Interpersonal Communication: Non-verbal communication

NVC and Interpersonal Attitudes

According to Argyle, there are two main dimensions to interpersonal attitudes. He represents these as shown below:

Our attitudes can be anywhere within those ranges. I guess we're all fairly familiar with that mixture of attitudes: the dominant, but reasonably friendly boss, the hostile, but submissive employee and so on. The evidence from a range of observations is that we use NVC to achieve more or less dominance and express more or less affiliation.

A particularly revealing series of investigations was carried out by Mehrabian in 1972. He asked his subjects to talk to a hat rack. A pretty stupid sort of thing to do, I suppose, but by doing so Mehrabian was able to eliminate a number of intervening variables. What he hoped to do was to reduce the set of necessary signals to the bare minimum, so that he could concentrate mainly on those signs which appeared to be common to all the subjects when instructed to address the hat rack in a certain way. His observations revealed the following:

Bodily signal	Affiliation	Dominance
Bodily contact	touches, strokes, holds
Proximity	1) is within normal range 2) closer proximity
Orientation	1) if mutual gaze, more direct 2) but intimate friends sit side-by-side	less direct
Gaze	more gaze, combined with smiles (especially males)	less gaze
Eyebrow	raised rapidly in greeting and flirtation
Posture	1) lean forward 2) open arms and legs (by females)	1) more relaxed 2) head tilted back 3) hands on hips
Facial expression	smiles
Tone of voice	soft	loud, assertive

We'll take a look at one or two of those variables now:

Proximity

As I've often mentioned in the previous sections, the way we use space varies considerably (and disconcertingly for the unprepared) from one culture to another. The general study of the way we use space is known as proxemics. In white Anglo-Saxon cultures, the general pattern seems to be as follows:

	Intimate space	people who have a close, intimate relationship will interact within a space of around 15cm
	Personal space	in a reasonably close, personal relationship (but not intimate) we will interact with others at a distance anywhere from 15cm to 1m. 1m seems to be roughly the space which is often referred to a our 'body bubble'. If strangers come within that space, we are likely to feel uncomfortable.
	Social/consultative space	the area outside our 'body bubble' or 'personal space' within which we are happy to interact with strangers in our everyday lives. This tends to be around 1m to 3m.
	Public space	above 3m we would certainly find it strange to interact with others, unless there are particular circumstances which make it seem right, for example an address by a public speaker.

As usual these general 'rules' will be modified by the context. Enforced orientation, for example, has an effect. I often see students sitting on the college's heaters in the winter. Students who have a close, but not intimate, relationship and who would normally sit around 1m apart sit so close that they almost touch each other. It seems, however, that the fact that they are both facing in the same direction reduces any discomfort they may feel about being so close together. Gaze is also much reduced. This is reflected also in the design of public transport where we sit very close to strangers, but facing in the same direction. In most British buses, there is one part of the bus where passengers sit facing each other, but in that case, the gap is well over a metre. Similarly, in UK trains, passengers normally sit facing one another, at a much closer distance than on the buses, but in that case they are separated by a table. On crowded underground trains, look how many commuters, forced into close proximity and not all able to face in the same direction, spend their time reading a tightly rolled newspaper or studying the map of the underground or even concentrating on the total blackness outside the window.

Observation - proximity

There's a little experiment you could try out here. It will need two people to conduct it. One person needs a stopwatch. Go into town and get one person to find someone looking in a shop window. That person should stand beside the window-shopper within the 'personal/consultative' range. The observer should time how long it takes before the window-shopper moves away. Repeat this a number of times. Now repeat the whole process several times for 'personal space'. Then repeat the whole process for 'intimate space' As you might expect, most of my students have found that the closer the distance, the less time it takes before the window-shopper moves way. Here again, though, there's a number of variables to be taken into account. One very attractive female student found that a shabby old man (as she described him) didn't move away at all when she was within his 'personal space'. So she moved within his 'intimate space'. Still he remained where he was until he eventually turned to her and asked "'ere! Are you tryin' to get off with me?" So be careful.

Orientation

As just mentioned, there seems to be an inverse relationship between proximity and orientation, except of course in intimate relationships

Orientation also changes naturally to suit the kind of interaction, roughly like this :

	competition	face-to-face
	co-operation	side-by-side
	conversation	90 degree angle

Thus, I observe in my college staff room that the cleaners arrange the chairs neatly facing one another either side of a long table. As people get into conversation in the morning, so they naturally move the chairs into 90 degree angles.

As you can see from this diagram, the way that the cleaners arrange the chairs, though very neat, corresponds to the orientation we have described as being typical of competition. Naturally and unconsciously, staff who are engaged in conversation move their chairs around so as to achieve the ninety degree orientation which seems to be conducive to conversation. As you can see in the diagram, even if four people are in conversation together, two pairs will always be at a ninety degree angle; those who in a four-way conversation are opposite each other always adopt a slight off-centre position so that they are not directly facing each other.

Thus, an interviewer, whether for a job, or for a TV or radio interview, or in a counselling interview, would be making a mistake if (s)he set the chairs up facing each other, as that is conducive to competition. It could make for quite dramatic television in fact, but is actually unlikely to produce new information or revelations. In a job interview, it may help a possibly nervous interviewer to intimidate an interviewee, but it won't encourage him or her to spill the beans. If you want your interviewee to be relaxed enough to start letting cats out of the bag, set them up in the ninety degree orientation which will make them feel comfortable to talk.

Proximity and eye contact

Just as there is an inverse relationship between proximity and orientation, so there is between proximity and eye contact. Irving Goffman determined that we initially establish eye contact when approaching a stranger walking towards us. In part this is no doubt because we need to have an answer to the practical question: which side is this stranger going to move to? in part perhaps also because we need to attempt an assessment of the stranger and whether s/he poses any threat. When the stranger reaches a distance of some eight feet, the eye contact gives way to 'civil inattention' (Goffman 1963: 95). Argyle conducted an experiment in which subjects were asked to look at an object and told to sit 'as close as is comfortable to see well'. Subjects were shown:

• a cut-out life-size photograph of a person
• the same person with eyes open (not a photograph)

Posture

Ask practically anyone what posture will be adopted by the dominant person in an interaction, and they'll almost always tell you that they'll be straight-backed and leaning forward. In fact, as you have seen in Mehrabian's results above, dominance is actually characterized by a relaxed posture, very likely to be asymmetrical, say with one arm hooked over the back of the chair, maybe with legs crossed, one foot off the floor, in an extreme case, maybe a foot up on the desk. At first, that seems counterintuitive, but a moment's reflection will of course suggest to us that the dominant person in the relationship may well in fact feel more self-assured and relaxed.

On the other hand, in order to achieve dominance in the first place, we may well draw ourselves up to our full height and lean forward into the other person's personal space. However, once we have achieved dominance (or know that we are dominant because of the formal relationship - e.g. boss and employee), then we will adopt the relaxed posture observed by Mehrabian.

Scheflen (1972) has demonstrated that within any given culture postural configurations in relationships are orderly and standard. From the observed postural configurations he abstracts three 'dimensions':

	Inclusiveness or non-inclusiveness of posture	defines the space for the activiteis and delimits access to and within the group
	Vis-a-vis or parallel body orientation	gives evidence about the types of social activities
	Congruence or non-congruence of stance and positioning of extremities	indicates association, non-association or dissociation of group members

Inclusiveness or non-inclusiveness of posture

Under this heading Scheflen includes the proxemic and postural behaviour of members of a group, who may, for example, form a circle to keep others out, or, if standing in a line, may at the end of the line extend an arm or leg (what Scheflen terms 'bookending') with the same intention. In a rather similar way, people who would otherwise form dyads (for example pairs that might engage in courtship or arguments) which might detract from the group's purpose are prevented from doing so by a member of the group who places a part of her body between the two.
Just as Argyle and Dean (above) detected a relationship between proximity and gaze, so Scheflen detects a similar relationship between posture and proximity: the closer people are forced to be, the more likely they are to adopt blocking postures like crossing their arms and leaning backwards.

Vis-a-vis or parallel body orientation

In the simplest relationship of two people interacting, Scheflen distinguishes between vis-a-vis orientation where they sit or stand facing each other and parallelism where they sit or stand side-by-side, oriented towards some third party, task or object. In the vis-a-vis orientation people tend to engage in conversation, courtship, instructing or arguing, typically an interaction which involves an exchange of information. These are interactions which Scheflen terms reciprocal - the participants must interact.
In the parallel orientation, the two participants are likely to be engaging mutually towards some third thing or person, for example lending each other support in arguing with a third party. Such relationships, Scheflen points out, do not require two people; they can equally be performed by a single individual.

Congruence or non-congruence

We have no doubt all noticed postural congruence (also referred to as mirroring, imitating, or interactional synchrony), even in relatively large groups of, say, six or so people. Once congruence is established, it tends to be maintained; when one member of the group changes posture, the others tend to follow suit quite rapidly.
In some groups there may be two congruent sets (which he also refers to as 'split postural congruence'), with two separate sets of members. In such a case it is likely that two points of view are being presented.
Scheflen also points out how old friends will often shift into postural congruence when they are disagreeing, almost as if to signal that their relationship continues amicably despite the temporary disagreement.

Territorial behaviour

In the rules for conducting staff appraisals at the college where I work, it is stipulated that such appraisals should take place on neutral territory. At first sight, the question of where the appraisal interview takes place may seem a complete irrelevance. After all we are rational human beings and what needs to be said can be said anywhere. Or can it? The evidence is in fact that there is much more of the animal in us than we might like to think, especially when it comes to marking out our territory. OK, so we don't go around peeing on all four corners of our office or other work area, but we do bring artifacts into work, which personalize our little area - photos of the kids, knick-knacks we've been given and so on. Consider the way that people in an open space like the library carve out their territory, piling up books on either side of their part of the table, leaving their coat on the chair beside them. Think how the regulars in the pub mark their territory. Over the years photos of the pool league will be brought in, postcards from regulars on holiday will be pinned up, Fred's tankard will hang above his usual place at the bar. And woe betide you if you accidentally take the seat that belongs to old Arthur, who's been sitting there every evening for the past thirty years. Think also of how cars are thought of as our home territory. If they were just machines for getting from one place to another, then people would hardly lose control whenever someone gives their car a minor scratch or dent.

Status is reflected in the size of the territory you control. Obviously, that's a function of disposable money - the more you have, the more space you can buy -, but it's also carefully reflected in the size of offices and whether those offices have doors, as well as in the size of company cars, the amount of space available for each customer in first-class and so on.

In the boss's office, we are dominated; if she comes to our territory, we have an advantage because we are in control. We are much more likely to be able to maintain our point of view if we are on our home territory. And if we and the other person are both on neutral ground there may well be a struggle to attain the dominant position. The 1970s Vietnam peace talks are a good example - it was weeks before the talks could start because of endless argument about who should sit where. The problem was eventually solved by using a round table so that no-one was dominant.
(See also Scheflen's comments above on inclusive/non-inclusive behaviour)

Gaze

It is a truism that eye contact is important. Eye contact should not be confused with gaze. Gaze is the term used to mean looking at a person, whereas eye-contact means mutual gaze, where the two look at each other at the same time. There is a general belief that maintaining eye contact signals genuineness, avoiding it signals shiftiness. Students of communication in particular often seem inclined to maintain eye contact at all costs, no doubt leaving the other person in the interaction wondering why this wild-eyed loon is constantly staring at them.

In fact, one of the most important functions of gaze is to regulate the flow of conversation and we all have a rough and ready idea of what amount of gaze is 'normal'. Normally, we look at a person when we are listening to them. We look away when we are speaking, glancing at the listener every so often to ensure that they've not fallen asleep and to gain feedback as to the effect our message is having. There is therefore a natural imbalance in the amount of gaze, Argyle having measured about 70% for listners and 40% for speakers. Anything departing much from these norms will be perceived as 'abnormal'. Consequently, far from signalling genuineness and truthfulness, an abnormally high amount of eye contact is likely to cause a person to ask just what's going on. When the speaker looks at the listener with a longer gaze, typically establishing eye contact and normally accompanied by a fall in the voice's pitch and perhaps an appropriate gesture, she is saying: 'OK, I've had my say. Now it's your turn.' Thus, eye contact is used here rather like 'end of paragraph|new line' in print. Eye contact is relatively infrequent in a conversation, Argyle having established that it takes place around 30% of the time.

Regulators

Such regulators as gaze which control the flow of conversation are often compared with punctuation as they perform a similar function. Regulators are not limited to gaze alone. Virtually all bodily movements play a role in regulating the flow of conversation. Scheflen (1972), for example, noted these regularities in head movement and gaze. As he remarks,

It is difficult to believe that the head-eye points for a person during a thirty-minute interview are this stereotyped and repetitive. Yet, the participants in this and other interactions I have studied rarely show greater range or variability. They use the same cluster of postures again and again.

Where there are brief grammatical pauses, say at the break between sentences or clauses, a speaker looks up (though she will look away during unintended pauses). At the end of an utterance there will be a longer gaze. The voice will rise in pitch to signal a question and the eyebrows will be raised.

In Bodily Communication Argyle lists the signals used for the synchronization of utterances, drawn from the work of Kendon (1970), Meltzer (1971) and Duncan(1972). Whenever you have the opportunity, observe people in conversation; you may be surprised how regularly these regulators are used:

	To take the floor, a listener can		actually interrupt; there may be a brief battle, volume being the principal weapon
			show impatience, using rapid head-nods, often accompanied by verbal signals such as 'yes', 'but' or 'well'
	To keep the floor, a speaker can		raise the volume when the other interrupts and keep the volume raised if the other continues to try to interrupt
			keep a hand in mid-gesture at the end of sentences
	To yield the floor, a speaker can		come to the end of a sentence
			end by trailing off, or end with something open-ended like 'you know'
			drawl the final syllable
			end on a prolonged rising or falling pitch
			come to the end of some of the hand movements accompanying speech
			gaze at the other
	To decline an offer of the floor, a listener can		nod
			grunt or make 'uh-huh' noises
			complete the sentence
			briefly request clarification
			briefly restate what the speaker said