Titanic: Relational And Interpersonal Communication
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The Titanic stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson and Kate Winslet as Rose in an epic romance tale of the fatal maiden voyage of the R.M.S Titanic (Titanic). Starting with authentic footage of the departure of the Titanic on its fateful journey, this epic movie articulates the events that occur on that tragic night from the position of survivor Rose. The timeworn 100-year-old lady recounts her tale of duty, love and tragedy to a salvage team searching for a lost diamond. Throughout this movie there are countless examples of different terms and concepts that illustrates both relational and interpersonal communication between characters. This paper is designed to both define and give in movie examples of the collection of different concepts,…show more content… An important concept in communication to begin with is the theories of attributions. This theory is based on the idea that personal characteristics are used to explain behavior (O’ Hair and Wiemann 40). The reason we make attributions is to “ explain the causes of behavior and to justify your perceptions, thus giving you greater control of the situation behavior (O’ Hair and Wiemann 40). There is a scene in the titanic where Caledon, Rose’s fiancé, expresses his dissatisfaction with Rose’s painting that were created by Picasso. Caledon has a personality that reflects the snobby upper class; he acts as if he is better than other people and that defines his personality. He acts cruel and mean and this behavior reflects Caledon’s personality throughout the entire movie. So when Caledon expresses his dissatisfaction with Rose’s painting: Rose’s attributions of Caledon are that he is a snobby, mean upperclassmen that…show more content… The main difference between the two is that: one explains why certain things happen to other people, and the other explains why things happen to us. To start, the fundamental attribution is the “tendency to overemphasize the internal and underestimate the external causes of behaviors we observe in others” (O’ Hair and Wiemann 40). One example of this can be in a scene near the beginning of the titanic: in this scene four men are gathered together in a bar playing a poker game that will decide who gets to ride the titanic. The man who originally bets his titanic tickets loses, thus the fundamental attribution error is the idea that the people in the bar would conclude that he lost the tickets because he was foolish enough to bet his tickets, which would be an internal way to look at it; as appose to the people in the bar saying he lost the tickets because the cards he got were not good enough to win the game, which would be something external. Yet, when we the situation involves us; internal and external conclusions are viewed in a different manner which is where self-serving bias comes into play. We tend to attribute our own success to internal factors and we also tend to blame external effects on our failures (O’ Hair and Wiemann 40). Referring back to