This is an older essay I wrote.
It is undeniable how important communication has been in the progress of humanity. Even before conventional languages were invented humans must have communicated using gestures or actions of the body, the scope of which was limited and localised (a lot of gestures only being understood within a tribe etc). The invention of language broadened the scope of communication. Not only could matters pertaining to day to day life be discussed but as language slowly evolved more abstract and complex concepts could be communicated through it. While we are discussing the merits it is important to point out the demerits too - language was still localised, people at different places came up with different languages (some languages being more widespread than others primarily because of historical reasons like invasions, war, immigration etc) and more importantly language posed a higher learning curve than simple gestures. Children all across the globe spend years to learn a language (the cost we have to pay for having higher expressive power). But the point of this article was not to discuss about languages but something more fundamental than it. “Communication” requires not only the language but also the background. The background could comprise of many things - the context of the conversation, the people and objects involved (the agents), shared experiences between these agents etc. (i.e the complete knowledge of the world where these agents reside). So it is natural to ask the question - Is “communication” expressive enough to convey everything? The answer to this might seem yes at first, everything we can imagine we can put down in words/picture/gestures and communicate with anyone else. But I argue that “communication” misses out on one thing, it is the “intention”. You not only need to know what the person is saying, who the person is, how they are related to you etc but also why they are saying it?. Even with complete knowledge about background it is still a difficult task for the listener to know what was intended by the speaker with certainity. The process of understanding “communication” is thus to figure out this intention of the speaker.
Everybody goes through life having different experiences and understanding of the world. The result of which is that everyone can interpret the same thing very differently. This can be explained easily using a concept of probability called priors. Priors are pre-conceived notion about events in the world which we have accumulated over the years through experiences. We have priors about all sorts of things in the world - also on intentions. Everyone has some idea what the other person intends or could possibly intend. With the background set, let me present a simple model for understanding (also perhaps misunderstanding). We have the knowledge about message (textual, verbal, non verbal etc) and the background of the speaker and we want to infer the “intent”. We already have a prior on this “intent”. Some stranger calls you and asks you to provide bank details - your prior says that this is more likely a fraud but if the same person is a family member you know it’s genuine and they need your help. Here knowing the background (i.e how the speaker is related to you) helped you understand. Since we are already talking about priors it wouldn’t be far fetched to see all this as a simple realisation of Bayes Theorem.
P(Intent | message+background) ∝ P(message+background | Intent) × P(Intent)
Most of the time our messages are clear enough or the person has enough background about the conversation for proper understanding. Misunderstanding happens when we don’t convey things well or that due to the prior of the other person they interpret it differently. Let’s focus more on the second reason. You offer to help a stranger who seems lost, they might think that you’re trying to dupe them. You text someone unknown on social media, you would most likely be thought of as a creep. You cancel some plans because some work came up, the other person might think you are not interested or they are less important in your life. There are numerous examples like this, your innocent intention was misunderstood because of mismatch in the priors. And the priors in the above example didn’t come out of nowhere, they are rightly there for a reason (too many people doing frauds with strangers or being a creep on internet etc). And through this article I definitely don’t intend people to ignore or change their priors because these play a huge survival role. These priors are what helps us decide anything, not to repeat mistakes, protect us from ill and evil of others etc.
So why did I write this? Humans have been doing this complex task of inference rather effortlessly (maybe subconsciously also) on their own for ages but sometimes even the awareness of the process itself does us good. If we try to introspect into our own priors (also popularly called biases) we will come to an understanding of how certain events or experiences in our life moulded us as a result of which we arrive at understanding of anything in a certain way and not some other. And most importantly next time we are on either side of communication we can ponder over two things - (i) what could the other person interpret this as? If you know the person you know a bit about their priors also so we can communicate things with more clarity and personalisation and (ii) did I do a good job of interpreting what the other person communicated? Did I overlook something the person could have intended due to my priors?