Social psychology traditionally has been defined as the study of the ways in which people affect, and are affected by, others.1 Communication is one of the primary means by which people affect one another, and, in light of this, one might expect the study of communication to be a core topic of social psychology, but historically that has not been the case.
No doubt there are many reasons. Among them is the fact that communication is a complex and multidisciplinary concept, and, across the several disciplines that use the term, there is no consensus on exactly how it should be defined. It is an important theoretical construct in such otherwise dissimilar fields as cell biology, computer science, ethology, linguistics, electrical engineering, sociology, anthropology, genetics, philosophy, semiotics, and literary theory. And although there is a core of meaning common to the way the term is used in these disciplines, the particularities differ enormously. What cell biologists call communication bears little resemblance to what anthropologists study under the same rubric...