Models of Communication

Sender-Receiver Models

As the name suggests, sender-receiver models describe communication in terms of a person sending a message or signal to someone who receives it. Many variations on this basic theme differ in how they represent the receiver’s response, or how the receiver is understood to distinguish the signal/message from noise or potentially competing signals in the environment. In general, this model suggests that senders deliberately encode meaning in a message, and that receivers must then successfully decode the message to obtain that meaning.

According to sender-receiver models, accurate communication happens when receivers correctly decode the message that senders intended to send. Improving communication is about helping senders encode messages more clearly and educating receivers in the knowledge and skills that they need for accurate decoding. A major limitation of this model is that it tends to downplay the importance of context.

Here’s an example of a scholarly article of using the sender-receiver model to study communication around epigenetics.

Rhetorical Triangle Models

According to the rhetorical triangle, the author (or speaker), audience, and message all interact to form a rhetorical situation. Meaning is produced in the context of that situation. Variations on this theme differ in whether they imagine the vertices of that triangle to exist before communication occurs or whether those roles and the rhetorical situation itself are produced in the act of communicating. They also differ in exactly how broader context is represented.

Rhetorical triangle models differ from sender-receiver molecules in that, according to the rhetorical triangle, meaning is not contained in the message. Instead, meaning is produced in the context of the rhetorical situation, as a function of how the communicator, the audience, and the message interact—including its mode or how it’s communicated beyond the content of what is communicated.

While the rhetorical triangle model is still taught in most college composition courses, many practicing rhetoricians also now consider it overly simplistic unless it’s modified to account for how individual’s roles change in communication contexts, and how communication contexts are only produced when elements of a situation come together.  

Ecological or Ambient Rhetorical Models

According to ecological or ambient models, communication is fundamentally about myriad factors interacting in context. Pulling those factors apart is difficult because, for example, the same person may become a different kind of speaker through how they interact with different environments. Furthermore, the environment itself (where communication is happening, what else is going on in that space, its spatial arrangement, etc.) may be part of the message. Words spoken from a raised stage in front of hundreds of people hit differently than the same words spoken from a bar stool or classroom seat.  

According to ecological or ambient models, accurate communication is never just about whether the communicator or the audience has done the right things, because no one person will controls the entire communication ecology. As with rhetorical triangle models, improving communication is about learning to adjust for context and about constant listening for feedback to inform how to continue adjusting.

For a review of how ecology and rhetoric intersect, see “Why rhetoric matters for ecology” by Caroline Gottschalk Druschke and Bridie McGreavy.

How Models Differ in Explaining what Happens when Something Goes Wrong

Under a sender-receiver model, if you communicated and didn’t achieve the effect you wanted, you failed to communicate clearly and/or your audience doesn’t have the literacy they need to clearly understand you. For example, maybe you used a lot of jargon that your audience doesn’t know. Maybe you relied on ambiguous language that didn’t clearly communicate your message.

Under a rhetorical triangle model, you failed to understand or appropriately account for the rhetorical situation: you may not have tailored your message to your audience, or understood the affordances and constraints of your modalities, or introduced your message in a felicitous context. Maybe you tried to talk about fecal microbiota transfer on the evening news and a bunch of people changed the station because they didn’t want to think about poo while they were eating dinner. Maybe you buried your class attendance policy in the middle of a paragraph about respect on the fourth page of the syllabus.

Under an ecological or ambient model, whether communication had the communicator’s desired effect is at least to some extent beyond anyone’s control. Some kinds of communication ecologies may arise often enough that communicators and audiences learn how to negotiate them to more or less predictable effect. For others, we may have to extrapolate from what we know about other settings, recognizing that we’ll also have to respond to new considerations. For example, maybe you wrote an article about science communication that most of your colleagues took in an entirely different direction than you’d anticipated because it interacted in a way that you didn’t expect with an ongoing debate in the field that you didn’t know about. Maybe you told your students that you wanted your class to be a safe and inclusive space, but some combination of the climate on your campus, current events, and your way of presenting yourself led some students to read that statement as threatening rather than reassuring.

Because sender-receiver models are simplified and easy to quantify, they can be useful when context is known and relatively stable. They are less useful when context is unknown and variable, as is often the case for metaphors and other dimensions of science communication that are likely to be read differently across relevant audiences.