Chapter 5, Nonverbal Communication. We're going to start this chapter by exploring what is nonverbal communication. Then we move on to why is it important?
If it's not important, why do we learn it? We learn it because it is imperative for us. There are different types of nonverbal communication and really we strive to improve on what our nonverbal communication is communicating to our relational partners.
So we start with the definition itself. This text defines nonverbal communication as communication produced by means other than spoken words. I want us to be really careful and make a note here that despite that that's the way it's defined in this text, we want to be careful to pay due and respect to American Sign Language, which is not verbalized necessarily, but it's considered a language.
So when someone communicates using ASL, we consider that spoken word. So we want to be really careful that we're not sliding American Sign Language into a category of nonverbal communication. It is a form of verbal communication. When we look at our nonverbals, we know that we primarily focus on nonverbals more than verbal communication.
It's not what someone says, it's how they say it. It's not what they're saying, it's looking at what are the nonverbals telling us what that means. Is there an aversion of eye contact?
Is someone leaning in or turning away or avoiding eye contact? All of these things help us to decode what the message means. So there's a lot of things that go with this, but we know that our nonverbals are incredibly important because we use them in everyday life. They help us maintain and help our relationships to function in a way that's helpful to us.
So it helps us with... understanding our world, interacting with our world. It helps us to understand what someone really means when they're communicating with us, which means that it's very culturally based, meaning that what a nonverbal might mean in one context, in one relationship, with similar cultures between the relational speakers might mean something different depending on who we are.
Remember, culture is defined by our lived experience, and so culturally we all vary a good bit. And so when we come to the table, we use those various cultural nonverbals to communicate with other people, but they may mean very different things, just like with spoken language. Sometimes we fall into a category where we attribute people's behaviors to something outside of their intention.
And so we want to be careful with that, and we'll take a look at that. And we know that we tend to think of nonverbals as universal, but they're really not. Because what one thing means in one space in time can mean something completely different in another space in time.
For instance, this is not a very kind example, but it's real. In Westernized society, if you see a thumbs up, that might be a symbol of good luck, good job, you're doing great, keep it up. Now, in certain places in the Middle East, if you gave someone a thumbs up, it means up yours.
Those are very different messages. So we want to be careful that even though we say there can be a universal language formed by our nonverbals, we want to be really careful at is there really anything that's universally true verbally or nonverbally? We know that that means that there's an open door to misunderstanding.
Because if nonverbals mean one thing to one communicator and a different thing to another communicator, the open door to misunderstandings is there. We tend to trust the nonverbals more than we do what's being said to us. We tend to look at, again, how did you say that?
Was the person making eye contact with you? All of those things change the meaning to us. So what does that mean?
It means that 93% of all meaning comes from nonverbals. Now, I want to be really clear about that. Moravian, who created this, Explain that 93% of meaning really comes from our non-verbal, and only 7% from verbal. Does that mean that I could communicate verbally with literally zero verbals at all and still have 93% of my message understood? No, of course not.
Could you imagine a professor standing in the front of the class and just non-verbally trying to communicate with y'all? It would be impossible to understand the message. So maybe- Morabian is really misunderstood.
What he says is that in tandem with verbal messages, 93% of the meaning comes from nonverbals. And when you look at this pie chart, it shows you what that means. That means when we're trying to derive meaning when we're communicating with other people, 55% of that meaning tends to come from body language itself.
If someone's leaning in, if someone's leaning away, the way that their body is facing you or facing away from you, all of those things say something. The vocalics itself, meaning... our tone, our intonation itself, how the rise and fall of pitch in our voice says, I'm not mad. I'm not mad. Can mean two different things.
So we look at how it's said. So tone, volume, how things are pronounced, all of those things start to bring about a deeper meaning to the message. And really 7% is only the chosen words that are spoken.
So we can see that it's pretty easy to see that, yes, 93% of meaning is derived from the nonverbals, but that's in tandem with verbal. Again, it would be very difficult for us to communicate in the absence of having any kind of symbols meant to be spoken word.