Theory

Theory statement

Communication effectiveness is the degree to which a representation and delivery strategy enables specified audiences to achieve specified epistemic, behavioral, relational, or experiential goals within a specified context, subject to accuracy, ethics, and accessibility constraints.

Scope and boundary conditions

This initial model covers deliberate human-facing communication. It does not yet explain interpersonal co-construction, art, ritual, deception, nonhuman signaling, or long-term cultural change. “Effective” never means persuasive regardless of truth or harm.

Underlying mechanism

An audience interprets signals using attention, prior knowledge, language competence, goals, identity, and context. Strategy choices—content selection, wording, order, medium, visual structure, and interaction—change the probability and cost of the intended outcome. No choice is intrinsically optimal independent of those variables.

Supported predictions

• Different goals require different measures and strategies.
• Objective performance, subjective ease, trust, and recall may diverge.
• Style labels alone will poorly predict outcomes unless paired with audience, goal, task, and context.
• Accessibility acts as a constraint on acceptable strategies.
• For immediate procedural execution, correctness, critical errors, assistance, and subjective experience remain distinct; time is conditional on the goal.

Failed predictions

None tested experimentally.

Supporting evidence

See EV-COMM-2026-0001 through EV-COMM-2026-0010.

Contradicting evidence

No direct falsification yet. Cross-context principles such as explicitness and navigability may prove more general than the model currently anticipates.

Alternative explanations

• A smaller set of universal cognitive principles may explain most variance.
• Genre conventions may encode sufficient audience-goal fit without explicit modeling.
• Source accuracy and prior trust may dominate presentational strategy in many settings.

Confidence rationale

Medium (0.62 judgment): convergent standards, synthesis, and trial evidence support conditionality, but constructs and causal weights are not operationalized across domains.

Open questions

Which input variables contribute the greatest predictive value? Which constraints are universal? Can the proposed procedural outcome vector be scored reliably and sensitively across tasks?

Required updates

Validate the RP-COMM-2026-0002 scoring specification on candidate tasks, run a bounded procedural experiment, and specify a formal context schema before promotion to supported.