Convergence Vs Divergence

Think about the last time you talked to one of your friends. How are you talking were you using big words or were you using small ones. Were you talking in complete sentences or were you talking in sentence fragments? Were you being serious or are you being sarcastic? Now think about the last time you talked to one of your professors or bosses, were you using big or small words were you using complete sentences were you being serious or were you being sarcastic. Hopefully you had different answers for each of these. With your friends you were probably being much more casual much more laid back maybe even goofing around but with your professors/bosses you were likely more serious and a lot more professional. This is due to a thing called

Subconscious or conscious choices are made about whose communication system to us and how much to accommodate each other.
Convergence is when we speak and behave more similarly to the person with whom we are communicating . there are many elements of communication that we can converge on, pace of speech, pitch, tone, and even nonverbal behaviors.
EXAMPLE: have you ever spoken to someone whispering, chances are you are gonna whisper to (this is convergence)
Divergence is for all intensive purposes, the exact opposite of convergence, its when an individual purposely speaks and acts differently from the person whom they are communicating. It is usually used when a communicator wants to point out there differences form someone else such as in a debate, or when you are just expressing a different viewpoint. There is a utility to divergence as well. it allows people in cultures in general to retain there identify. providing a richer communication experience. Now a days we see more teenagers having problems with communicating. a 9th grade student that attended john f kennedy school in Paterson new jersey , had his phone taken away by his teacher for using it in class. , the student approached the teacher to retrieve his phone back. During a student teacher conversation you would expected the student to converge in the approbate way to speak to a figure in authority, instead

and many researchers have added on to this foundation, but this foundation has always proven to be very sound. The fact is there are a lot of different elements that play into how we communicate with others. but the ways in which we exploit our similarities and differences are important and understanding that will help you become a better communicator.

convergence “ although convergent communicative acts reduce interpersonal differences. interindividual variability in extent and frequency of convergence is, perhaps not surprisingly, also apparent, corresponding to sociodemographic variables such as age (Delia and Clark 1977).

convergence and integration
“CAT proposes that speech convergence reflects, in the unmarked case, a speakers or a groups need (often unconscious) for social integration or identification with another.”
“ in the early days of its development, the theory relied heavily on notions of similarity attraction (Bryne 1971), which, it its simplest form, suggests that as one person becomes more similar to another, this increases the likelihood that the second will like the first. Thus, convergence through speech and nonverbal behaviors is one of the many strategies that may be adopted to become more similar to another, involving the reduction of linguistic