– Action – Process – People – Idea –

We ended off the topic on Group Communication with a self-assessment exercise on our individual Communication Styles. We were given 40 pairs of statements, out of which we had to choose one out of each pair that best represents ourselves. The results divided us into four groups – Action people, Process people, People people, and Idea people.

 Being a psychology major naturally meant that I found this activity very exciting and interesting. The concept of grouping people into several broad categories is something very appealing to me. Besides finding out our individual styles of communication in a group setting, what was even more interesting (Which I found intriguing) was the distribution of people in each category.

Out of our lecture group, an overwhelming majority of students were identified as People people. The second largest group was process people, followed by Idea people, and finally, Action people.

Our lecturer expressed no surprise at the large majority of People people in our lecture group. According to her, she had also yielded the same result in previous lecture groups.

I came to the conclusion that most people are too nice to not want to be People people. After all, everyone wants to be nice, and being nice to others gives us lots of advantages in this social world, where having the ability to get along with everyone else brings us lots of benefits and few problems. Also, I assume that most students of Communication would probably be/want to be People people and already have better interpersonal communication and relational skills.

This method of dividing people into four different categories reminds me somewhat of the Classical Temperaments of Choleric, Melancholic, Sanguine, and Phlegmatic people. (I’m not too sure how they match with the four Communication Styles, but there is probably some degree of similarity in the four different groups.) (I remember there being the same overwhelming majority of people in the Sanguine group in my secondary school class, and my Sanguine classmates do seem like they would fit a lot into the People people cateogry in this assessment.)

Another method of dividing that I can better match this assessment with is the four elements of the astrological signs. Fire is to Action people, Earth is to Process people, Water is to People people, and Air is to Idea People.

My results for this assessment showed that I am an Idea person, and I scored the lowest for the People style of communication. There weren’t many people in the lecture hall who scored as Idea people, but there was an even lower number of students categorised as Action people.

And I remember thinking.. Why aren’t people grouped more or less evenly across the four categories of communication styles? Why can’t there be more Action people around? Does that mean that people from the three lower-scoring groups are any less relevant or valuable in any group that needs to communicate? Do people with the same communication style flock together to form Groups? (Attraction based on attitudinal similarity) Does that imply that in any given group, we are bound to have more People people than say, Action people?

Of course, carrying out this same assessment with a different group of people would probably yield slightly different results. For example, I would imagine there to be more Process and Idea people in a group of researchers, and there would probably be more Action people in a group of athletes, and the most People people in a group of politicans or for example, media people. But I would not know if my hypothesis is correct until I actually test it out.

Another of my assumptions is that the society and environment would make a big difference in the distribution of each group. Cultural contexts would yield significantly different results. For example, low context cultures like western countries, especially Germany and America, would encourage a predominance of Action and Idea people. High context cultures like Japan and China would, on the other hand, be predominantly Process and People people. (Again, I will not know if my assumptions are correct until I carry out research.)

In other words, I think that the environment that one is in and the social factors around us make us more likely to adopt certain beliefs and attitudes, and hence settle on a communication style that is more appropriate and encouraged in our own contexts. However, it is important to acknowledge the importance of each communication style as they each play an important part that cannot be missing or replaced in any situation.