Motivation (ch. 36)

Motivation is a very important aspect when it comes to communication. It helps us to fulfill basic needs of affiliation, achievement, control, and reducing our uncertainty and anxiety. The need for affiliation is a good example of our motivation in communication. We always have a need to form close relationships with others and we force ourselves to do this. This theory can kind of tie in with group communication, and how we sometimes adapt to the beliefs and attitudes of the groups we associate ourselves with. It almost makes me think that because we have a need for affiliation, we may adapt to the beliefs and attitudes of others simply so that we may feel that we belong to a group. I like this idea because not only are we fulfilling a need that we have, we also learn new things from the people around us. If we surround ourselves with people who are different from us, we learn things about different beliefs and how other people think. Knowing things like this helps the communication between others. This idea ties in with the need to reduce uncertainty, and how we motivate ourselves to communicate so that we may gain knowledge and create understanding. We communicate with others so that we may be able to learn new things, understand them, thus creating a nice flow of communication.

Credibility (Ch. 36)

Aristotle believed that it was important for a speaker to clearly show their competence on the topics they speak about. The audience has to be able to relate to the speaker in order for the speaker to grasp their attention. This kind of helps the speaker build a relationship with the audience, building trust between the speaker and the audience. When the speaker, or really any communication source, proves to be invalid and untrustworthy, the audience will no longer listen to that source, and find another source to get their information from. In politics, when the public finds out that the government lied, or rather didn't give all of the information about a certain issue, you can see how the public start to not trust the information they provide to them. They see this as a violation of the trust that they had for the government. With any communicator, if they are not seen as a credible source of information, they are not going to be taken seriously. Once the credibility is put into question, the source will always be viewed in scrutiny because at one point or another, it was seen as dishonest.