Humans Are People, Too: Nurturing an Appreciation for Nature in Communication Research

• Human social behavior, including communication behavior, is inf luenced by higher-order factors that remain largely unacknowledged in communication theory and research. • Several communicative behaviors, including communication anxiety, conf lict, emotional expression, and aggression, have strong biological ties. • Most of the research on the biology of communication behavior is conducted outside of the communication discipline and remains unknown to communication scholars, even though the focus is on communication behavior. • Ignorance of biology leads communication theory to be needlessly anthropocentric, offering human-specific explanations for behaviors that are not unique to humans. • Communication research often ignores heritability and treats entities such as media and culture as though they were living organisms, when in fact they are human creations. • Environmental inf luences such as enculturation, modeling, and media messages are powerful, but all environmental inf luences require biological factors to be effective.