How aware are you of your cognitive biases and how they can impact your reception and delivery of communication? In a paper to be delivered at ProComm2020, Quan Zhou categorizes and outlines over twenty cognitive biases that can play into the communication act.
The Cognitive Bias …
When communicating about risk, the hope is to craft appropriate messaging to motivate appropriate action and understanding by the public. This is often challenging, particularly when there is so much scientific uncertainty involved in the risk. Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, many messages have been developed …
Photo: Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung
Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, we have witnessed many stark examples of strong, responsible leadership – and some examples of not so responsible leadership. This leadership has been demonstrated through legislative action, but also through acts of communication …
Times of crisis can provide stark reminders of the importance of language and communication. At a moment in time when the majority of us are – to varying degrees – practicing social isolation in an attempt to prevent the novel coronavirus from spreading, how we …
For a technical audience of engineers, quantitative data often holds the key to persuasion. For more general audiences, however, narrative or storytelling has been shown to potentially hold greater sway. In addition, the effectiveness of both techniques is context-based and contingent on the type of …
One of the cardinal sins in professional communication is to focus on what you want to say, rather than what your audience needs to hear. A poet or a novelist may have the privilege of their audiences wanting to hear what they have to say, …
One of the most frequent things we hear from audiences – both of reports and presentations – who fail to engage with and understand the content being communicated is: “What’s the story?” It may seem like an odd request, since engineering communication may not seem …
For the engineers that I have taught, one of the most challenging communication tasks is explaining scientific concepts to less technical audiences, such as the general public. Yet explaining their work to the public – and other audiences with varying levels of technical know how …
We asked Aachen University’s Claas Digmayer to talk about the importance of public communication in the acceptance of new sustainable technologies. In this video, he describes how two similar technologies, Carbon Capture and Storage and Carbon Capture and Utilization, have been received quite differently in …
We don’t always say what we mean …
In fact, we often avoid direct speech acts – saying what we mean – in the service of politeness and conflict avoidance, relying instead on indirect speech to communicate complex thoughts. An indirect speech act, according to linguist John Searle, …
