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Interpersonal Communication: NVC
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Interpersonal Communication: NVC
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In the previous section we began to see some similarities between non-verbal communication and verbal language. It started to look as if nvc has a vocabulary and, following the analogy with language, we also proposed that it must have a grammar. Linguists, as you may recall from the section on codes, break down signs below the level of words to phonemes and morphemes and some use the term lexeme to attempt to distinguish between a semantic and a syntactical unit.
We don't need to be grammarians to know that there's something wrong with these sentences:
colourless green ideas sleep furiously
golf plays John
the boy may frighten sincerity
John solved the pipe
We may find it impossible to say why they are 'wrong', but we know that some kind of rules are being broken somewhere - we know the structure, we have internalized the grammar of the language.
Do we find similar elements to these in non-verbal communication? According to Argyle
It is generally true that non-verbal signs form systems, and each signal gains meaning partly from the other signals with which it is contrasted.
1982: 41
a quotation which would remind any semiologist of Saussure's notion that signifiers signify because of the relationship between them. Chosen from the available paradigm, each sign's valeur derives from the fact that it is not another sign in the paradigm.
If it is reasonable to draw this analogy with other sign systems, then it ought to be possible to identify the repertoire of available NV signs and to identify the 'permisible' combinations of them, the influence which context and sequencing have on our understanding of them and so on, just as we can identify, say, camera movement edits, lighting etc. as the main groups of signs in cinema. As with cinema or with language, we should be able to determine when a 'rule' is 'broken', which can give us an insight into what the rules are, or we might perhaps be able to detect regular patterns, which would suggest to us that rules are being followed. Let's briefly consider now how we might go about discovering the rules:
hardly an option, of course, but old books of etiquette can be quite revealing and it can also be quite interesting to take a look at some of the rules governing formal occasions, as we might expect them to be a kind of conscious abstraction from whatever rules we follow in everyday communication. To an extent, I think we do find that. Consider, for example, how a man is expected to bow or a woman to curtsey when introduced to the Queen. This might perhaps suggest that in less formal circumstances we make ourselves smaller to show deference or the other person makes themselves bigger to show dominance. At the Lord Mayor's banquet in the City of London, the Lord Mayor has the big chair, the Prime Minister a small one in comparison. Again this might be an abstraction from the ways we use territory to express dominance in everyday life, which is perhaps also reflected in the ever increasing size of offices the further you go up a company's hierarchy. At the State Opening of Parliament, important bigwigs walk backwards away from the Queen on her throne, looking down at the floor as she stares down at them - perhaps a formalized version of the use of gaze to 'stare down' a subordinate or potential rival, a behaviour displayed amongst apes in the wild and amongst apes in the pub on a Friday night. Such behaviours as these would seem to be suggestive of some general rules underlying our everyday non-verbal communication. The problem is, though, that they tend to be so remote from our normal life and are in some cases so encrusted in tradition that it is hard to know what their original intention was.
some of the most revealing investigations in this respect were carried out by ethnomethodologist, Harold Garfinkel, whose 'breaching experiments' were set up to test the deliberate breaking of assumed rules. In one experiment his students behaved towards their parents as if they were lodgers. However, Garfinkel's breaching experiments and other studies were not concerned primarily with non-verbal communication, but rather with interpersonal behaviour generally. However, you may well have accidentally broken rules you were unaware of. This can be particularly noticeable when you move to a very different culture. A frequently quoted example is the significant difference in the use of personal space between Arabs and white Anglo-Saxons, but there are others you're likely to come across (see the section on innate and culturally determined nvc). I seem to recall a story by Kurt Vonnegut(?) about an alien from another planet whose main forms of communication are tap-dancing and farting. Coming across a man whose house is on fire, he urgently taps and farts his concern and desire to help. Not surprisingly, he gets a thump on the nose for his troubles. Whilst we're unlikely to come across cultural differences as extreme as that, they can sometimes come pretty close.
another method to determine the rules is the study of the socially mobile. Garfinkel investigated a young woman who had changed her sex and had suddenly become aware of a whole new set of rules. In your own life, you will also have become aware of how the rules governing non-verbal communication can vary from one situation to another. Obvious examples are such things as the appearance required of you in school, the appearance required when out with your parents and the appearance required when out on the town with your mates. At my local secondary school, as soon as pupils leave the school gates, the boys tug their shirt tails out of their trousers and loosen or remove their ties and school jackets are slung over their shoulders. Not all the boys do that, though, and it's easy to see how the boys conform to the norms of their particular group of friends, varying from those who remain as neatly dressed as they were inside the school through to those who try to emulate the local tramps as closely as possible. You are probably aware as well of differences in gesture which follow fairly obvious rules. Just as with spoken language, it's probably the case that there are certain gestures you can use towards your friends, bu tnot towards your parents.
regularities in non-verbal behaviour might in themselves go some way towards showing us what the rules are. The patient and detailed observation of many hours of film conducted by Birdwhistell in his study of kinesics appears to reveal a number of often very small facially movements which regularly accompany certain types of verbal expression. Mehrabian interestingly conducted experiments in which he dispensed with interpersonal interaction altogether, asking subjects to approach a hatstand as if it were their boss, their girlfriend and so on. These experiments revealed noticeable regularities.
Perhaps, though, a note of caution does need to be sounded here, before we try to press the analogy with other sign systems too far. Owen Hargie defines a social skill as
a set of goal-directed, inter-related social behaviours which can be learned and which are under the control of the individual
Hargie (19??)
and Michael Argyle in Bodily Communication similarly describes human social acts as 'subject to self-direction'. Argyle's social skill model proposes that social behaviour is
We are well aware that much non-verbal communication is beyond our conscious control. Though not, of course, beyond 'conscious monitoring', it is nevertheless 'automatic and habitual'. To what extent this differs significantly from language is debatable, but it is worth bearing in mind as it makes our interpretation of non-verbal behaviour uncertain. After all, we are all familiar with the Freudian slip which supposedly reveals our subconscious motives and desires, or with the hypercorrection involved in the accidental mispronunciation of 'butcher' and 'bush' with the same vowel sound as in 'cup' - a slip which in Britain is suggestive of the hypercorrection of an originally northern regional accent, therefore also of lower middle or working class social origin.
Do we know which bits of nvc are beyond the actor's control and which are under it? If we do, do we interpret the conscious signs differently from the unconscious ones? For most of us, blushing, sweating are perhaps examples of non-verbal behaviour which we cannot control. How do we know, though, that that's also the case for this particular individual we are currently conversing with? If we assume that it is the same, do we accord more credence to the supposedly voluntary relaxed smile or to the presumably involuntary blushing? Judy Gahagan (19??) draws what might be a useful distinction between informative and communicative behaviour. Gahagan refers to such behaviours as blushing, those which we cannot control, as informative, and to the handshake accompanied by a smile as communicative.
The distinction can hardly be all that firmly drawn, however, as we have to base our judgment as to the voluntary or involuntary nature of a nv sign on our assessment of the other person's competence. In any communication, the meaning is not contained within the message, but within our heads - we are always involved in a process of interpretation, as emphasized by, for example, Osgood and Schramm's model. If we take them to be averagely skilled performers, then we are likely to interpret their trembling hands as involuntarily revealing something negative about them - informative; if we know them to have problems with motor skills, we will attach no significance at all to their trembling hands - neither informative nor communicative; what, though, if we know them to be skilled actors? What significance do we attach to the 'involuntary' catch in Prime Minister Blair's throat when he makes a public comment on the death of Princess Diana - is this genuine emotion or just another example of his rhetorical skill; is it informative or communicative, in Gahagan's terms?
As always in communication, a message is subject to considerable uncertainty. The meaning it has for the receiver depends on a variety of factors. Berlo's list of factors influencing reception will serve as well as any. The factor we are considering in the case of Blair is our attitude towards the communicator. Do we believe that he is a genuine, credible person or do we believe that he is just another politician, a skilled orator willing to use every rhetorical device to his advantage? The meaning we attach to the catch in his voice will vary widely depending on where we stand between those two extremes.
As with all other communication, the context in which nvc takes place is vital to its interpretation. In Britain, it doesn't normally matter much if I don't shake hands with you when I'm introduced, but it could certainly make a difference if the occasion was a very formal one. In relaxed, everyday, informal circumstances, the lack of a handshake is of no significance; in more formal circumstances, the failure to proffer a hand to shake could be seen as a deliberate snub. Think of the attention paid by the media to which politicians shake hands with the Sinn Fein President, Gerry Adams. Think of the attention repeatedly paid to the handshake of the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler with Adolf Hitler.
Don't overlook the fact that non-verbal communication also includes communication through the artefacts in our environment. So, for example, nvc includes not only the rude gesture byt the other car driver, but also you wheel-spin in response, as you use your car to communicate your anger non-verbally. Similarly to the lack of a handshake, so the absence of a flag flying at half mast over Buckingham Palace during the week following Princess Diana's death seems to have been given enormous significance by many ordinary members of the public, who saw the lack of that gesture as in itself a calculatedly offensive gesture. The Palace's attempts to explain that protocol dictates that flags are not flown above the Palace when the Queen is not in residence merely served to strengthen the popular view that the Royal Family was totally out of touch.
Again, referring to the death of Princess Diana, think of the Queen's television broadcast. It was an extraordinary event for the British royal family in which she spoke for the first time ever, as far as I know, direct to camera, live and without notes. The address was given against the backdrop of mourners laying wreaths outside Buckingham Palace. The fact that the address was live was in itself an instance of non-verbal behaviour which had a dramatic impact. Television viewers would have seen this within the context of the Queen's other televised speeches - this was the kind of behaviour which the Queen just does not engage in. Before she said anything at all, the non-verbal behaviour was arresting.
The speech was also interpreted within the context of the 'national outpouring of grief' over Diana's death. Thousands of people across the nation had broken down, had spontaneously laid flowers outside places, churches, wherever seemed appropriate to them, thousands had queued for hours to sign books of remembrance all over the country. The royal family, however, had made none but the sparsest of public comments for five days and press criticism of their 'unfeeling' attitude had mounted steadily throughout the week. Within that context, the Queen's address was bound to be interpreted by most viewers as 'too little, too late' unless, presumably, she actually broke down on live TV.
I guess you could readily think of a variety of non-verbal behaviours which are acceptable in some contexts and not in others. For example teenagers' non-verbal behaviour with their friends might be interpreted quite differently if it was displayed towards their parents. I shall never forget a man I used to see as a child. He had apparently been a professional soldier who had served in the British army during the Second World War. At the time I saw him every morning on my way to school, he was an office worker in a local factory. He had the erect bearing, the quick marching step of the soldier, his right arm swung back and forth whilst his left arm was absolutely stiff at his side, the hand holding his briefcase. Such non-verbal behaviour would no doubt have earned him respect and commendation in the army. On his way to the office, though, that same behaviour just made him look ridiculous.
semiotics
language
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