Page 145 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

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Psychology and Communication | 133

MOTIVATION ANd COMMUNICATION

The most important element in defining personality and to best understand
its influence on communication, are the social relationships a person enters
into and in which he or she is both the subject and the object. A person
enters into these social relationships through his or her activity.
When we speak of activity we do not intend it as a synonym of behaviour
as the behaviourist understands it. For the behaviourists, man is, in effect,
an automaton albeit a very complex one. Like an automaton, he ‘switches
on’ when external forces somehow exert and influence him, by pressing a
button, inserting a coin—as soon as such influence is exerted, man starts
to ‘behave’, to act in some way, and to react. This influence need not always
be direct and immediate. The influencing factor or ‘stimulus’ itself need not
necessarily have physical reality; it might be nonverbal, that is, it might take
the form of a sign.
A person’s activity is relational and significant, he or she does not simply
‘behave’, nor does he or she perform abstract deeds. Each of his actions is an
interaction with objects outside himself, and it can influence and alter them.
There is no abstract subject of activity in the act of communication; there is
always an object as well as a subject that is another person and the content
in communicative activity. The nature and effectiveness of communication
in any interaction depends upon the object, the contents, and more impor-
tantly the subject. The qualitative characteristics of this activity depend upon
the cognitive, affective, native, as well as social characteristics of a person,
and embody his or her social relationships. Since it is a social phenomenon,
the person shows the socially elaborated prerequisites necessary for the act
of communication.
The task of education is to determine the structure of a learner’s per-
sonality with significance to society because personality is the fundamental
propulsive force for the person’s activity in the society. The students must be
taught to evaluate their own behaviour and that of others’ objectively in any
act of communication or interaction. The teacher’s, personality, too, plays an
important role in fulfilling the task.
As far as psychology is concerned, communication is identical to any
other activity. It has definite aims and is impelled by a motive or more often
by a system of motives. These motives may be internal; for instance they
may grow out of some needs. Internal motives may be of a social nature.
For example, the teacher, who asks his pupil a question on the lesson, is at
the same time shaping a motive or a series of motives for the pupils’ sub-
sequent utterance. But the pupil may at the same time be guided by self-
assertive motives and by the desire to gain or maintain prestige in the eyes of
the teacher or in the class.

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