Recursiveness as the Dominant Feature of Communicative Behavior in Day-to-Day Interaction

Abstract

Day-to-day interaction is overtly standardized and being associated with the expectations and norms imposed by a society as well as stereotypical societal being. When communicating, an individual is perfectly aware of the roles that could be attributed to him and aims to stand up to them. At the same time he intends to promptly comprehend and process the data he obtains from the outside and fit them into his niche, or the hierarchical environment determined by his unique set of properties. To put it differently, the subject of communication reflects upon those elements which are relevant for his being, and he can comprehend given his organization. With this it makes sense to relate to repetitive nature of some actions that have proven instrumental in maintaining the hierarchy of this environment and ensure self-preservation of the subject. Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have coined the term recursiveness to relate to the repetitive character of the activities of a living entity in different cases of this living entity’s interaction with is medium. The authors of the theory of autopoiesis mainly focused on biological species, and humans being one of those. In the publications while they cover the foundations of their theory, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela refer to social systems as complex third order systems being regulated by the same self-preservation laws as a living entity. This serves as a prerequisite to attribute recursiveness to communicative behavior of a human aiming to step into social interaction and design a model of recursive communicative behavior. To verify this model we planned and ran a psycholinguistic experiment to measure the degree of the steoretypization in communicative behavior of mainstream representatives of the society. The participants were subdivided into two contrasting subclusters: “those under 24” and “those over 45”. They were offered a number of experimental cases with a task to model the communicative behavioral patterns typical for them in various day-to-day communication settings. Overall the experiment involved 219 subjects. The analysis of the data obtained outlines those settings implying a higher degree of the standardization in communicative behavior as well as the gender and age-related specifics of the participants with more stereotypical speech patterns.