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extent that they have had similar experiences’. Berlo also felt that human
commu nication always had a purpose ‘our basic purpose in communication is
to become an affecting agent, to affect others, our physical environment, and
ourselves… we communicate to influence—to affect with intent’.

Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson’s Model (1967)
In the year 1967 Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin, and Don Jackson wrote
Pragmatics of Human communication, which provided a general view of com-
munication on the basis of psychiatric study and therapy. Their approach and
many of the concepts and propositions they provided have been influential in
communication thinking since that time. The Watzlawick-Beavin-Jackson’s
view of communication presented in a general form in Figure 5.22 portrayed
it as a process involving a give and take of messages between individuals.
The perspective stressed the view that communication is not something that
occurs only when a source chooses intentionally to send messages. Rather,
they asserted, in the tradition of Shannon and Weaver, that because we are
always behaving, ‘one cannot but communicate’.
Communication was seen as an ongoing, cumulative activity between
individuals who function alternatively as source and receiver. As with other
works of this period their writings suggested that in order to understand
how communication worked, one needed to look beyond the messages and
channels to the meanings the individuals involved attach to the words and
actions they created.
Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson proceed from the tenets of the informa-
tion theory in order to explain behavioural choices in an evolutionary form of
explanation. They feel that humans choose a behavioural alternative in terms
of a ‘limitations’ principle of communication that in a communicational

Person 1 3 5 7 9 11
A

Messages

Person B 2 4 6 8 10
Figure 5.22
Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson’s Model (1967)
Source: Adapted from Pragmatics of Human Communication,
Paul Watzlawick, Janet H. Beavin and Don D. Jackson, 1967.

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