Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: communication

[Ruddick, T.R. (RUDDICK]

Michael, still insisting that nonverbals account for 93% of all
communication, wrote:

>However, even if the statistics are inaccurate, the principle is still
true.
>As I said, "I love you" can mean many different things, as can most words.

OK, more research results:

Most people believe that they can detect falsehood through nonverbal
communication.  One experiment after another has demonstrated that this
belief is erroneous.

Rubin et al, for example, learned that FBI and CIA agents who had been
trained in detecting falsehood through nonverbals could do it no more often
than randomly selected college frosh.  UNLESS the falsehood related to a
law-enforcement situation, in which case the agents did much better.

Conclusion: nonverbals are unreliable.  Falsehood is more reliably detected
by finding contradictions in the verbal message.

Simlarly, Elgin cited studies showing that lies can be more easily detected
over the telephone than in person.  Over the phone you aren't distracted by
nonverbals (except vocal tone) so you attend to the verbal, which is more
reliable.

I think it's fair to conclude that communication is not as simple as the
talk-show pundits would like to make it.  "I love you" is an emotion-laden
statement, and as such nonverbals are important.  "Hand me them pliers,
willya?" is not emotion-laden (OK, if you want to invent exotic situations
where it would be, I acknowledge the possibility) and the world would be a
ridiculous place if the next worker on the assembly line came back with
"Your nonverbals tell me you really don't want the pliers".

Incidentally, some people do read the pop communication paperbacks and try
to live them, so some assembly-line workers have responded like that in real
life.  Most of them soon learned that it ruined the possibilities of really
communicating effectively, and they quit.  Would have been better had they
not been misled in the first place.
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