Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella, and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of ICA Podcast Network. Today our architect is Judee Burgoon. She is a professor of communication, family studies, and human development at the University of Arizona. Additionally, she serves as the director of research at the Center for the Management of Information, and she is the site director for the Center for Identification Technology Research at the University of Arizona. Burgoon’s authored or edited 14 books and monographs and more than 300 articles, chapters, and reviews. Her research currently centers on deception, trust, interpersonal interaction, and new technologies. She served as editor of Communication Monographs and was the Chair of the National Communication Association Publications Board. Among her research-related honors are NCA's Golden Anniversary Monographs Award, the Charles H. Woolbert Research Award for Scholarship of Lasting Impact, the Mark L. Knapp Interpersonal Communication Award. She received the National Communication Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award for a lifetime of scholarly achievement. She was the youngest woman to be elected as a fellow of the International Communication Association and was awarded ICA's Steven B. Chaffee Career Productivity Award and the B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award. Today, Judee will be in conversation with Norah Dunbar, who is a Professor of Communication at the University of California Santa Barbara and a Fellow of the International Communication Association. Here is Norah.
Hello, I'm Dr. Norah Dunbar. I'm here today with my mentor and great friend, Dr. Judee Burgoon. She was my PhD advisor back in the late 1990s, and we've been collaborators and friends ever since. I just checked my CV this morning and found that her name appears on it 92 times. So it's reasonable to say she is the most influential person of my career, personally. And I know I'm not alone. She’s had over 60 PhD and MA advisees in her illustrious career. Her theories, books, and articles have shaped the research of countless others. Judee, thank you for joining me today in recording this program. It's always a pleasure to talk with you.
You're welcome. It's my pleasure too.
Let's start by talking a little bit about how you got interested in the field of communication. What sparked your interest to study it? Do you have a first memory of when you decided that communication was an interesting thing to study?
Absolutely. I had a ninth-grade teacher, of all things, who created something called “voice choir”. And in that, we as a group who got selected would do things like poetry, Shakespeare, or whatever. We speaking in unison, more or less like a Greek chorus. And that led to interest in debate. And debate was really my first love, brought me into the field. Communication wasn't really a concept then, exactly. Schools only spoke about doing communication were doing media work. So interpersonal communication, which is really my end of the discipline, hadn't really developed.
How did you decide that interpersonal communication was the aspect of communication that you wanted to study?
I had a course, and it was actually a course in nonverbal communication, in which the instructor assigned each of us a unit in the course. And at that time, there were no books in nonverbal communication. But once we had assembled this collection of topics and the literature that was out there scattered across a lot of different disciplines, it became really the entree into interpersonal communication. There were neither books for nonverbal communication or interpersonal communication, and so we created our own entry into the field that way.
Who do you think your early intellectual models or influencers were? Who shaped your trajectory when you were a young scholar?
I would say, first of all, my advisor for my master’s and PhD program, William Lashbrook. And you won't know his name, because he very soon went out into the commercial world and was developing educational materials. But he was a really bright scholar who encouraged all of us to critically examine communication and to work on critical thinking and argumentation. And then I was also influenced by Jim McCroskey, whose name might be familiar because he was one of the people who was developing a whole master’s program in interpersonal communication. And then beyond that, I was introduced to Michael Burgoon. And Michael had more interest in the persuasion end of things. But he was really a big proponent in developing argument, developing theory, and justifying the theoretical positions that we were taking. We had assignments, for instance, in Michael's class, to take a particular area–and I took proxemics–and really develop a theory around it. And that was the beginning of EVT, Expectancy Violations Theory.
So your Expectancy Violations Theory is clearly one of the most influential theories in the field. People always joke that when you get a chapter in one of the standard communication textbooks, you know you've made it. And you couldn't have a communication textbook without EVT. So tell us about what sparked your interest in developing the theory, and what is it about the proxemics literature that led you to develop EVT?
One of the things that's always been appealing to me is to find conflicting points of view and figure out how to reconcile those. And the proxemic literature offered that possibility of thinking about alternative points of view because the literature does two things. It indicates, for instance, that people move closer to those whom they like, and to whom they want to create some relationship. So closer is better. On the other hand, there's a body of literature that says closer is threatening, and that people will seek greater distance as protection for themselves. So the question is, is closer better or farther better, and when? And that really led to the theory. It was very simple. It appeals to a lot of people because it makes sense. It fits with our lived experience, that we want to move closer to those whom we like, with whom we want to affiliate, and whose approval we seek. And on the other end of it, we want to avoid situations that we see as possibly threatening. So the question becomes, is the key in the behavior itself or something else? And as a person coming out of a communication background, I assumed there had to be some meaning in the behavior itself. And that was the proxemic move. So it depended on the message coming out of the proxemic signal but also who was sending the signal. We as communication people do think that the source matters. And that's one of the things that Jim McCroskey did encourage us, to think back to the beginning of communication and the whole issue of what counts as source credibility or ethos. So if you put those two together, it really matters who is sending the message. And if it's somebody who is what we call rewarding, then that person sending that signal probably is using it, or you're interpreting it, as an invitation. Whereas if it's coming from somebody who is higher in, for instance, positions of power, then the signal of proximity actually can be a threat. So that's how we came to putting together these concepts. I get a lot of letters from students saying they really like this theory and they're pursuing this theory in their class. So I think it had some legs.
It definitely has had legs. The theory is such a parsimonious and simple explanation, but I often talk about it in terms of how the theory has evolved over time. The theory has become even more streamlined as it's also become more applicable. So it's not a theory of proxemics, it's a theory of a lot of different human behaviors. And that's something that I think the students find very appealing.
I agree that the expansion was essential. We moved beyond violations of spacing to all kinds of nonverbal violations. Often, I talk about nonverbal expectancy violations. And we've now been applying it to language.
How do you think EVT then led to some of your other theories? Because I think it formed a building block for interaction adaptation theory, and perhaps to some extent, even interpersonal deception theory.
You're right. It was a building block for me because it had foundational principles that fit into talking about other aspects of communication, that are, for instance, in the nonverbal realm. And as we expanded our understanding of nonverbal communication, and looking at it in other cultures, a body of literature that's out there from psychology, for example, from sociology, from anthropology, there are aspects of them examining communication from the standpoint of violations. But the common approach had been everything that's normative, that meets expectations, is the way we develop theory around those areas. My position was no, you can actually get more traction by violating expectations. And so that was one of the jumping-off points for developing other theories in nonverbal areas and trying to determine when it was advisable not to just conform to norms, conform to expectancies, but also when it might be advisable to violate those. So that led to the development of interpersonal adaptation theory because there had to be points at which it made sense to not be always doing the normative thing, doing what's expected, but instead, moving into realms where violations of those nonverbal patterns could be advantageous.
So your interest in those expectancy violations, is that what prompted your interest in studying deception? It sounds like you're saying that your interest in deception actually came out of your own theory.
In some ways, yes. I'll tell you how I got started with it. I was invited to be on a panel at ICA. And on that panel were psychologists and myself, and we were asked to talk about how nonverbal communication related, and so on. I thought if I was going to talk about deception and had never done any research on deception, that was a bit of a leap so I felt like I needed to do some deception research, to talk with more authority about that area. So David Buller had been working in that area. And David became my advisee. He’d been working with G.R. Miller at Michigan State. So we decided together to do a study in deception. Naturally, I was going to look for ways in which EVT fit into the deception space. We designed a study that allowed us to look at deception from an expectancy violations perspective.
If you think back over your career, the work on EVT, and all your work with nonverbal communication and deception, you've made many contributions to the field. But do you have one that you're most proud of that you look back on and think to yourself, “Boy, I'm really glad we did that.”
I’ve thought about that question quite a bit, about what is my main contribution? What is my legacy? And then I have to tell you, actually, the first legacy I think about is the cadre of students that I have worked with, because I think that is building a foundation for the next generation of scholars. Many other disciplines are now finding communication, if you will. And they're laying claim to that territory. I think it's important that we indicate how much of a contribution we, coming out of communication, have already laid the foundation for that area, that we have examined it and done so with a very rigorous point of view. So I am really proud of what we've done in creating a pretty large foundation of students who have studied communication and done so in a way that is really with rigor, argument, and evidence. Now, that comes out of my debate training, you really need to establish, what are your arguments, and what's the evidence to support them? And that's the same thing we're doing when we're building theory. So beyond that, I would say all three theories you and I have just now talked about are part of my foundation of contribution, EVT being one of them, interpersonal deception theory being a second, and not so much interpersonal adaptation theory, because that has not really had the same degree of contribution and development as the other theories. But then the whole area of nonverbal communication, our methods for studying it, I think we have done quite a bit in the discipline. I think I've done quite a bit in encouraging understanding nonverbal communication and the multiple modalities to which it contributes to the understanding of communication. It's not a one-trick pony.
That's for sure. We just recently published our–I'll call it “Burgoon theory number four,” our spiral model of trust. And that was the most difficult part of writing a theory with you was just trying not to include everything, because there's so many different things that can influence perceptions, like trust. I kept saying, “Our theory has too many propositions.” But what do you cut? What do you leave out? Maybe over time, it'll become more parsimonious.
I think parsimony is definitely important. And it might depend on what is the most important issue you're trying to develop with the theory? I don't think there's ever going to be a universal theory of communication. So if, for instance, your current objective is thinking about trust, what are the most important facts that contribute to it? And what assumptions do you begin with? And I think any good theory ought to first lay out, what are the assumptions that undergird the theory you're developing? And then you can start trimming and focusing in on those facets that are the most important.
So it's good that you talked about the future and training your graduate students who are leaving a legacy of your scholarship. What do you think are the big intellectual questions for communication scholars to address in the next decade?
One that has arisen that concerns me is the development of fake news, deep fakes, a disregard for the veracity of communication. It seems as if we have a whole, I hope, minority of the populace that believes there is no such thing as ground truth. There is no need to concern ourselves with truth in communication. And that is terribly worrisome to me. And it partly is arising out of people not being educated in the notion of the veracity of communication. What is ground truth? How do we get there? How do we test for the validity of messages, and that communication is not just something we develop with whatever ideas we have in mind, and that we can manipulate communication in any way that we wish? And, to me, that's really a troubling development in the public discourse. We need in our educational system more emphasis on critical thinking and tests for the validity of communication. So I think that's going to be an issue for us in the next 10 years. I also think the difference between thinking about communication and high touch, low tech. What's the importance of actually using communication to develop contact with others, developing a sense of connection, and where does that come into the picture? If we are creating communication that is, for instance, creating social presence out of media, but it's not real human-to-human, face-to-face communication, where does that come into the picture? How important is face-to-face communication, as opposed to mediated communication? Is mediated communication, for example, to be understood in the same way that we understand face-to-face communication?
I feel like sometimes we do all this research in the lab and we publish them in our journals. But if the problem is really out there with the lay public, and they are disregarding the veracity of fact, then how do you think communication scholars and scholarship can make a contribution and address these problems in the real world, so to speak?
Well, I have had people tell me that’s our obligation as scholars. But what if we are not the best translators of the literature, of the findings? There are some people who are very skilled at doing that. And so I sense that there will be some who are the practitioners that take the scholarship and translate it so that it's understandable, that it's useful for the “lay public.” But it is not necessarily the obligation of the scholars to be good at doing that. I have been more successful than some at presenting some of these findings in a way that others understand them. But that's not to say that everything I have done is easily presented to the lay public. And I believe there are some whose talents lay in that area and can help present our theories, our understanding of the world in a way that is also understandable to others. And I think that is actually an important thing for our discipline to do. But it doesn't necessarily follow the same shoulders to do the discoveries as to turn around and present the discoveries to the world at large.
As we wind down to the end of our interview, I want to go back a little bit to talking about you and your legacy. The podcast series is titled The Architects of Communication Scholarship. So if you think about yourself as an architect, what is it that you have built? What is your legacy that you're leaving behind and will be remembered for?
My guess is less so particular theories, and more so a given area, such as nonverbal communication, that I have developed a strong undergirding with the students I've taught to pursue things in a more complex way to understand that communication is a multimodal activity. We need to look at the interconnections among different aspects of communication. I think of communication as a system that requires a whole lot of different facets to be understood. And I hope that the way I have gone about teaching communication contributes to an understanding of it that way.
I appreciate your sentiment that you're basically creating a foundation for other people to build on. I think that fits well with the architect model but also is an apt description for what you've contributed.
Thank you, Norah.
Thank you very much for giving your time for this podcast and for the students that you work with.
Thank you again for being one of my best students and making it clear why it's so valuable to work with students and maintain those relationships long after we've left the academy.
Architects of Communication Scholarship is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by The Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Our producer is Kate In, and our executive producer is DeVante Brown. 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.
