Practitioners in the communicology discipline employ empirical and deductive research methods, such as cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys, experiments, meta-analyses, and content analyses, to test theoretically-derived hypotheses.
Charles Horton Cooley described the system of communication as “a tool, a progressive invention, whose improvements react upon mankind and alter the life of every individual and institution.”[1] The adjective form of commūnicō, communis, is translated as “to make common.” An important pursuit in the academic study of human communication is to understand how meaning is created through the messages shared between interaction partners.
The label communicology narrows the scope of studying human communication by focusing solely on scientific approaches to message construction, production, and exchange.
The study of human communication originated in ancient Greece and Rome with notable philosophers, such as Socrates, Cicero, and Plato.
The modern study of communication in the U.S. can be traced to four influential forefathers: Paul Lazarsfeld, Kurt Lewin, Harold Lasswell, and Carl Hovland.
Hovland was interested in the persuasion of propaganda, including ideas involving attitudes, credibility, and fear appeals.
During his post as the Director of the Institute of Human Relations at Yale University, Hovland addressed a large number of social problems in his research using multidisciplinary approaches.
[3] The term “communication” used to describe the collection of these vastly different traditions is now so broad and encompassing that it means everything and, at the same time, nothing.
Communication departments are also commonly the home of professional training in media-related topics, such as journalism, media production, Web design, and telecommunications.
Some universities have attempted to house multiple independent departments that focus exclusively on targeted aspects of communication under larger “colleges of communication.” The large breadth of the communication field meant that rhetoricians and critical cultural scholars were housed in the same departments as quantitative social scientists and even neuroscientists.
No matter what reason we have for communicating with another interactant, we simply cannot achieve that purpose without initiating a state of mutual understanding with him or her.
The social scientific approach is generally concerned with the way humans relate to each other by forming beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes about them.
Perception, attitudes, reasoning, thinking, memory, and emotions, all things that can be directly influenced by one's environment, are taken into consideration when explaining, predicting, and controlling (i.e., the functions of theory-based knowledge) human behaviors.
The view of communicology as a natural science is guided by an understanding that humans’ communicative behaviors can be best explained as a function of our biologically-engineered responses, which are, to some extent, predetermined by our evolutionary origins.
The basis for this view is that human communication that is employed for cooperation and collaboration served as an important historical adaptive advantage over several millennia.
[4] Communicology has been used to describe a discipline under the broader field of communication that uses logic-based semiotic and phenomenological methods to study human consciousness and behavioral embodiment.
[5][6] This method of studying human consciousness and embodiment can be traced to Edmund Husserl, the Father of Phenomenology, and later inspired by the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Charles Peirce.
Their aim is to classify knowledge and extract a set of key factors and basic processes that all of communication and change have in common.
Focusing on common key factors allows their students to make their knowledge useable and deliver changework more effectively within their frames of work.
It’s the systemic understanding and the clear focus on the processes beyond context and content that make this scientific work so special.