Interpersonal Communication Accommodation Theory

Interpersonal communication drives and influences all aspects of life. Close friends, business partners, and mentors all affect a person in ways that often change their entire way of life. As an individual talks to someone else, or becomes a part of another's life, they often start to accommodate the other, changing the way they talk, or even how they look and act, to ensure that the different party is as comfortable as they can be. Within the same relationship, the people involved are often constantly seeing whether the value and worth of it are more than the costs involved with maintaining the connection that they have established. For the week consisting from April 23th-April 30th, a log was kept of all of the interactions that were between

Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) is an objectivist, intercultural communication theory that emerged within the 1970s. Originally known as Speech Accommodation Theory, it argues that when two people take part in communication, they change some aspect of their behavior in order to accommodate the other person. This can range from how they dress and look to their body language, and is in response to the differences that people have in their culture, such as age, occupation, or ethnicity.

The goal of CAT is to explain how this happens, and predict the extent to which this shall occur between different people. To achieve this goal, it makes certain assumptions, the most important being that the way that we perceive the actions of others while communicating will determine how we evaluate interaction and adapt as needed. As we adapt, we shall start to accommodate who we are communicating with in one of four different ways: convergence, divergence, maintenance, and over-accommodation. Important within this theory is that there are various reasons for why one would want to accommodate, based upon social identity theory, as well as how the other person perceives the one who is