How people perceive and talk about miscommunication

Abstract

We examined how people perceive and talk about miscommunication. Participants in study one recalled a miscommunication incident, and then responded to a set of questions regarding their perceptions of the incident. These miscommunications were viewed as relatively unserious, largely the fault of the sender, humorous, confusing and frustrating. Most (76.8%) of the time both interactants were aware of the miscommunication. In a second study we harvested all tweets containing the word “miscommunication” and compared them with tweets containing the word “communication”. Tweets about miscommunication were higher in negative emotionality and certain types of cognitive processing. Hence, the occurrence of miscommunication elicits levels of negative emotions and higher levels of cognition which we interpret as users attempting to make sense of the miscommunication.