going to make it much more popular.
Because of these automated systems that are now in place.
Or we're starting to get in place. I don't think we're quite there yet. But we're certainly starting to get there.
So in your area of research, what do you think are the big societal challenges and opportunities where communication scholarship can actually make a major contribution?
I think as a field, we need to develop a little more courage, because we have a huge amount to say. We know so much about why people get into conflict across social categories, like why nurses and doctors get into conflict in hospitals. And we know in particular, that it's not because of the rotten personalities of one group or the other. And we need to address those issues and really get that research out. I mean, we could change the face of health by elucidating much better the kinds of conflicts or the lack of conflicts that happen across health professions, or between patients and doctors, between patients and nurses, all those kinds of things. And we will. I'm very optimistic that that will happen, because it's getting easier to track that behavior.
And of course, we have to counter the resistance if you're talking about health, too, because I think there's a big resistance from the health community.
But see, that's something we can address as well. I mean, that's really just an example of intergroup communication. They don't like it when some other field horns in and nobody does. Nobody likes it. So what do we have to do as communication scholars to come in and convince health professionals that we have something to offer them that they need? And that we can do it for them without taking anything away from them, you know, without them having to make a huge effort. That's what I don't think communication scholars have been good at doing.
Do you have any suggestions?
One thing is all I want to do is audiotape you, all I want to do is videotape you, and then I will come back in a timely way. And that's where we really fail, we don't come back in a timely way, or we don't come back at all. And I will tell you what I've found and what you need to do. We get tangled up, and we don't go back to our subjects, we don't go back to our participants and tell them what we found. And when you're working with people like doctors and nurses, you don't want to do that. Because all it does is make them think you're an idiot and alienate them generally. I think we can do more. I think we can treat our participants with more respect and enormous respect for what they know. So I think, you know, we need to make more than half the effort because we need those people, in a sense more than they need us. And we certainly realize we need them more than they realize they need us.
I get the impression that health professionals don't really realize that communication is important. They see it as what's been known as a soft skill.
They do take it into account, and they think they're really good at it. And the truth is, they are really good at it. There's exceptions to everything, but as a group health professionals are really good at communication. They have to be. They have to communicate with their patients. And you know, life is at stake. They have to communicate with each other. And I think this is a feature of all researchers. We want to solve problems, we want to find things out. And so we go in and we say, what's wrong with this situation? And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that in terms of informing your own research, but you don't want to communicate that to your participants. And I think that's what we often forget. And because so many of us do work with university students who expect to be trampled on by their lecturers, who just see it as part of the deal. But you know, when you're working with professionals who have a fairly high self esteem, you know, they don't particularly appreciate that, and understandably so.
"Why do you want to get things so wrong?" is not a good question.
What else do you think might be going on here? Subtle version of the same thing. What do you think you're screwing up? And doctors and nurses are smart enough to see through that subtlety and see through to what you're really asking. So we need to learn how to be very, very respectful, and to realize that without them, if they weren't doctors and nurses, we would have nothing to study. That's point one. And point two, that they have enormous expertise, and they have a lot of communication expertise. They can tell us things. And in particular, they can tell us how it looks to them. Why are you doing that that way? What's the advantage of doing that that way? And that's one of the reasons actually that I like communication accommodation theory so much because it makes it easy to do that. It sort of says okay, what I want to look at is how people change their behavior because they're so skillful at communicating with different kinds of people. So you know, what kinds of changes do they make as a way of making that better and making that easier? What do you do, for example, when you're communicating to your patients, because they don't have the expertise that you have? So I think there's ways you can approach people, but it comes from a basic respect.
So what would you say you have built as an architect of communication scholarship?
I wouldn't claim anything for myself alone, because I don't think anything that I've done would have been done without all the people around me. People like Howie Giles, and people who in a sense are ahead of me, you know, in temporal terms who started before I did, and people like you and other students who have come behind and continued the work. But I think as a group, we have built a much more sophisticated edifice, a much more complex edifice, around understanding intergroup behavior. And we've also been more willing, in recent years to measure actual behavior. Everybody studies everything except what people actually say and do they think you can do it all with a questionnaire, well you can't do it all the questionnaire. And when I think now we're more willing to address that.
So you're being quite humble about what you've built, but I think also at the same time, what you have built as a critical mass of scholars who can work with you to keep this work going.
You know, I would put a lot of that down to the previous generation. What used to be the case is 99% of the people would be fascinated by the area, and then they get turned off because it was so hard. As things become a little bit easier, I think that percentage is starting to climb.
And also I think people not realizing what as communication scholars we do. Often in psychology, they sort of think you're on the fringe somehow, whereas actually, you're at the heart, you're the heartland of what everybody does. So Cindy, sort of summing up, what do you think is really important for communication scholars moving forward?
I think one thing is to understand that it's not an easy field. But it's also a fascinating field, the rewards are huge. As you begin to elucidate what people say and do in communication, it's just so interesting. If you can find a way to make the fascination more important than the challenge, then I think it's a very, very satisfying career.
On behalf of all scholars, and all the people who you've taught, and general communication scholars, I want to thank you for the lasting contribution you've made to communication research. And I'm sure all our listeners will want to wish you well for future work and health.
It's been a real pleasure, and I hope we've been able to communicate a little bit of the fascination of this field. Because I think you know, it is a difficult field, but it's well worth it if you stick with it.
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network and is sponsored by The School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producer is Jacqueline Colarusso. Our executive producer is Aldo [ALL-doe] Diaz [dee-ASS] Caballero [cab-ah-YERO]. Our production consultant is Nick Song. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.
