Page 26 - Effective Communication Skills by Dalton Kehoe

The Conscious Mind in Using Language
Lecture 6

The cognition process involves how we name and think about the
patterns we create and also how we deal with differences between our
expectations and reality in day-to-day life. Our conscious mind can and
does work its way through the process of rational problem solving and
decision making, but it’s a relatively slow, energy-demanding process.
Everyday talk, however, demands a quicker form of cognition—we
size up a new situation very quickly, ¿guring out what’s going on

and guessing what’s going to happen next using the schema from our

life experience. We effortlessly create ¿rst impressions of people and
things in our environment and then interact using low effort, automatic
forms of thought. But the more automatic and low-effort our thinking
processes, the more vulnerable we are to mistakes that can interfere
with good communication.
e should be careful in our use of words, but we aren’t. Thinking
Lecture 6: The Conscious Mind in Using Language
about our thinking is hard work, so instead we use abstract
Wjudgment words as part of our thinking process. Humans really
like using abstract and judgmental language: It rewards our sense of
competent self. We sound clear, de¿ nite, and sure of ourselves—and we get
other people’s attention with these kinds of assertions. But when we talk like
this, things can go very wrong, very quickly. Poor word choices, spoken in
inappropriate contexts, can get us into trouble because we can’t know for
sure how others will understand our judgments.

We use four simple judgment tools to make decisions about what’s going
on. (1) We take things at face value. What we hear ¿rst can act as a starting

point for subsequent decision making (so be careful what you say ¿ rst to
another). (2) We base our judgments on the ease of availability: We seem to
think that the easier something is to recall, the truer it must be. (3) We use
the representativeness approach, classifying a person or situation based on a
case in our past. (4) We treat assumptions as facts, because we have a hard

time distinguishing between inferences and observable facts.

18