Words: 1271
Write a note on Psychological barriers to communication. Psychological Barriers These barriers are categorized in the way which effects the communication psychologically. In other words the psychological barriers effects the communication in three ways. Emotionally. Perceptually. Selectivity. Now we will discuss the given three psychological barriers. i) Emotional Barriers: As we know that emotions directly effects the communication.
In other words the success and failure of the communication also depends upon the emotions of a communicator. The more the emotions of a communicator are devoted to the communication, the more the more the communication would be effective and helps in achieving the goal for the specific purpose. This rule does not only applies on the communicator, but the on the audience aswell. It depends on the audience’s response to the communication.
If the emotions of the audience are attached with the communicator the communication would be successful but it goes fail in the in the opposite case. Its psychology of a man that for effective communication the two individuals must be emotionally attached, if this is not so, the communication will be ineffective so if it there is one way communication or the communication between two or more than two individuals, emotional attachment must be there to make the communication effective.
Now we will have some of the examples of emotional psychological barriers. Lets take an example of a political gathering, a politician standing and delivering his speech to the audience who support his party, now among those people there must be some people of the other political party, the people of his own party would be at high morale during his speech and become hyper at is each word, this is because they are emotionally attached to that leader, but the other hand the people of his opposing party does not give a deaf ear to his words and take them as a drama, so the communication to those people goes ineffective between them while it will be effective between him and his party followers. Now lets take an example of two brothers Ali and Abbas. Ali is elder than Abbas. Ali forbade Abbas to meet his bad friends. Emotions Now there are two ways of saying so to his brother the one is the polite way and the other is the harsh way.
Now it depends on the emotional understanding of those two brothers that which way would be accepted by Ali. But the way he accept the orders of his elder brother is the effective way of their communication. And there would be no emotional barrier among them and the communication will be successful but in the other case if Abbas does not bears the strictness of Ali he will refuse his orders and will continue with his doings, so in this way there is a barrier in communication between them.
These were some of the examples of emotional psychological barriers. So there should be some steps taken to avoid these barriers in communication. ii) Perceptual Barriers: These are the second type of psychological barriers. As people have different and complex personalities and they belongs to different backgrounds, therefore, they perceive things differently according to their own point of view which causes hurdles in the way of communication sometimes the communication goes fail due to these miss perceptions.
There are further three cases of failure of communication due to wrong perception. It also depends upon the frame of reference of one’s mind which basically controls the perception of an individual. The perceptual process In first case, people perceive thinks differently sometimes they think totally opposite to the thing which is being under discussion or being delivered to them. Lets take an example of two friends discussing a matter n patriotism for their country, the one says our country should be disputed by America so that there would be some betterment in education, laws and jobs etc. on the other hand the other friend taking it wrong and says “you are a rebel”, so this is the way the second friend assumed according to his perception which goes wrong and the discussion ends without any conclusion due to the miss perception of the second friend, which is a psychological barrier existed between them hence the second case of perceptual barrier takes place and the communication fails.
In second and third cases people sometimes fill in the information without checking accuracy, for example, I am writing this article there might be some points which I couldn’t understood exactly as they were taught to me but I am still filling in the information according to my own experience, this is what I perceive from the lecture delivered to me in the class. Hence perceptual barriers are due to the different ideas and concept of people which they acquired from their lives and experiences, so there should not be any wrong perception for achieving the goal of communication.
Example: Here is an example of a complicated sign board which may cause a wrong perception to many of the travelers driving on the road. iii) Selectivity: A final set of psychological barriers exists because of competition for peoples’ time and attention- “The selectivity block”. we all are bombarded with information. Sources, such as newspapers, magazines, technical journals, reports, memo, letters, meetings, radio, television, videotapes, computer printouts, terminal displays and electronic mail.
We simply cannot absorb all this information flowing our way, so, we must screen it selectively. One factor in the way people select is timing. Some messages that may be effective at one time might be blocked or even detrimental at another time. For example a letter of congratulation or condolence sent out immediately after the event is more effective than one sent later. A meeting about accident prevention gets more attention if it follows an accident than if it precedes one.
A report turned in late may have a highly negative effect if your supervisor has been anxiously awaiting it or may have little effect if he is busy with other matters. A rush typing assignment may affect your secretary differently at 4:45 pm than at 9:30 am. All of the information from these sources could not be absorbed as it is delivered to us. Another selection factor is context. In one research experiment, subjects were shown two identical pictures of a rail road train in a station.
One captioned ‘parting’ and the other ‘arriving’ on a scale ranging from ‘sad’ to ‘happy’ the subjects tended towards ‘sad’ for the first and ‘happy’ for the second. The subjects received the same data but – the suggestiveness of the context- the captions influenced the way they perceived the picture. In the business world, you might be more apt to read an article if it appears in a magazine you respect or a report if it is accompanied by a cover memo from your boss.
Similarly, you might tend to pay more attention to a presentation if it is held in a boardroom or a well appointed conference room, or listen more attentively to a sales talk in an elegant restaurant or hotel. One more aspect of selectively, we tend to remember the extremes and forget the middle ground. Think about comments you may have gotten from a teacher, a coach or a boss. Most people remember that most positive and the most negative and forget the neutral or middle ground comments. Therefore, your communication may be blocked or ‘selected out’ simply because it does not contain startling positive or negative news.