The anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1968) highlighted another possible advantage of using body language to communicate interpersonal attitudes when he wrote that 'It seems that the discourse of nonverbal communication is precisely concerned with matters of relationship. ... From an adaptive point of view, it is therefore important that this discourse be carried on by techniques which are relatively unconscious and only imperfectly subject to voluntary control.' He implied that it was unconscious body language that was primarily involved in these 'matters of relationship'. We can all say 'I love you', some rather too easily; it is quite a different matter to fake love non-verbally, or so Gregory Bateson seemed to think.
This is the traditional theory of body language, partly based on reasoning of the sort that we have just outlined but partly based on a set of core studies by Mehrabian in the 1960s and Argyle in the 1970s, which compare the impact of body language to verbal language in the communication of interpersonal attitudes. The problem with these seminal studies is that they are all flawed in one way or another (see Beattie 2003). They all apparently demonstrate that, in the communication of interpersonal attitudes, body language is much more powerful than verbal language, with the facial channel alone estimated to be more than five times as powerful as the verbal channel. These studies were all based around a simple paradigm, the construction of consistent or inconsistent verbal language/body language combinations that were rated by participants. But the problem with these studies is that they underestimate the power of language in the expression of interpersonal attitudes. Mehrabian restricted his analysis to individual words such as 'honey', 'maybe', and 'brute'. But the problem is that no one talks in individual words in the real world if they can help it. Michael Argyle used sentences in his studies but these were extremely explicit and therefore rather unreal sentences, which failed to take into account the great subtlety of language for the communication of interpersonal attitudes in everyday life. So how might verbal language be used to convey interpersonal attitudes? Opening up a conversation, the use of first names, compliments, disclosure, reciprocated disclosure, the asking of personal questions, verbal engagement, shared perspectives, the sharing of childhood memories, offers of help, offers of support are all likely to play some vital role in such communication. Language is almost certainly as crucial to conveying interpersonal attitudes as body language and classic studies, which suggest otherwise, are themselves fundamentally flawed.
But some psychologists have argued that the other half of the traditional theory about language and body language is also incorrect, namely that half which states that only verbal language conveys factual or semantic information. Wundt, the originator of the traditional theory, wrote in 1921 that 'the primary cause of natural gestures does not lie in the motivation to communicate a concept, but rather in the expression of an emotion'. But consider the following extract produced when a participant was narrating a cartoon story:
- 'she [chases him out again]' Hand, gripping an object, swings from left to right.
Other psychologists have recognized that iconic gestures are common in speech but claim that they are too 'imprecise and unreliable' to be of any value in the communication of meaning (Krauss, Morrel-Samuels, and Colasante 1991) on the basis that individuals find it quite difficult to match gestures with the speech they accompany. However, Beattie and Shovelton (1999, 2001) argued that this is the wrong way of investigating the possible communicational function of these gestures. They maintained that if gestures are designed to communicate then they should provide critical information about the semantic domain to be encoded, the world out there or that part of it involved in the experiment, rather than about the accompanying speech.
Beattie and Shovelton video recorded participants narrating cartoon stories and then played just the speech segments or the gesture–speech combinations to another set of participants who were questioned about the original stories. They demonstrated that participants who received gesture–speech combinations recalled significantly more information than those who heard only the speech (60 per cent more specific information, 10 per cent in terms of overall message). The extra information included the speed and direction of the action, whether or not the action involved rotation or upward movement, and the relative position, size, and shape of the people and objects depicted, among other things. This research suggests that the iconic gestures that accompany talk are highly communicative and convey particular semantic aspects of a message. The fact that people gesture on the telephone (but less frequently on the telephone or on an intercom than in face-to-face communication, see Cohen and Harrison 1973) does not disprove this theory. People gesture when they speak, but the brain mechanisms that mediate gesturing are far older than mechanical artefacts like the telephone — on the telephone they simply cannot inhibit this natural and primitive form of communication.
In conclusion, body language is not separate functionally from verbal language in the way that Wundt, the founder of modern psychology, thought. They both work together to communicate interpersonal relationships and both work together to convey semantic information. However, although some forms of body language like iconic gesture do communicate semantic information they do so in a different fashion from verbal language. Speakers spontaneously create images for the listener with their hands, but unlike verbal language, they do not use a pre-selected lexicon of individual items to do this. It has been argued that in some forms of body language one can see the unconstrained human mind in action, working alongside verbal language to communicate meaning in its own unique way, in everyday talk.
(Published 2004)
— Geoffrey Beattie/Heather Shovelton
- Bibliography
- Argyle, M. (1972). The Psychology of Interpersonal Behaviour (2nd edn.).
- Bateson, G. (1968). 'Redundancy and coding'. In Sebeok, T. (ed.), Animal Communication.
- Beattie, G. (2003). Visible Thoughts: The New Psychology of Body Language.
- — — and Shovelton, H. (1999). 'Do iconic hand gestures really contribute anything to the semantic information conveyed by speech? An experimental investigation'. Semiotica, 123.
- — — — — (2001). 'An experimental investigation of the role of different types of iconic gesture in communication: a semantic feature approach'. Gesture, 1.
- Cohen, A., and Harrison, R. (1973). 'Intentionality in the use of hand illustrators in face-to-face communicative situations'. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28.
- Krauss, R., Morrel-Samuels, P., and Colasante, C. (1991). 'Do conversational hand gestures communicate?' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61.
- McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought.
- Wundt, W. (1921). The Language of Gestures (repr. 1973).
