Tag Archives: conversational analysis

Backchannels

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backchannelDiplomats, mediators and leaders of all sorts make extensive use of backchannels.  They know that the expressive needs of individuals are sometimes at odds with the goal of finding face-saving solutions.

Imagine that you are at a party with five other close friends.  In the course of a conversation with the group, the host mentions that he is pleased to have found a new employee to work in his small business. The new hire who he identifies lives in the same small town, and is known to you and some of the other guests. You also know that others who have worked with the employee have reported that he is an unreliable worker, showing up late and sometimes making careless mistakes.  Should you say something to the host?

Do you:

  1. Tell the host immediately and in the midst of the gathering that they have probably made a mistake in extending the offer of a job?
  2. Say nothing?
  3. Follow-up privately with the host, mentioning the doubts that you have?

Most of us have been in this situation, where there is no perfect answer. The first option of saying something immediately in the presence of all is what many would see as an obligation of good friendship.  Friends save friends from making bad mistakes. The sooner, the better. In addition, an opinion aired within a group is more easily disputed or affirmed by others who are present: a kind of base-line value built into American patterns of more open communication.

Some, though probably not many, would say nothing, believing that both the host and the new worker deserve the advantage of a clean slate.  After all, the employee is being judged partly on hearsay, and in advance of the record they might establish in their new job.

And some would choose the last choice, what I call the backchannel option.  They might wait until later to tell the host privately that the new hire could be problematic. This option protects the host from the embarrassment of being asked to publicly disown the positive view they just stated.  And it allows a little more time to assess the reliability of the pessimistic view.

It’s often a good idea to opt for a backchannel, where a message can be focused and private.  On the solid premise that we need to carefully pick our moments, it can make sense to hold back in a group setting when we have the awkward task of telling someone that they have made a mistake.

Backchannels have many advantages, and at least one disadvantage. The disadvantage is that they deprive the truth-teller of their moment in the spotlight.  It can be hard to not parade our wisdom before a gathered group. Though this may seem like a selfish and frivolous concern, it’s good to remember that most of us are fulfilled and affirmed by the display of what we regard is a superior understanding of what’s really going on.  This kind of “showboating” is probably why the concept of “forbearance” had to be invented for the rest of us.

Aside from our expressive needs, the advantages of backchannels are even more consequential.  Communication out of the public eye is useful as a way to save the “face” of another. A person can be corrected or warned without carrying the additional burden of what can seem like an unnecessary humiliation.  Small potatoes, perhaps.  But in the actual situation described above, the enthusiastic employer was quite embarrassed by the less than positive response that came from his friends. He clearly felt a need to honor a commitment he had already made, obviously wishing he’d said nothing.  And it’s easy to see why. Unravel this small moment a little more and it’s apparent that a public conversation about a potential mistake could be construed as an implicit judgment about the host’s competence. With backchannels, most of this baggage doesn’t accumulate. There is a better chance to preserve the friendship that exists between the host and the doubters.

Diplomats, mediators and leaders of all sorts make extensive use of backchannels.  They know that the expressive needs of individuals in groups are sometimes at odds with the task of finding face-saving solutions. The challenge for all of us is to resist our first impulse to take ownership of a conversation on the quick hunch that we have superior insights.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

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Invitations From Hollywood to Witness Conversational Trainwrecks

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Actress Sarah Steele, "Bernice"
      Actress Sarah Steele

The scholar Hugh Dalziel Duncan believed that communication has to be studied as a form of theater.  We are not only role-players in our lives, but in his simple aphorism that I never tire of quoting, he noted that theater is the process “by which we become objects to ourselves.”  

Plays, films, and all forms of written or performed narratives allow us to see our lives in the proxy behaviors of actors in a performance. A character on screen may not be living a close facsimile to our own lives, but their responses to others are still recognizable.  Empathy and imagination give us all the room we need to compare our communication choices with a panorama of figures ranging from Hamlet to Harry Potter. 

It follows that sometimes the most direct way to access communication challenges is therefore to get down to cases. Communication is almost always a matter of relatively fixed templates: sets of expectations about what someone facing the demands of one setting must do if they are to use their communication abilities to make things better. And that frequently means taking a look at a key scene in a film or play to discover how key figures handle the demands imposed by their own social settings. We’re easily drawn in. And we find that our natural hard-wired love of narrative means that we can place ourselves in almost any scene and compare our likely responses to those given by a character on stage or on the screen. 

Most films have such moments, as in the recent Before Midnight (2013) written in part by actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke.  They play a married couple who came together over the course of two earlier films, and are now drifting out of love and into middle age. The film is a feast for those interested in conversational analysis.  But two current favorites are from more popular and commercial films released a few years ago.  Each film offers a moment when a simple communication misstep builds into a volcano of hurt and anger.  Both play to a familiar litany of questions we ask whenever we failed to realize our intentions with another person. What went wrong?  How could someone with good intentions create the interpersonal equivalent of a complete train wreck?   

The Family Stone (2006) revisits the familiar terrain of an engaged son bringing his fiancé home to meet his family.  Everett Stone’s clan is a free-thinking group of comfortable New Englanders.  Dad is a professor.  Diane Keaton’s mom is a sharp conversationalist, and happily uses it to build a protective fence around a younger gay son who is deaf, and who is in a committed relationship to an African American man.  This modern couple is also hoping to adopt a child.  Enter Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker), the new fiance and a Manhattan executive who is invited to meet the family over dinner.  Meredith’s views are more conventional that her hosts.  And that spells trouble as the conversation turns to the younger son’s impending marriage.  She clearly likes the family, but she’s thrown off by Mom’s offhand comment that she wished all of her children were gay.  They might stay around longer, she muses. And Meredith takes the bait. Her questions are earnest but potentially wounding to the senior Stones, who wear their liberalism as badges of honor.  Will an interracial marriage be more difficult?  And would the Stones really wish for gay children?  Dermot Mulroney’s Everett is suddenly silent as these question settle over the meal like a bad stomach ache.  

As the scene plays, we see a classic communication breakdown.  One person lays down an ambiguous observation. It’s followed by a clumsy question that is easily misinterpreted as a marker of bigotry. Meredith is clearly at sea, and wants to be in the good graces of the family.  But none of the Stones are interested in helping climb out of the hole she has fallen into.

The Family Stone is a modest film, but this scene is a brilliant miniature of the potentially rough terrain of even simple statements and queries.  As it plays, we see why language and the tonalities of presentation complicate what appears to be the simple objective of finding a secure place in another’s life. 

A second favorite scene is built around one of the many winsome figures the Hollywood producer/writer James L. Brooks has created over the years.  In Spanglish (2004) Bernice stands out as a sensitive soul in a family of over-achievers.  Actress Sarah Steele’s empathetic character has an impulse to please which closely binds her to a spirited grandmother and to John, her affectionate father (Adam Sandler).  But she must also defend her fragile self-esteem against aspersions about her weight from an overwrought mother. Deborah has made Bernice her project. And while the razor thin compulsive has mastered the outward rituals of everyday conversation, she  tends to substtitute empty talk and hours of jogging for true intimacy.   

She is the provocateur in this conventional Brooks set up of an upwardly mobile Los Angeles family.  Connection and affirmation are put at risk by a character who is not so much malevolent as clumsy in understanding the fundamentals of social intercourse.   Even when Deborah returns from a shopping trip with new clothes for Bernice, we sense that her ostensibly thoughtful act will have a painful denouement.

The scene opens with John helping Bernice complete her history homework, making a game out of a quiz question asking for the name of the famous World War II President who was not a “ruse.”  What does the word mean? Bernice asks.  A “Phony,” he notes.  “So this president was not a ruse. . . He was the real thing.”  When Deborah returns with bags of new clothes, Bernice is at first delighted by her apparent thoughtfulness.  But when she tries on the gifts of a coat and sweater, they are clearly too tight.  A quick look at the tags of all the other new garments confirms that Deborah has deliberately bought everything one size too small.  This is her idea of an inducement for her daughter to lose some weight, and it unfolds as a slow motion humiliation in front of John and other members of the household.  The moment snuffs out the excitement that was just seconds old, leaving Bernice to find a way to resurface with some of her dignity intact.  She recovers, fighting back tears.  There is no big outburst, just a few rueful words said more in regret than anger.  “Thanks  Mom. . . I’m glad you didn’t get here a little earlier or else I wouldn’t be able to tell you that your gift is a ruse.  Please excuse me.”  And she exits.

There is agony in this small but emblematic moment where, as Brooks observes, Deborah feels “the futility of anyone understanding her point even as she makes it.” Those are his script directions to actress Tea Leoni who plays her.  She isn’t connecting with members of her family:  something she senses, but is powerless to remedy.  She is tone deaf to her daughter’s needs.  And somehow her ideals for success and a perfect waistline have also made her blind to the charms of her own family.