Tag Archives: Rod Hart

“Does He Know We Can Hear Him?”

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Public rhetoric is minefield of unintended meanings. It needs to be tempered by alert self-monitoring.

With his usual flair for irony Stephen Colbert tossed out the question that heads this piece during his CBS show that included a video clip of President Trump. The President predictably decided to go off script at a gathering of his formal Board of Peace. With dignitaries from 20 nations in the room, he decided to remind them and those watching how much he liked young women. This thought escaped into this formal setting on February 19th, the very moment that most of the world was fixated on the unfolding Epstein/Prince Andrew saga of trafficking of girls and young women.

To say the thought was ill-timed is obvious. It fell out of his mouth after he veered into the weeds by complimenting one young diplomat on his good looks. One can imagine that after he made this strange observation it would be wise to chase the thought further down a rabbit hole, making it clear that this was not a homoerotic point. So he quickly added his own misfired punchline: but “women—I like.”

The leaders in the room sat in stunned silence. And so Colbert’s question was both a joke and a pertinent inquiry about Trump’s ill-timed self-own.

Is there any consistent situational awareness evident in his comments? Does he know what he should be saying at a formal event? This instance is another reason why presidential staffs like their bosses to work from carefully prepared manuscripts. Yet Trump fashions himself as a natural wit and raconteur. He is neither.

Public rhetoric is tricky. It needs to be tempered by a careful degree of self-monitoring. A person needs to anticipate how comments made to others will be heard and understood. Failing at this vital social skill is like driving a car with a gas pedal stuck to the floor. More specifically, Presidents can’t use formal gatherings to deliver asides or rants more common to a social media troll. If not for him, the regrets of his staff must pile up faster than cars on an icy road. And the biggest risk is to be the last person in the room to notice the calamity of a verbal impulse not captured in time. Trump’s persistent tendency to want to chase after his randy reputation in comments about the appearance of women journalists only adds to the increasing association of him with the womanizing Jeffrey Epstein.

As I noted a decade ago, the concept is central enough to be at the center of measures of social intelligence. The idea is meant to identify those traits of character that allow for the tempering of one’s own impulses to successfully mesh with the needs and feelings of others. This is another way to describe a person’s “rhetorical sensitivity:” an ability defined by Rod Hart and his colleagues to imagine “how one views the self during communication, how one views the other, and how willing one is to adapt self to the other.” Worded in a questionnaire where agreement affirms this general awareness, some of the items include the following:

  • One should keep quiet rather than say something which will alienate others.
  • The first thing that comes to mind is [not always] the best thing to say.
  • When talking to your friends, you should adjust your remarks to suit them.
  • A person who speaks his or her gut feelings is [not always] to be admired.
  • We should have a kind word for the people we meet in life.

A thought often misattributed to Cicero is still a good one: “As man speaks, so is he.” It is probably too much to expect that Trump will ever acquire the social intelligence necessary to lead with empathy and compassion. In the meantime more of us respond by adopting versions of his rough rhetoric of personalization in our own counter-responses. In the end, the morality of human decency gets slighted in the very settings where it is needed most.

The Damaged Individual Who Cannot Self-Monitor

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U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump takes the stage at a campaign rally in Windham, New Hampshire, January 11, 2016. REUTERS/Brian Snyder - RTX21VNU
               REUTERS/Brian Snyder   theatlantic.com

To be fully human is to be responsive to the shifting     landscape of others’ feelings.  

People who spend time assessing how we relate to each other usually also reach the conclusion that we possess not just intellectual intelligence—however that is measured—but also social intelligence.   We have various capacities that help us function effectively with others.  These traits include such basic ideas as empathy, the capacity for identification, and a reasonable awareness of what others need from us. This last ability for self-monitoring is a fundamental attribute of maturity.  It’s what makes us social creatures.

Certainly not all communication is so self-regulating.  Hit your finger by mistake when hammering a nail and the first sounds you utter are not likely to be intended for others.  But most of the communication that spills from us encompass the parts of our sentient life that we deem fit for sharing.

Consider even in the smallest exigencies of life:  for example, the reasonable expectation that a person will acknowledge the courtesy of another who has held open a door, or the stranger who has paused to assist someone scrambling to collect groceries that have fallen from a torn shopping bag. There are no hard rules, but the recipients of such acts of consideration are usually expected to acknowledge the courtesy. To be rhetorical is to be aware and responsive to the shifting landscape of events and their witnesses.

This is an interesting moment to think about the social necessity of self-monitoring.  I can’t recall any modern presidential campaign when one of the contenders so casually violated the impulse for self-restraint.

Beginning in the 1970s, rhetoricians began to extend this idea of self-monitoring by attempting to locate the varied dimensions of “rhetorical sensitivity” which could make “effective social interaction manifestly possible.”1  Most notably, Rod Hart and his colleagues developed a massive correlational study of attitudes within individuals that might motivate them to weigh the effects of their actions on others. In their work “rhetorical sensitivity” was essentially a synonym for the impulse to read the needs of others and monitor one’s own rhetoric accordingly. 2

The goal of the project was to develop an inventory of attitudes—known as the RHETSEN scale—to test the idea that “rhetorical sensitivity is a function of three forces: how one views the self during communication, how one views the other, and how willing one is to adapt self to the other.”  Worded where agreement affirms these forms of awareness, some of the items on the inventory include the following:

One should keep quiet rather than say something which will alienate others.

The first thing that comes to mind is [not always] the best thing to say.

When talking to your friends, you should adjust your remarks to suit them. 

A person who speaks his or her gut feelings is [not always] to be admired.

We should have a kind word for the people we meet in life.

This is an interesting moment to think about the necessity of self-monitoring.  I can’t recall any modern presidential campaign where one of the contenders so casually violates the impulse for self-restraint.  Even past leaders who could be crude or thoughtless in private (Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon come to mind) were careful to honor the basic dignity of Americans with varied backgrounds that were within the range of their discourse.

To be sure, partisanship always frays the boundaries of what is acceptable to say in public. And the existence of “live” mics everywhere adds to the burdens of keeping strictly private thoughts out of the ears of others.  We are deep into a new age where audiences are sometimes unseen and unintended. So the risks are greater that a candidate will be heard uttering slurs against individuals or entire categories of potential constituents.

Donald Trump is both the perfect case and a cautionary model.  He is one of the victims of a fully wired age.  At the same time he has eagerly tapped into group tensions and antagonisms that energize his core supporters, using we/them binaries to build a political base based on a strategy of division rather than unification. Mexicans, African Americans, Mexican-Americans,  immigrants and scores of women have felt the cold breath of his offensive characterizations.

When voters express concern about Trump as a role-model, this lack of self-monitoring is partly what they mean.  We expect Presidents to be the personification of rhetorical sensitivity.  We want them to keep their deepest prejudices to themselves.  Virtually every idea of leadership works when the arrows are pointing away from division and toward inclusion. The problem with dividers with insufficient concern for the feelings of others is that they cannot govern a free and pluralistic nation.  They seem only capable of making the society coarser.

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1. Roderick Hart and Don Burkes, “Rhetorical Sensitivity and Social Interaction,” Speech Monographs, 39, 1972, 75-91.

2. Roderick Hart, Robert Carlson and William Eadie, “Attitudes Toward Communication and the Assessment of Rhetorical Sensitivity, Speech Monographs, March, 1980, 1-22.

Parts of this essay are adapted from  the author’s The Perfect Response: Studies of the Rhetorical Personality (2010).