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 his 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 on 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.