The Communication Skill Deficit Hypothesis
One of the more popular explanations of why some people turn to abuse concerns communicative skills. The communication skill deficit explanation holds that people turn to negative conflict tactics, including abuse, when their communication skills do not yield the outcomes they want (e.g., Marshall, 1994).
It appears that competent communication differentiates physically abusive marriages from others. For example, Gordis et al. (2005) discovered that that “couples reporting recent aggression... had the poorest communication” (p. 187). Likewise, Babcock et al. (1993) examined the competence of spouses using the Behavioral Observation of Communication Skill (BOCS), a measure of communication clarity, organization, and other features. These authors found that communicatively incompetent husbands were more physically and psychologically abusive. Interestingly, wife BOCS was negatively correlated with husband psychological abuse. This means that if the wife was more competent, then their husbands tended to use less psychological warfare. These authors concluded their research in the following way:deficits in husband communication skill are particularly acute in the relationships of batterers. Perhaps these deficits are greatest when conflict issues are being discussed with the partner. If the wives of batterers are more adept at verbal arguments and husbands are desperate to win those arguments, they may choose physical violence as their alternative. We can test such a hypothesis only by comparing couples’ communication and arguing skills while they are engaged in direct interaction with one another. We plan to examine such interactions in future studies. (p. 48)
Aggression occurs as a predisposition as well as through actual interaction. As a predisposition, argumentativeness is the tendency to engage in argument when faced with a controversial topic (Infante & Rancer, 1982).
Argumentativeness differs from verbal aggression, which is the tendency and behavior by using tactics that aim to hurt the other the other person’s ego (for a review of approaches, see Beatty & Pence, 2010). Infante, Sabourin, Rudd, and Shannon (1990) identified ten types ofverbally aggressive tactic: character attacks, competence attacks, background attacks (attacking the person’s history), criticism of physical appearance, maledictions (e.g., telling someone to go to hell), teasing, ridicule, threats, swearing, and nonverbal emblems (e.g., raising an eyebrow to show disdain).Research points to the functional utility of being predisposed to engage in argument behavior (i.e., to present a position and offer support). For instance, Infante, Chandler, and Rudd (1989) found that physically abusive marriages were characterized by lower self-reported argumentativeness and higher reports of spousal verbal aggressiveness. Likewise, Infante, Trebling, Shepard, and Seeds (1984) found that highly argumentative people were less likely than others to rely on aggression in roommate conflicts. Abuse appears to be a function of communicator incompetence and unwillingness to use communication to present and defend one’s position.