ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the factors that influence people’s ability to comprehend and evaluate the messages they receive. Upon first consideration, these factors may seem self-evident. For example, recipients’ ability to comprehend a message undoubtedly increases with the amount of knowledge they have already acquired about the topic at hand. However, possession of this knowledge is hardly a guarantee that recipients will interpret a message in the manner the communicator intends, or that they will evaluate the validity of the communicator’s assertion accurately. Message reception may in fact be inherently limited for two general reasons.
