What communication brings to the study of gaslighting: metatheory toward interdisciplinarity

ABSTRACT

Communication scholars are uniquely positioned to engage in complex, interdisciplinary research that integrates insights from different fields alongside a key expertise in the role of human symbol use. Viewing symbolizing as one of many central elements in complex social problems, we argue that communication scholars benefit when they begin from an interdisciplinary posture in conducting their research. We take as a case study the example of gaslighting. We show how research on gaslighting from philosophy, psychology, and sociology profits from the addition of insights from the field of communication and propose directions for future research on gaslighting that incorporate communication into robust interdisciplinary projects.

KEYWORDS:

• gaslighting
• interdisciplinarity
• theory
• metatheory
• epistemology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Allen F. Repko, Rick Szostak, and Michelle Phillips Buchberger, Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies (Los Angeles: Sage, 2020); Leland G. Spencer and Michelle Phillips Buchberger, “(Inter)Disciplinary Transgressions: Feminism, Communication, and Critical Interdisciplinarity.” In Transgressing Feminist Theory and Discourse: Advancing Conversations across Disciplines, ed. Jennifer C. Dunn and Jimmie Manning (New York: Routledge, 2018), 16–30.

2 Robin Stern, The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life (Harmony, 2007); Clint G. Graves and Jennifer A. Samp, “The Power to Gaslight,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 38, no. 11 (2021): 3378–86.

3 Clint G. Graves and Leland G. Spencer, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Epistemics of Gaslighting,” Communication Theory 32, no. 1 (2022): 48–67, https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtab013.

4 We are, of course, not the first communication scholars to call for interdisciplinarity or to theorize communication’s particular aptitude for it, as this special issue attests. See, for example, Franklin H. Knower, “Interdisciplinary Studies of Communication: An Editorial,” Central States Speech Journal 12, no. 3 (January 1, 1961): 163–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510976109362595; Jimmie Manning et al., “(Inter)(Cross)(Multi)(Trans)Disciplining Sex, Gender, and Sexuality Studies: A Qualitative Inquiry into the Reflections of Researchers, Teachers, and Practitioners,” Women & Language 31, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 36–41; Patricia J. Sotirin and Victoria L. Bergvall, “Interdisciplinarity in Communication, Language, and Gender Studies: Whence, Why, Whither?,” Women & Language 31, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 1–7; and the research series edited by Colin B. Grant, Tino Meitz, and Seung-Mock Yang on Interdisciplinary Communication Studies (https://www.peterlang.com/series/ics); for an opposing view, see Valerie V. Peterson, “Against Interdisciplinarity,” Women & Language 31, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 42–50.

5 Repko, Szostak, and Buchberger, Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies.

6 For discussion, see Spencer and Phillips Buchberger, “(Inter)Disciplinary Transgressions.”

7 Celeste M. Condit and L. Bruce Railsback, Transilience: How to Understand Everything (Even Human Beings), 2005, http://railsback.org/Transilience/ConditRailsbackEverything2PH.pdf; see also, Celeste M. Condit, “How Should We Study the Symbolizing Animal?,” https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/annual-convention/NCA_Convention_Video_Archive_2004_Arnold_Lecture.pdf.

8 Condit, “How Should We.”

9 Celeste M. Condit, Angry Public Rhetorics: Global Relations and Emotion in the Wake of 9/11 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).

10 As one reviewer of this article noted, Transilience would seem to encourage a synthetic analysis that draws on literatures from the physical, biological, and social sciences simultaneously. However, one of Condit and Railsback’s central arguments is that any object of analysis can be examined from multiple view points and at different scales. Condit’s Angry Public Rhetorics borrows biological literatures but not literatures in physics or chemistry precisely because of the limited use such literatures would have to her overall analysis. Her argumentative purpose is not served by scaling down the physical matter of bin Laden’s speeches or the chemical, hormonal reactions associated with human anger. Such approaches might present as useful under certain argument structures; however, it is not imperative in the Transilience framework to use all materials at all scales in all analyses (which are necessarily finite and directed). Much of the work that we discuss in this essay is concentrated on the “symbolic” node of Transilience, which incorporates many different disciplines. However, other studies in communication have branched into physical and biological language. For example, Diane Davis has interrogated physical and biological phenomena in her work on rhetoricity. Condit and Railsback, Transilience; Condit, Angry Public Rhetorics; Diane Davis, “Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38, no. 2 (April 15, 2008): 123–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773940701779785; Diane Davis, “Rhetoricity at the End of the World,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 50, no. 4 (2017): 431–51, https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.50.4.0431.

11 Repko, Szostak, and Buchberger, Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies.

12 Celeste M. Condit, “You Can’t Study and Improve Communication with a Telescope,” Communication Monographs 76, no. 1 (2009): 4, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637750802684006.

13 Robert T. Craig, “Communication Theory as a Field,” Communication Theory 9, no. 2 (1999): 119–61, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.1999.tb00355.x; see also, Robert T. Craig, “The Constitutive Metamodel: A 16-Year Review,” Communication Theory 25, no. 4 (2015): 356–74, https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12076; Clint G. Graves, “Dialogic Inquiry as a Mechanism of the Constitutive Metamodel,” Annals of the International Communication Association 43, no. 3 (2019): 240–256; Marc Howard Rich and Jessica S. Robles, eds., Practicing Communication Theory: Exploring, Applying, and Teaching the Constitutive Metamodel (Cognella, 2020).

14 Graves, “Dialogic Inquiry,” 245.

15 Graves, “Dialogic Inquiry.”

16 Kate Abramson, “Turning up the Lights on Gaslighting,” Philosophical Perspectives 28, no. 1 (2014): 1–30, https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12046; Stern, The Gaslight Effect; Veronica Ivy, “Allies Behaving Badly: Gaslighting as Epistemic Injustice.” In Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus (New York: Routledge, 2017), 167–74.

17 Abramson, “Turning Up the Lights”; Graves and Spencer, “Rethinking.”

18 Repko, Szostak, and Buchberger, Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies; Spencer and Phillips Buchberger, “(Inter)Disciplinary Transgressions.”

19 Russell Barton and J.A. Whitehead, “The Gas-Light Phenomenon,” The Lancet 293, no. 7608 (1969): 1258–60, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(69)92133-3; Victor Calef and Edward M. Weinshel, “Some Clinical Consequences of Introjection: Gaslighting,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1981): 44–66, https://doi.org/10.1080/21674086.1981.11926942.

20 Stern, The Gaslight Effect.

21 Stern, 174.

22 Paige L. Sweet, “The Sociology of Gaslighting,” American Sociological Review 84, no. 5 (2019): 851–75, https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419874843.

23 Sweet, 854.

24 Sweet, 852.

25 Priya Fielding-Singh and Amelia Dmowska, “Obstetric Gaslighting and the Denial of Mothers’ Realities,” Social Science & Medicine 301 (May 1, 2022): 114938, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.114938.

26 Sweet, “The Sociology of Gaslighting.”

27 Abramson, “Turning Up the Lights,” 3.

28 Abramson, 19.

29 Ivy, “Allies.”

30 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2007).

31 Veronica Ivy, “Gaslighting as Epistemic Violence: ‘Allies,’ Mobbing, and Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Including a Case Study of Harassment of Transgender Women in Sport.” In Overcoming Epistemic Injustice: Social and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Benjamin R. Sherman and Stacey Goguen (New York: Routledge, 2019), 285–301.

32 Angelique M. Davis and Rose Ernst, “Racial Gaslighting,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 7, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 761–74, https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2017.1403934; Boni Wozolek, “Gaslighting Queerness: Schooling as a Place of Violent Assemblages,” Journal of LGBT Youth 15, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 319–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2018.1484839.

33 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice.

34 Abramson, “Turning Up the Lights”; Sweet, “The Sociology of Gaslighting.”

35 Stern, The Gaslight Effect.

36 Abramson, “Turning Up the Lights.”

37 Judee K. Burgoon and Jerold L. Hale, “The Fundamental Topoi of Relational Communication,” Communication Monographs 51, no. 3 (September 1984): 193–214, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637758409390195; James Price Dillard, Denise Haunani Solomon, and Mark T. Palmer, “Structuring the Concept of Relational Communication,” Communication Monographs 66, no. 1 (March 1999): 49–65, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637759909376462.

38 Though we take up two examples in this section, readers can also find the concept of gaslighting treated from media studies, communication and law, and rhetorical theory perspectives, respectively, in Tommy Shane, Tom Willaert, and Marc Tuters, “The Rise of ‘Gaslighting’: Debates about Disinformation on Twitter and 4chan, and the Possibility of a ‘Good Echo Chamber,’” Popular Communication 20, no. 3 (July 3, 2022): 178–92, https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2022.2044042; G. Alex Sinha, “Lies, Gaslighting and Propaganda,” Buffalo Law Review 68, no. 4 (September 6, 2020): 1037–1116; Clint G. Graves and Leland G. Spencer, “Against Knowing: The Rhetorical Structure of Epistemic Violence,” Southern Communication Journal 87, no. 5 (2022): 403–417, https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2022.2101683.

39 Graves and Spencer, “Rethinking.”

40 Graves and Samp, “The Power.”

41 Craig, “Communication Theory.”

42 Graves and Spencer, “Rethinking,” 62.

43 Craig, “Communication Theory,” 133.

44 Ivy, “Gaslighting”; Ivy, “Allies.”

45 Graves and Spencer, “Rethinking.”

46 Craig, “Communication Theory,” 133.

47 Sweet, “The Sociology of Gaslighting.”

48 Graves and Spencer, “Rethinking,” 54.

49 Graves and Samp, “The Power.”

50 Graves and Samp, 3384.

51 Norah E. Dunbar, “A Review of Theoretical Approaches to Interpersonal Power,” Review of Communication 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2015): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2015.1016310.

52 Stern, The Gaslight Effect; Abramson, “Turning Up the Lights.”

53 Graves and Samp, “The Power,” 3379.

54 Craig, “Communication Theory,” 133.

55 Ivy, “Allies”; Stern, The Gaslight Effect.

56 Lauren Duca, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” Teen Vogue (blog), December 10, 2016, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/donald-trump-is-gaslighting-america; Chris Cillizza, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting Us on the January 6 Riot,” CNN Politics (blog), September 17, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/politics/donald-trump-september-18-january-6/index.html; Stephanie Sarkis, “Donald Trump Is a Classic Gaslighter in an Abusive Relationship with America,” USA Today, October 3, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/10/03/trump-classic-gaslighter-abusive-relationship-america-column/1445050002/.

57 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (London: Hutchinson, 1973).

58 Condit, “You Can’t.”