Sociology of Non-Verbal Communication

In day-to-day interaction, people across different cultures tend to rely heavily on language to communicate needs and establish understanding. However, communication also occurs in a number of nonverbal ways outside spoken language that typically include facial expressions, the absence or presence of eye contact, physical proximity, nonutterances, touch, gestures, and bodily movement. Studies of nonverbal communication stem initially from studies of animal behavior—in which nonverbal gestures and expressions are seen as legacies of more primitive or instinctual behavior and are therefore seen as largely unconscious or unintentional—or from cultural anthropology—in which nonverbal communication is viewed as largely intentional. In sociology, studies in nonverbal communication are associated mainly with symbolic interactionism, which shows how knowledge of nonverbal communicative norms (e.g., socially appropriate facial expressions and bodily gestures) and control are crucial to the competent presentation of self in everyday life.

Keywords Body Idiom; Deep Acting; Dramaturgical Model; Face Work; Focused Interaction; Looking Glass Self; Self-idea; Surface Acting; Unfocused Interaction

The Sociology of Nonverbal Communication

Overview

In day-to-day interaction, people across different cultures tend to rely heavily on language to communicate needs and establish understanding. However, communication also occurs in a number of nonverbal ways outside spoken language that typically include facial expressions, the absence or presence of eye contact, physical proximity, nonutterances, touch, gestures, and bodily movement (sometimes known collectively as "body language"), as well as unspoken assumptions that may affect any encounter between people (Hirsch, Kett & Trefil, 2002).

Contemporary scholarship on nonverbal communication is associated with sociology, cultural anthropology, communication, and media studies, and is oriented more generally toward looking at the ways people use nonverbal information to maximize their success in business, public, and professional life. Yet nonverbal communication—as unintentional communication—is arguably most important within the context of day-to-day encounters.

Studies of nonverbal communication stem initially from studies of animal behavior, in which nonverbal gestures and expressions are seen as legacies of more primitive or instinctual behavior and are therefore seen as largely unconscious or unintentional. Nonverbal communication has been popularized through books such as Desmond Morris's (1977) hugely popular Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behavior and programs that offer to school people in techniques that will increase their social power and improve their success at work or in dating. Common to such efforts is the idea that the attention people give to their external appearance and physical conduct has an impact on communication and can be understood by others.

Symbolic Interactionism & Phenomenology

In sociology, studies in nonverbal communication are associated with two main traditions. First, symbolic interactionism, especially as developed in the work of Erving Goffman, shows how knowledge of nonverbal communicative norms (e.g., socially appropriate facial expressions and bodily gestures) and control are crucial to the competent presentation of self in everyday life. In this framework, successful interaction with others depends on impression management, information control, and being ever attentive to what our bodies and faces are “telling” others. However, such management and control is not always possible, and sometimes bodily disruptions and differences present interactional challenges.

Second, phenomenology suggests how important sensory experiences and information are to the development of a sense of self and to interaction with others, although Western thought tends to deny the significance of such experiences and to privilege rational thought as the basis of self.

Contemporary scholarship on nonverbal communication has turned its attention to the ways people decorate and mark their bodies to convey information about belonging, group membership, and status.

Further Insights

Symbolic Interactionism & Nonverbal Communication

The late nineteenth-century German sociologist Georg Simmel developed what has come to be known as a “sociology of the senses.” He observed that people are bound together through the various encounters, sensory experiences, and glances that are exchanged in everyday life (Frisby & Featherstone, 1997). These sensory experiences are the prime means through which people apprehend and appreciate each other, and sense-impression (what we hear, smell, and feel of others) is what primarily gives us access to an idea of who people are (Simmel, 1969, cited in Blaikie et al., 2004).

Simmel argued that visual contact was especially important for initiation and coordination of face-to-face interaction and that the "the eye has a uniquely sociological function" (cited in Blaikie et al., 2004, p. 2) since social interaction is based on mutual glances that both reveal others and disclose ourselves to others. In Simmel's work, making and keeping eye contact is so important in establishing social relations that breaking eye contact has a negative function (e.g., it signals shame or lack of confidence). This insight, obvious as it may seem to early twenty-first-century readers, was systematically developed by sociologists associated with what became known as the Chicago School.

The “Looking Glass Self”

Visual information is important for developing a sense of self and was central to the development of symbolic interactionism, an approach to understanding social life that emphasizes the importance of the role of images and symbols in social interaction. In particular, Charles Horton Cooley proposed a theory for the development of self as a creative agent in his 1902 book, Human Nature and the Social Order. This theory suggests that self-development emerges through interaction with others who reflect back to us an image of ourselves. The eyes and the face are important in self-presentation because they are so visible and exposed in Western cultures: they offer vital information about who and what we are and present a focal point for interaction. Of all the senses, sight is most privileged in Western culture as evidence of social reality, and there is a tendency to base what we know on what we can see. We “see” others by looking into their faces and into their eyes, and their facial expressions and gestures reflect back to us how others in turn see us.

Cooley names this process of seeing and developing a sense of self as the development of the self-idea, which emerges in three stages:

• How we imagine we appear to others,

• How we imagine others judge us, and

• The self-feeling we develop in response to our imagination of these judgments.

Cooley likens the self-idea to a mirror that provides us with a visual reflection of the external appearance of our bodies and faces. Use of a mirror, however, is an interactive process that creates a connection between the subjective self of the viewer and the external world of others (Hepworth, 2000, p. 46). When we look into a mirror, we interpret what we see through our imagination of what others see.

Images, Symbols & Gestures

In addition to visual appearance, the exchange of gestures and symbols is central to understanding nonverbal communication within the symbolic interactionist framework. George Herbert Mead paid close attention to the role of images, symbols, and gestures in social interaction and self-development. For symbolic interactionists, the self is not the product of rational thought alone, but rather is the product of an ongoing, persistent social process characterized by constant interaction between self and others and between different aspects of self (Mead, 1934). Central to Mead's theory of nonverbal communication is how images and gestures mediate not only how others look at us, but also how we look back and at ourselves.

The self is characterized by habits or instincts that he calls “I” and by the organized beliefs learned from interaction with others (between “me” and the groups to which “I” belong). Part of the self is objective and expresses the gaze of others (e.g., social norms and expectations). Yet, “I” can stand back from “me” and reflect on “myself.” In part, this is possible not only through language, but through the conversation of gestures (e.g., mimicking others and, later, the games children play) through which children develop their sense of self and awareness of others.

The Dramaturgical Model

Erving Goffman develops these ideas in his dramaturgical model of interaction. In his classic text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1971), which is based on ethnography of life on a Scottish island in the 1950s, Goffman explores what makes it possible to enter into and participate in social encounters and in the presentation of self in those encounters. The dramaturgical model emphasizes that in social encounters, people give, receive, and manage information, most of which is nonverbal and directed toward performances. Performances are possible through roles that operate as organized frameworks that allow people to make sense of encounters. People or actors seek to maximize or minimize the visibility of bodily and facial information depending on the impressions they seek to present. Importantly, the self-image that people develop is related to how effectively they present themselves (Freund & Maguire, 1999). Successful encounters require managing visual and expressive information—including gestures, facial expressions, and other physical cues such as clothing, hairstyle, and jewelry—and acquiring control over the human body (or doing body work). For the symbolic interactionist, the body and the face literally “speak.”

Body Work

Goffman's work draws attention to shared patterns and ways of using bodily gestures and facial expressions in Western culture. In Gender Advertisements (1979), he shows how bodily gestures that are used in images designed to sell products are based on gender assumptions and convey meanings about relations between men and women. His book offers an inventory of photographs that displays a range of gestures and positions that imply differences in social power between men and women. For instance, images of women in seated positions near men who are standing imply male authority (Goffman, 1979).

For Goffman (1963), these shared understandings of bodily gestures and facial expressions—what he refers to as a shared vocabulary of body idiom such as handshakes, smiles, forms of dress—shape and organize social interaction; they are recognizable as conventional aspects of everyday life and convey particular and highly contextualized meanings. Body idiom helps people classify information about others and in turn influences how people present themselves in social encounters.

For instance, a dramaturgical analysis of the handshake asks what it means to shake another's hand and how this differs depending on the context in which hands are shaken, how (e.g. firmly, weakly), and by whom. Handshakes are deemed significant in Western culture for many reasons. In particular, they are used to open and close encounters that require focused interaction, where people have to attend to the responses and social cues given by another in order to understand the meaning of the encounter. Focused interaction occurs when two or more individuals are directly attending to what the other is saying and doing, whereas unfocused interaction is the mutual awareness individuals have of others in large gatherings when not directly interacting. In the business world, the handshake signals not only the opening of an encounter but is also used to signal agreement; in certain business contexts, the handshake offers a symbolic exchange of trust that involves breaching personal physical space, which in Western contexts is highly protected and regulated (Shilling, 1993).

Social meanings are expressed through nonverbal gestures and expressions. For instance, people in positions of relative power (e.g., bosses, doctors) may be more likely to initiate physical touch than are subordinates (Goffman, 1971), thus perpetuating a power differential. Touch, of course, may mean different things to different groups. Where, for men, touch might be used to signal dominance, women may use touch to convey empathy.

Face Work

The face is especially significant in presenting information to others in ways that conceal and reveal the self. In Western culture, the face is central to building up a picture of who someone is. Goffman (2003) notes,

The face is, as Norbert Elias (1991) suggested, a kind of “signaling board” (p. 121), and it is one of the key ways people manage the impressions they give to others and make information available in both focused and unfocused encounters. The face is a mask that people use to conceal or reveal information; people literally present a “face” in public (Goffman, 1971) and monitor their own facial expressions and bodily conduct and those of others, thereby sustaining the predictability of much of day-to-day social life. Many routines are tactfully carried out as a means of saving the actor's own face or that of another, and people adjust their performances accordingly.

Expertise in face work and the manipulation of masks is familiar to many women in Western culture. For example, makeup can be seen as a form of face work that enables women who wear it to present a particular sort of self. Some women will not appear in public without make up on the grounds that cosmetics provide a mask to hide behind or a mask that allows them to feel more confident than they really feel (Tseelon, 1995). The face, then, can be seen as a kind of mask that reveals and conceals what people are really thinking and feeling.

Arlie Hochschild (1983) developed this idea in her book The Managed Heart, which examines the role emotions play and how they have to be managed and regulated in modern service occupations. One focus of her study was flight attendants, who, she noticed, employed several different techniques to help customers relax. Prime among these techniques was face work, and in particular, smiling, in order to “look friendly” and put people at their ease. For Hochschild, smiling was one of a battery of techniques of interpersonal exchange that involve acting: surface acting, which entails changing our external appearance to give an impression of a particular feeling (smiling, though you feel blue), and deep acting, which involves changing how you actually feel.

Phenomenology & Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal communication analyses have been used to study the work of nurses. Nurses and caregivers may be or become particularly skilled in nonverbal communication in everyday interaction, especially with patients who have lost the power of speech. For instance, one phenomenological study (Sundin, Jansson & Norberg, 2000) looked at interactions between nurses and people who had experienced a stroke. Their analysis identified the importance of wordless communication in establishing trust, openness, and connection. Stroke can involve loss of cognition, perception, mobility, and comprehension, and contribute to substantial communication frustration for both sufferer and others with whom they interact. Moreover, people who lose the power of speech as a consequence of stroke report a substantial sense of isolation. Nonetheless, the researchers found that caregivers who became skilled in communicating nonverbally with stroke sufferers used touch creatively to communicate a sense of warmth and closeness and relied heavily on “sensing” the feelings of patients through close attention.

Other health professionals are sensitive to the importance of nonverbal communication and increasingly incorporate this in their practice. For instance, one dental hygienist has developed a program that highlights the importance of touch, bodily movement, time, space, and distance, especially in the context of intercultural dental care (de Palma, 2006).

Body Marking

Cultural anthropologists have conducted studies of ritual and practice that examine nonverbal communication as part of a wider set of shared symbolic meanings about the social world and have noticed how body idiom varies cross-culturally (e.g., Mauss, 1973).

This tradition in cultural anthropology also informs contemporary scholarship on how decorating the human body is used to communicate ideas about belonging, group membership, and status. Anthropologists have remarked on how body decoration and marking, such as neck-stretching rings (Ebin, 1979), are used to signal changes in social status and rites of passage or demonstrate social value. In Western culture, various contemporary forms of body decoration or modification, such as tattoos, piercing, and fashion, might be understood as attempts to nonverbally (though collectively) establish social distinction (Bourdieu, 1984); to express resistance against adult, class, and gender norms; to make an antifashion sartorial statement (Polhemus, 2004); or to show belonging to a particular urban tribe. One study of piercing (Eubanks, 1996) suggests that some people may pierce body parts as a way of signaling affinity with non-Western cultures and discontent with contemporary Western society. These and other instances of nonverbal communication offer a “radical gesture” against dominant social norms.

Viewpoints

The emphasis on “performance” within the symbolic interactionist framework suggests that there is no sense of the inner self in Goffman's observations of social interaction (Hochschild, 1983). His performers merely present "themselves to others in a false or manipulative fashion" (Giddens, 1987, p. 112). Yet this framework is used productively to study professional service groups, such as nurses.

Nurses work hard on their emotions and are able to appear detached and offer gestures of caring or enjoy humorous episodes even though they have to deal with potentially embarrassing, awkward, or emotionally charged situations in a culture that is relatively touch averse (Bolton, 2001, p. 88). Therefore, nurses have to present a “professional face” that appears to be concerned but not too involved and that helps them “save face” and stay in control, by maintaining distance and sometimes masking negative feelings, such as anger. However, in order to survive, nurses have to find offstage areas that allow them to replace the professional face with expressions and glances that signal relief, humor, or anxiety.

Finally, it is challenging to conduct research on nonverbal communication and studies that typically involve nonparticipant observation in experimental or field settings to observe mechanisms of nonverbal communication such as facial expression, gaze, bodily movement, posture, interpersonal distance, and touch. Many studies develop coding systems for different forms of nonverbal gestures to align them with objective measures and make them amenable to statistical analysis. For instance, a study conducted by Ishikawa, Hashimoto, Kinoshita, Fujimori, Shimizu, & Yano (2006) on patient experiences and outcomes in Japan assessed how medical students used nonverbal communication in clinical examination contexts, especially facial expressions that patients may use to interpret what they view as “hidden agendas." Students were given higher ratings from patients when they directly faced their patients, nodded, and made frequent eye contact. They were given lower ratings for self-touching (e.g., hair twirling or scratching), since these activities may be interpreted as signs of anxiety or preoccupation.

Whether people use language or not, there seems to be general agreement within social science disciplines that our bodies and faces “speak.”

Terms & Concepts

Body Idiom: The physical gestures, positions, and conduct that are recognizable as conventional aspects of everyday life in a given culture.

Deep Acting: Involves working on feelings in order to alter them or exchange them for another feeling.

Dramaturgical Model: A framework for explaining how individuals, social groups, and institutions manage information, by engaging in performances, to present particular impressions to those with whom they interact.

Face Work: In Western culture, the face is central to social interaction as it expresses information about social attributes that have to be managed, concealed, or revealed, according to audience and performance requirements.

Focused Interaction: Occurs when two or more individuals are directly attending to what the other is saying and doing.

Looking-Glass Self: C. H. Cooley's concept that uses a mirroring metaphor to represent a dynamic process of self-development that is shaped by interaction between how others respond to our external appearance, what we imagine they think of us, and how in turn we respond to others based on this internal image.

Self-Idea: How we develop a sense of who we are through social interaction with others who reflect back to us an image of who they think we are.

Surface Acting: Entails changing the appearance of the face and adopting a strategy of pretense (e.g., smiling when we feel angry or afraid) to give the impression of a particular feeling.

Unfocused Interaction: The mutual awareness individuals have of others in large gatherings when not directly interacting with each other.

Bibliography

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Hirsch, E. D. Jr., Kett, J. F., & Trefil, J. (2002). The new dictionary of cultural literacy (3rd ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

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Ishikawa, H., Hashimoto, H., Kinoshita, M., Fujimori, S., Shimizu, T., & Yano, E. (2006). Evaluating medical students' non-verbal communication during the objective structured clinical examination. Medical Education, 40 ,1180–1187. Retrieved May 8, 2008 from EBSCO online database, Academic Search Premier http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=23162641&site=ehost-live

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Polhemus, T. (2004). Hot bodies, cool style. London, England: Thames and Hudson.

Shilling, C. (1993). The body and social theory. London, England: Sage.

Sundin, K., Jansson, L., & Norberg, A. (2000). Communicating with people with stroke and aphasia: Understanding through sensation without words. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 9, 481–488. Retrieved May 8, 2008 from EBSCO online database, Academic Search Premier http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=5518772&site=ehost-live

Tseelon, E. (1995). The masque of femininity: The representation of woman in everyday life. London, England: Sage.

Xiaoying, Q. (2011). Face. Journal of Sociology, 47, 279–295. Retrieved October 30, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=65220165

Suggested Reading

Calbris, G. (2011). Elements of meaning in gesture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co. Retrieved October 30, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=407687&site=ehost-live

Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co.

Riggio, R. E., & Feldman, R. S. (2005). Applications of nonverbal communication. London, England: Psychology Press.

Manusov, V., & Patterson, M. L. (2006). The Sage handbook of nonverbal communication. London, England: Sage.

Matsumoto, D., Frank, M. G., & Hwang, H. S. (Eds.). (2013). Nonverbal communication: Science and applications. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.