Have you ever noticed what happens when two dogs who don’t know each other meet during a walk? Both dogs narrow their focus until they are ignoring everything but the other dog. Their eye contact is intense. They watch what the other dog’s tail is doing. Is the hair on the back of the neck bristling. If one or the other barks, what is the pitch of the sound they make? Does one advance or hold its ground? These are just a few of the ways the dogs are deciding whether this will be a peaceful or angry encounter.

Today’s post, from my diary of a global traveler deals with nonverbal communication in humans. I hope you find it interesting.

Bodybuilding

Dr. Albert Mehrabian is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He did a study which has become one of the most quoted in the field of interpersonal communication over the past 40 years. It is perhaps no surprise that it is also one of the most misquoted.

Mehrabian studied what affected the conveyance of emotions and attitudes from one person to another. So he had people say words which had positive, neutral or negative connotations, with absolutely flat intonation vs with inflection and also with supporting body language. For example, what happens when a person says “no” with no emotion in the voice vs with a strong negative tone vs with a negative gesture. He found that intonation produced 5.5 times as many negative feelings as just the word said matter-of-factly and the supporting gesture further enhanced that negative feeling. Similar findings occurred with positive words, intonation and gesture.

This resulted in a formula that 7% of the emotional content comes through the words themselves, 38% through the way they are said and 55% through the body language.[1]

But the most significant finding of Mehrabian, in my opinion, is what happens if the words say one thing and the voice and/or body language say another. This often happens when sarcasm is used and also by people behaving in a passive-aggressive manner. This is called incongruence. Overwhelmingly, during episodes of incongruent communication, the words are believed the least. Tone of voice trumps words and body language trumps them all.

So it behooves us all to be aware, whether we are motivating a team, selling a product or service or negotiating terms or conditions, to not let our voice or body language reveal things we want to keep hidden.

The Meaning of a Smile

An American female friend of mine who was working in Germany came to me one day with a rather surprising question. She asked if I thought she looked like a prostitute. “Absolutely not. What would prompt such a question?”, I said. She explained that when she walked down the street in Berlin where she was working, she would occasionally be approached by a man suggesting that he would be interested in such a relationship with her. She couldn’t imagine what would be encouraging him to make such a proposition.

After a moment’s thought I realized what was going on. In many parts of the United States it’s normal to smile at perfect strangers that you meet on the street. It represents friendliness but nothing more. When I asked her if she might be unconsciously doing that when she walked down the streets of Berlin, she allowed as how that was probably the case. We had an interesting discussion about how Germans, who are generally more distant in their relationships with people they do not know, often prefer to avoid eye contact or any other signs of recognition when they pass a stranger on the street. Her smile may well have been interpreted as some form of invitation.

Body language is a subtle but powerful communicator. Nervous fidgeting with the hands during the presentation may suggest not only your lack of confidence in your rhetorical skills but perhaps also lack of conviction about the topics you are discussing. In the south of Europe people stand much closer together than they do in the north and often touch more. Kissing on the cheeks is still quite common between men and women in business situations in some European countries but not in others. Certain gestures or body language may be quite offensive. For example in Singapore you should never touch a person on top of the head.

Another great author and speaker on the important subject of nonverbal communication is Allan Pease, who with his wife Barbara help their readers to understand how to read the body language of others and how to avoid sending nonverbal messages you don’t want to send.[2]

Considering how different one language is from another, it is quite surprising to me how few differences there are in body language across cultures. German readers of the works of Samy Molcho[3] will find everything he explains to be applicable in the English-speaking world as well.

Get your body language under control and you’ll be surprised at how much more you will be seen as having the solutions to the problems in your environment. Be careful to avoid incongruence.

Herb

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[1] Albert Mehrabian, Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes

[2] Barbara and Allan Pease, The Definitive Book of Body Language

[3] Samy Molcho, Alles über Körpersprache: sich selbst und andere besser verstehen