Howard Giles

Howard Giles, born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1946, is a British-American social psychologist and Distinguished Research Professor of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he chaired the Department of Communication from 1991 to 1998. He earned his bachelor's degree in psychology at Bangor University and his doctorate in social psychology at the University of Bristol. He is best known for developing communication accommodation theory, which explains how people converge toward or diverge from the verbal and non-verbal speech styles of those they speak with, and for applied research on intergroup communication. He has served as president of the International Communication Association and of the International Association for the Study of Language and Social Psychology, founded the Journal of Language and Social Psychology and the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, edited Human Communication Research, and received awards from the British Psychological Society and the National Communication Association.