Тhe most serious problem in the world is that people do not understand each other. Failures in communication take place in various circumstances and conditions: at home, at work, between social and ethnic classes, between religions and nations. They can lead both to small complications or troubles in our everyday life and large-scale conflicts between societal groups and cultures. The significance of the problem was the reason I decided to do my bit in studying the causes of miscommunication.

In trying to understand the mechanisms of communication failures, I have been forced to go outside pure linguistics and discover what we can learn from studies where the human being is taken as a cognitive and societal creature. The starting point of my thinking is the following diagram, which describes interaction as a circle rather than a linear line, as it is usually understood.

Each stage of interaction includes some risks for successful communication:

1. The speaker wrongly interprets reality (sees or hears what does not correspond to the truth);
2. The speaker tries to express a thought which is unclear to him- or herself;
3. The speaker is unable to express the desirable thought clearly enough;
4. The speaker speaks in a low voice, pronounces unclearly (mumbles, swallows part of speech; etc.) or makes a slip of the tongue;
5. There are disturbances in the situation of communication (a loud noise in the street, in a disco, at a reception, a vacuum cleaner etc.);
6. The recipient mishears the message (a slip of the ear);
7. The recipient understands the message in different way from that intended by the speaker;
8. The recipient connects the message to another person, bus, shop, thing etc.

The mental worlds of the speaker and the recipient influence all the stages of interaction. Some words may be unknown to the recipient (the names of people, birds, concepts etc.). The interpretation of some other words may be different, for instance what freedom, equal rights, holiday, grandma, city, cold weather or in the morning mean. People’s mental worlds consist of language command, cultural knowledge, values and everything they have experienced during their lives. Their most recent experiences play a special role. That is why, for example, a phrase like “the bow was awful” apparently has different interpretations depending on where a person has just been: in a concert, in a glasses shop or in archery training.

As such, the ambiguity of phrases is not a big problem in communication if the interlocutors have similar mental worlds. Almost everyone understands the phrase “They sell white shirts and ties in the market” in a similar way: ties are obviously not white. However sometimes different readings are possible, as in “They sell black suits and shoes in the market.”

The starting point in human thinking is that other people think in the same way as we do, especially if the person belongs to “us” (the so-called common ground fallacy). This kind of egocentrism is a salient cause of misunderstanding in everyday life. It can be avoided by proper recipient design. However, recipient design often fails because the speaker is too eager to say what he or she wants to say. The desire to be regarded as smart and clever overrides the rules of recipient design. Nevertheless, acting in this way has the reverse effect: a person will be misunderstood and seen to lack interest in listening, which will have a negative impact on that person’s reputation.

The limitations of the human brain play an important role in the way we interact. In order to avoid becoming tired, we must minimise our cognitive efforts. This leads to poor concentration in interaction. As speakers we fail to conduct recipient design and as recipients we slip into thinking about quite different matters.

Two blogs on communication and recipient design:

• Communication is everything. Helsingin yliopiston strategiablogi Huipulle ja yhteiskuntaan. 2011.
• Recipient design and common ground fallacy. Tekniikka & Talous. October 6, 2011.

Papers on miscommunication:

• Risks of miscommunication in various speech genres. Understanding by communication. E. Borisova & O. Souleimanova. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, 33-53.
• A speaker-oriented multidimensional approach to risks and causes of miscommunication. Language and Dialogue. Language and Dialogue, 2012, 2, 216-243.

Papers on коммуникативная неудача:

• Коммуникативные неудачи сквозь призму потребностей говорящего [Communication failures from the point of view of the needs of the speaker] // Язык и мысль: современная когнитивная лингвистика / А.А. Кибрик & А.Д. Кошелев. М.: Языки славянской культуры, 2015, 543-559. And a video.
• Почему общение на лингва франка удается так хорошо? [Why is communication in a lingua franca so successful?] // Языки соседей: мосты или барьеры? Проблемы двуязычной коммуникации / Н. Вахтин. СПб: Институт лингвистических исследований РАН, 2011, 10-31.
• Причины коммуникативных неудач: попытка всеобщей теории [Causes of communicative failures: towards a common theory] // Русский язык за рубежом, 2011, 4, 76-86.