Process Models: Schramm, Berlo, Westley–MacLean, Newcomb

Story

1954: one chapter, two diagrams

Imagine opening the first chapter of a reader printed in 1954. The first page is surprisingly everyday. The author reminds you that the word “communication” comes from the Latin communis, “common”. Then he lines up three scenes: someone phones the fire brigade to shout that a house is burning, a young man in a parked car tries to tell the girl he loves how he feels, a newspaper tries to persuade its readers to back a political party. The process is the same in all of them, he says.

A few pages later the same author draws a plain chain that looks like a radio circuit: source, encoder, signal, decoder, destination. Put a microphone in place of the encoder and an earphone in place of the decoder and you have electronic communication; treat the source and encoder as one person and the decoder and destination as another and you have human communication. Then, in the same chapter, comes a warning that breaks the line: it is misleading to think of the communication process as starting somewhere and ending somewhere; the process is really an endless current, and each of us is a small switchboard in it.

The author is Wilbur Schramm. He did not throw away the engineer’s diagram from the lesson The Lasswell and Shannon–Weaver Models; he borrowed it and added human layers on top. This lesson tells the story of those additions and of the three models that followed (Newcomb, Westley–MacLean, Berlo).

Card

Why the line was not enough

The two models in the lesson The Lasswell and Shannon–Weaver Models were good at drawing the journey of a message from source to destination. But as researchers moved closer to the receiver’s side, places appeared where the line fell silent.

Schramm summarises the period in 1971, looking back: the audience had been thought of as a defenceless target; but psychologists such as Hovland and his team at Yale found that an audience member’s experience and personality differences were very strong in determining how a message was received. By the middle of the 1950s, in his words, the “Bullet Theory” had been shot full of holes. (For the history of that label, see the lesson The Hypodermic Needle and Magic Bullet Model.)

Three things missing from the line were named:

• The receiver’s activity: a message does not hit a target; the receiver selects and interprets.
• The place of meaning: meaning is not in the signs but in the participants; it is the receiver’s response to the signs.
• Return and relationship: the speaker and the listener keep swapping roles; the relationship shapes the fate of the message.

Process models are attempts to fill these gaps; each one puts a different gap in the foreground.

Card

Who and when? Six names, seven years

The heroes of this lesson come from different fields and fit into the years 1953–1960.

• Theodore Newcomb Theodore M. Newcomb (1903–1984): social psychologist. In 1953 he proposed the triangle of A, B and X in his paper on an approach to communicative acts.
• Wilbur Schramm Wilbur Schramm (1907–1987): from a literary background; in 1947 he founded the Institute of Communications Research at Illinois. His chapter “How Communication Works” appeared in 1954.
• Charles Osgood Charles E. Osgood (1916–1991): a psychologist at Illinois; the person who gave Schramm’s model some of its ideas.
• Bruce Westley Bruce H. Westley and Malcolm MacLean Malcolm S. MacLean Jr.: teachers of journalism; the first article in 1955, the revised one in 1957.
• David Berlo David K. Berlo (1929–1996): a doctorate at Illinois, first chair of the communication department at Michigan State; his book came out in 1960.

The order: 1949 the Shannon–Weaver book, 1953 Newcomb, 1954 Schramm, 1955–57 Westley–MacLean, 1960 Berlo, 1971 Schramm’s rewrite.

The names are linked. Westley and MacLean start from Newcomb’s ABX and criticise Lasswell’s formula and the information-theory model. In his preface Berlo says the writings of Osgood and Schramm have permeated his thinking “beyond recognition”, and he thanks his colleague MacLean as well.

Card

The core claim: four additions to the line

The four models share one claim: communication is not a one-way dispatch from a source to a destination but a process kept going by participants who influence each other, with shared experience and a constant return. Each model adds a different part to this claim:

• Schramm (1954): the more two people’s circles of experience overlap, the more easily meaning is shared; everyone both encodes and decodes; feedback ties the rope.
• Newcomb (1953): when two people talk about something (X) they orient at the same time toward each other and toward the thing; when their views diverge, a strain toward symmetry arises.
• Westley–MacLean (1957): mass communication is built with an intervening channel role (C, the gatekeeper); C selects like the receiver’s agent; feedback runs along three lines.
• Berlo (1960): each element of communication (source, message, channel, receiver) has factors that determine the outcome, and the elements are not independent of one another.

These four additions come on top of the two models in the lesson The Lasswell and Shannon–Weaver Models; they do not replace them. In the next step we open the four additions one by one.

Lab

Lab: do your two circles overlap?

Schramm’s most memorable drawing is two circles. In his own account the circles stand for the accumulated experience of two people: the source can encode only as much as its own experience allows, and the destination can decode only as much as its own experience allows. If the circles overlap in a large area, communication is easy; if the overlap is small, it is hard; if they do not overlap at all, it is impossible. His own examples: someone who has never learned Russian can neither encode nor decode in that language; someone who has never seen an aeroplane may take it for a big bird; someone with no science training has trouble reading Einstein.

Now try it (a hypothetical scene): a banker says to a ten-year-old nephew, “The transfer will reach the account tomorrow.”

1. In the banker’s circle, what signs is this sentence loaded with?
2. In the nephew’s circle, what do “transfer” and “account” evoke?
3. What is left in the overlap? How can the banker move the sentence into the overlap?

According to Schramm’s text, a source who thinks the other person will have trouble understanding can add examples and analogies; that is, choosing signs from the overlap is the way to enlarge the overlap. Textbooks call this drawing the field of experience; Schramm’s own words are “experience” in 1954 and “frame of reference” in 1971.

Card

Glossary of concepts

• Encoder, decoder, interpreter: according to Schramm everyone both encodes and decodes; the scheme that adds the role of “interpreter” is attributed to Osgood. See circular model (Osgood–Schramm).
• Field of experience: the overlap of two people’s circles of experience; shared meaning is built there. See field of experience.
• Feedback: in Schramm the return process (you also get feedback from your own message); in Westley–MacLean purposive or non-purposive; in Berlo the message re-entering the source’s system. See feedback.
• A, B, C, X (Westley–MacLean): A advocacy roles (those who transmit purposively), B behavioural system (the receiver: a person, group or society), C channel roles (those who select and transmit; the gatekeeper, see gatekeeping), X the objects and events of the world. See Westley–MacLean model.
• Orientation and symmetry (Newcomb): a person’s view of a person or object; A, B and X are the three corners of one system. See Newcomb’s ABX model.
• SMCR: the mnemonic name for Berlo’s six components reduced to four. See SMCR model (Berlo).
• Process: in Berlo, a whole with no beginning, end or fixed sequence, whose elements affect one another.
• Noise: by the common definition Schramm reports, anything in the channel that the sender did not intentionally put there; see noise.

Card

Shared assumptions and one split

Although the four models’ authors come from different disciplines, they share three things:

1. Participants are similar systems. According to Berlo, source and receiver must be similar systems; the same person can be both, and usually is. “Source” and “receiver” are not names of separate beings but of behaviours that have to be performed in communication.
2. Meaning is in people. According to Schramm, meaning exists within the participants; it is the receiver’s response to the signs. That is why the circle of experience is at the centre of the model.
3. A model is a map. Berlo compares a process to a camera: the frame stops the process and is not the event itself. According to Schramm, what tests a model is not whether it is a copy of reality but whether it lets you make predictions.

Newcomb’s model adds a fourth assumption: people try to keep their views in balance; divergence creates strain.

The split: purpose. In Berlo the source has a purpose and communication is an effort to obtain a response. Westley and MacLean also take non-purposive messages into the model: if the person transmitting has no intention to influence, the message is an X; the intervening C is non-purposive too. In talking about mass communication this difference changes who counts as the “source”.

Step by step

Schramm’s model, step by step

1. The source wants to share something and encodes it. It turns a feeling or piece of information into signs that can be transmitted (speech, writing, gesture).
2. The sign leaves the source. Once encoded, the message is independent of its sender; Schramm’s example is the helplessness every writer feels when handing the text over to be printed.
3. The destination receives the sign and decodes it, but only with meanings inside its own circle of experience.
4. Interpretation and response. The learned responses a sign calls up are its meaning; this meaning pushes the destination to do something, that is, to start encoding.
5. The return. The destination is now in the source’s place; its response is feedback. Feedback does not come only from the other side: a person who hears his own voice and corrects his pronunciation, or sees what he has written and corrects it, also gets feedback from his own message.
6. The strength of the chain. The system is only as strong as its weakest link: the source’s information, the accuracy of the encoding, the speed and accuracy of transmission, the message being decoded in a way that matches what the source encoded, the destination being able to respond to it.

These six steps can be read like a circle, but Schramm’s own phrase is an “endless process”: the two sides keep swapping roles.

Card

Newcomb’s triangle: A, B and X

Someone tells you, “this documentary is wonderful.” The sentence’s value depends on two things: the documentary and the speaker. Did the same sentence come from a friend you like or from someone you have never warmed to? Newcomb’s 1953 paper turns this pair into a model.

As Westley and MacLean report it, a mature person (B) does not orient toward an object (X) alone; if an A is there, he orients simultaneously toward both A and X. His view of X now depends not only on the satisfactions X itself can offer but also on the relation between A and X. So the full meaning of an opinion cannot be understood apart from who says it.

Newcomb’s prediction (in Westley and MacLean’s summary): other things being equal, when A tells B something about X and B likes A (or at least does not dislike A), B’s perception of X after the communication is more similar to A’s than it was before. Newcomb frames this as a “strain toward symmetry” and draws on Heider’s ideas of balance. In 1971 Schramm counts A–B–X as an early example of consistency theories.

The model thus moves from the “carrying messages” line to a “relationship triangle”: communication is a way of keeping two people’s views of something in balance. The limit is here too: according to Westley and MacLean, A and B in Newcomb are only persons; the next card shows how they get past this limit.

Step by step

Westley and MacLean: a C steps in

1. The simple act. A transmits something about X to B (Newcomb). In the face-to-face case many senses are at work and feedback returns at once.
2. Mass communication is different: the variety of senses shrinks, and feedback is minimised or delayed.
3. B’s surroundings are full of Xs. B orients selectively according to his needs and security problems. Some Xs arrive directly: seeing through the window that a neighbour’s house is on fire is information without any A.
4. A C for Xs out of reach. C selects the abstractions suited to B’s needs, turns them into symbols with shared meanings and transmits them through a channel. The authors introduce C as Lewin’s gatekeeper as adapted by White and as Bush’s “encoder”.
5. Whose agent is C? B’s. C survives only to the extent that it satisfies B’s needs; B chooses among many Cs, so Cs are rivals for attention.
6. Three feedback lines. From B to A, from B to C and from C to A. They can be purposive (an angry reader’s letter) or non-purposive (purchase data).

Their own examples are charming: if a housewife with too much to do cannot go round her neighbours, the neighbourhood gossip becomes her C; a remote frontier colony posts a sentinel; a state sets up a diplomatic service.

Card

Berlo: the factors inside four elements

Berlo’s 1960 book moves forward with a question: what should you look at in an analysis of communication? The answer is a model of six components: source, encoder, message, channel, decoder, receiver. When two people talk, source and encoder and receiver and decoder can be treated together; four elements remain. This is the short form textbooks call SMCR.

The weight lies in the factors inside the elements:

• Source (and, as its mirror, the receiver): communication skills (writing, speaking, reading, listening and thought), attitudes (toward oneself, the subject matter and the other person), knowledge level, place in a social-cultural system.
• Message: code, content and treatment (treatment: how something is said as well as what); each with elements and structure.
• Channel: in its simplest sense the senses: seeing, hearing, touching; now and then taste and smell.

Berlo’s own examples are nice: if a salesman does not believe in the product this leaks into his message; on a newspaper the reporter, the desk editor, the typesetter and the deliverer are parts of one communication network. This is a list model: it says “look here”, it does not say “this is what will happen”. Berlo himself says the model tries to be useful rather than “true”.

Lab

Lab: solve one episode with two models

The episode (documented). A series of cartoons had been prepared to make prejudice look ridiculous: a character called “Mr. Biggott” displayed absurd prejudices; for example, in hospital he demanded only “sixth generation American blood” for a transfusion. The study was done for the research department of the American Jewish Committee; the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia carried it out. The expected path was this: the prejudiced reader sees that Biggott’s ideas resemble his own, finds Biggott absurd, realises the ideas are absurd, and gives up his prejudice. What happened was different: some of those who first understood the cartoon tried so hard to escape identifying with Biggott that they missed its point; the authors called this a “derailment of understanding”. (You met the same episode in the lesson The Hypodermic Needle and Magic Bullet Model for a different question.)

Task 1: Schramm. Draw the cartoonist’s circle and the prejudiced reader’s circle. What is in the overlap? The authors also describe cases where the reader took the cartoon into his own frame of reference and transformed it.

Task 2: Newcomb. A is the cartoonist, B the reader, X prejudice. Does B feel close to A? Is the reader’s reaction toward A’s view, or away from it?

Task 3: The gap. Neither model tells you “what happened”; they show you where to look. (The interpretation is ours; the article’s authors themselves call the part that explains the motives “speculative”.)

Card

What is a model tested by?

The source texts of these models (Schramm 1954, Westley–MacLean 1957, Berlo 1960) are proposals for a conceptual framework, not experimental reports; that is why the “evidence” section does not describe an experiment. Their authors’ own yardsticks:

• Schramm: most of communication happens in the “black box” of the central nervous system; so models are analogies and gross functions, and the test is not whether a model is a copy of the black box but whether it lets you make predictions.
• Westley and MacLean: they write that their model is not a full theory but a paradigm, and that its worth lies in its heuristic value.
• Berlo: he says no model is “right” or “true”; some are more useful than others.

Still, each model has a sentence that can be tested:

• Newcomb and Westley–MacLean: B’s perception of X moves toward A’s if B likes A.
• Schramm: the less experiences overlap, the harder it is to understand each other.
• Berlo: the relationship between the skills of source and receiver is more decisive than skill level alone (he calls this relationship a “vital” determinant of the accuracy of communication, its fidelity).

The honest answer in an exam to “what is the evidence for the model?”: the model itself is not evidence but a framework that guides research; the real evidence is sought in the fields it borrows from (social psychology, learning theory, information theory).

Myth check

Does “process model” mean a model that draws a circle?

What people assume. “Linear” models are one-way lines and “process” models draw loops; Schramm’s circular model, Berlo’s SMCR and Westley–MacLean are this new generation. In Turkish Wikipedia Berlo’s model is called a “linear transmission model” and a popular summary lists the lack of feedback among its faults.

What the evidence says. The sources are more complicated:

• In 1954 Schramm does not say “circular”; he says the process has no beginning or end. The “circular” label came later.
• Berlo defines “process” as a point of view and not a drawing: elements affect one another and there is no fixed order; but his first model is a list of six components, and the term feedback enters the book only in the chapter on learning.
• Westley and MacLean put “feedback” in quotation marks and write that A “transmits” something to B; Sapienza and colleagues therefore still count the model as transmission-based.

Conclusion: “process” is a way of reading, not a way of drawing; and a half-finished way of reading at that: the language is still the language of sending, transmitting and encoding.

Card

What can they still not draw?

These models turned the line into a network; let us also say honestly where they stop.

• Context in one box. Berlo puts the social-cultural system into the list of features of source and receiver; Schramm in 1971 treats the social layers of communication (the situation, relationships, relevant groups, society) separately in the text. Carey’s ritual view, on the other hand, reads communication as sharing and sustaining a common world; see The Ritual View of Communication: Carey.
• The language of transmission continues. According to Sapienza and colleagues, the Westley–MacLean model is still counted as transmission-based because of its terminology and its way of conceiving communication.
• Feedback is secondary. In Berlo’s first model feedback is not a component; in Westley–MacLean it is minimised or delayed in mass communication.
• Institutions’ interests are absent. C is drawn as the receiver’s agent; the owners’ interests do not appear in the model (interpretation). Westley and MacLean are partly aware: a reporter may in practice act as an advocate; the authors treat this as a gap between role prescription and actual behaviour and leave it as an empirical question.

What do defenders say? The authors say from the start that the models are maps: Berlo on the limits of freezing a process with a camera, Westley and MacLean that the model is a paradigm and not a theory, Schramm that the yardstick is prediction. “What did they leave out?” is a fair question, and so is “what did what they drew make you ask?”

Lab

Today: whose feedback is at whose gate?

Westley and MacLean’s 1957 article contains an observation surprisingly close to the screen age: should “special publics” such as trade journals, hobby publications and house organs count as mass communication? Even if some reach circulations measured in millions, where the line is drawn must be arbitrary; their model does not need such a distinction, because their Bs vary in how far they share common problems.

The following is not documented evidence but a thinking exercise on how the model might be applied today (inference):

• In a message group, a newsletter or a platform, who or what is the “C” that selects which events reach you? The model makes you ask: whose agent is C, yours or A’s?
• Show the three feedback lines (B→A, B→C, C→A) on a platform you use: which is fast and which is delayed? In 1957 the line in mass communication was counted as “minimised or delayed”; today signals such as likes and comments may have shortened it. Treat this as a hypothesis, not a conclusion.
• The authors separate purposive feedback (a letter) from non-purposive feedback (purchase data); which of your clicks on a platform are purposive and which are non-purposive?

How platforms actually work is a separate subject: see Computer-Mediated Communication Theories.

Card

This is how exams ask it

Typical question patterns

• “Source, message, channel, receiver” → Berlo (1960); factors: communication skills, attitudes, knowledge level, social-cultural system.
• “A, B and X” → Newcomb (1953), ABX; symmetry, balance.
• “The model that adds a gatekeeper C role and adapts Newcomb’s model to mass communication” → Westley–MacLean.
• “The overlap of two circles, shared experience, encoder–interpreter–decoder” → Schramm (1954); Osgood–Schramm.
• Matching: Schramm → circles of experience; Newcomb → ABX; Westley–MacLean → C and three feedback lines; Berlo → SMCR factors.

Tempting wrong answers

• “Berlo is a linear model” → summaries write so; Berlo’s own text stresses process. In an exam write the classification in your textbook; in a discussion cite the source.
• “Schramm’s model is 1952” → the year the paper was written; the year of publication is 1954.
• “Westley–MacLean first appeared in 1957” → the first version was 1955.
• “The S of SMCR is a single person” → in Berlo source and receiver are names of behaviours.
• Years: Newcomb 1953; Schramm 1954; Westley–MacLean 1957 (first 1955); Berlo 1960.

Alternative names in Turkish (Turkish Wikipedia and the renderings chosen in this course)

• Berlo modeli, SMCR modeli, Kaynak–Mesaj–Kanal–Alıcı modeli.
• Newcomb modeli, ABX modeli, ABX iletişim modeli.
• Schramm modeli, Schramm’ın iletişim modeli, Osgood–Schramm modeli, dairesel (döngüsel) model; “ortak deneyim alanı” for “field of experience”.
• Westley–MacLean modeli; “kapı bekçisi” (gatekeeper).
• Classification: doğrusal iletim (linear transmission) models, etkileşim (interaction) models, işlem (süreç, process) models.

Summary

Summary card

• The shared claim: beyond the line of Lasswell and Shannon–Weaver, communication is a process built by the participants’ shared experience and by a return.
• Schramm (1954): the chain source, encoder, signal, decoder, destination + two circles of experience + everyone both encodes and decodes + the endlessness of the process. “Circular” and “field of experience” are later labels; Osgood’s ideas are credited in a footnote in Schramm’s text.
• Newcomb (1953): A, B, X; a strain toward symmetry; “who is speaking” is part of the meaning.
• Westley–MacLean (1955/1957): A (advocate), B (receiver system), C (channel, gatekeeper) and X; C is the receiver’s agent; three feedback lines; purposive and non-purposive messages.
• Berlo (1960): source, encoder, message, channel, decoder, receiver (the acronym SMCR came later); skills, attitudes, knowledge, social-cultural system; code, content, treatment; the senses.
• Limits: the models are maps; their language is still the language of transmission; context and power are drawn only in part; “process” is a way of reading, not a way of drawing.
• Historiography: Schramm’s “founder” story, the debate on whether the transmission model was a “straw man”, Berlo’s mention of the needle: a model is also read by what it sets itself against.
• Exam: years (1953, 1954, 1957/1955, 1960), letters (ABX, SMCR, A–B–C–X), alternative Turkish names, Berlo’s “linear” label.