Part 2: You were asked to spend 15 minutes communicating without any physical embellishments, i.e., no hand signals, not vocal intonation, not head, facial, or body movements.
This portion of the assignment was very difficult to do for multiple reasons. The first reason was the extreme difficulty of speaking without changing or altering your tone of voice. In every conversation I have, even typing this out, I use different tones of voice in my head. I felt like I was speaking like a robot and none of my conversations with my partner were compelling in the slightest. Everything I said was taken with a grain of salt because there was no meaning and a slight awkwardness to it. Another thing that was difficult was that I am a very expressive person when I speak out loud. My face tends to say it all and when holding back facial expressions I started to not be able to think clearly due to thinking about the response I'm giving with my face. The hardest part was showing my partner interest, because without any facial expressions or changes in voice tone, my partner showed signs of being as uninterested as me. My partner hated that experiment because she felt that it was a very sarcastic conversation where nothing really mattered. Talking for 15 minutes was pretty much impossible because I was not engaging in everything she said, but she did try to make it work by taking control of the conversation most of the time. The only time my partner had difficulty understanding me was when we had a conversation about what we wanted to do that night. She tends to enjoy when I am interested in where we are going, and she felt that the entire time I didn't care what we did, which made me uncomfortable.
This experiment shows that signs in our language are very important because body language gives context clues to how people are feeling about a topic. Without these context clues, other people can pass off your opinion on matters as unimportant or uncared about by the speaker. The information a human gets from reading body language can cause a person to believe what the speaker is saying on an emotional level. We, as humans, express ourselves by more than just words. If we had no body language, others wouldn't know when we were sad, upset, angry, or even happy and excited. Body language helps others match your excitement or your emotions and gives humans the understanding they need to give the proper response.
This could help humans survive because it can keep humans out of danger. Reading an angry person's body language or someone who is robbing you will tell you if they are a danger to you. It allows you to read the other person and see their intentions before they act. It can tell you whether you should run and hide or stay and fight, keeping that person around to reproduce successfully.
Yes, there are people who have difficulty reading body language and I feel like I can identify them because they tend to not understand concepts or match excitement levels when speaking to them. This might be beneficial in a situation where someone is lying to you. They can lie entirely through just speaking and you would never know because they don't show body language when lying. You would then have to formulate discrepancies in the story they are telling, especially if it were over the phone conversations or social media.
Hello Andres,
ReplyDeletePart 1:
I relate with you in the part that it is difficult to get your points across with others when you are only able to use body language. Facial expressions, hand motions, and body movement are only really capable of conveying one's mood. It is very difficult to express opinions towards a subject without using words. I did my experiment with multiple people which ended up making me feel excluded very fast due to the lack of communication. The others involved in the conversation can easily change the topics or speak over you because they can describe anything they desire with their voices.
Part 2:
I too found it very difficult to speak without differing tones. Tone comes so natural when using verbal communication so when it came time to forcibly become monotone, it became awkward in the conversations. I also see that you found it impossible to convey your mood to your partner. To me, a person who constantly uses all forms of body language when speaking, it was very unnatural to speak with just the verbal portion. This part of the experiment showed me how important it is to use body language and through this post, I see that you have learned this lesson as well.
Whats up Andres!
DeleteI just realized we are in the same class! Tell Hannah I say what's up and that I want both kinds of onions on my double-double. His girlfriend, who was his partner for this experiment, was a manager at In N’ out. That's right, the big boss! Anyway, I liked your example of how reading body language would be an adaptive benefit in the real world. If a person is able to identify that they were about to be robbed based on the burglar's body language It would give that person a competitive advantage over someone who cannot read body language. Great job! This was an excellent connection. Something that surprised both of us is that tone inflection, facial expressions, hand gestures, and body language are all vital to properly convey the meaning of complex messages. Keep up the good work brotha!
Part 1:
ReplyDeleteGood opening description of your first experiment and good discussion on the issue of power and control in the conversation.
I agree with your conclusion regarding the communication of complex ideas and the attitude of the speaking to the non-speaking culture. Well explained.
Part 2:
Very good description of this part of the experiment. I want to suggest another way to think about this and your girlfriend's response. Perhaps it wasn't that she didn't think you cared. The response about the conversation seeming to be "sarcastic" was a clue. She was looking for information from you in your body language as to the validity of your statements. That's one of the primary roles of body language, to validate or to falsify your words. When someone says, "Sure, I'd love to get sushi" (for example) and their face looks interested and their voice rises and their body leans forward, that indicates interest, matching the words and therefore validating that the truth is being spoken. When the same statement is made but the face is blank, the voice is flat and the body is unmoving, this suggest that you are *lying to your girlfriend*. :-) Shame on you! Seriously, she will not realize this is the issue, but that is why she was unhappy in the conversation... because your body language was telling her that you were not telling her the truth. This is a very important point and I will offer more on this in the next section.
"The information a human gets from reading body language can cause a person to believe what the speaker is saying on an emotional level."
You come closest to this key point on detecting lying in his sentence here. I'm not arguing that body language doesn't serve the other functions you list, but consider just important it might be to be able to detect liars and how this might help an individual's ability to survive and reproduce (which applies to the next section).
Good discussion on the benefits of reading body language. I agree with all of them but just consider how it might benefit your reproductive success to be able to detect those who intend to cheat you or steal for you or otherwise deceive you? We may wax eloquent over trusting individuals, but in the real world, we recognize this trait as being "gullible" and likely to be taken advantage of. That doesn't bode well when your ability to compete for available resources, attract mates and protect your offspring depends upon NOT being taken for a fool. Reading body language is a key part in this.
"I feel like I can identify them because they tend to not understand concepts or match excitement levels when speaking to them."
Can't we be more specific than this? Like all human traits, there is normal variation in expression, and the ability to read body language is no different. But beyond that, there are groups of people who have great difficulty or an outright inability to read body language due to physical or mental disability, such as those who are in the autism spectrum or those who are blind (though they can read vocal intonation).
I don't think you understood the last question. It was asking for a situation where it might be best to ignore body language. I suggest that it would NOT be beneficial to ignore body language when someone is lying because that is precisely when reading body language is most helpful. It is easy to lie with words. It is very difficult to lie with body language.
But is there any situation you can think of where body language might actually mislead you, not because the person is lying but because you don't know how to read the body language? Do all cultures use the same system of body language? They all use different systems of spoken/written language, so why would we assume their body language isn't different? If you travel to another country, can you trust the information you get from their body language?