MediaSpace Wiki

Small Group Spring2006 Session06

Index card assignment due today

Find a place where you can watch a group (any group) interact from a distance. List five different non-verbal behaviors that seemed to contribute to the group's conversation.

Agenda

• Collect questions
• Group discussion of group observations
  • What non-verbal behaviors caused one or more group members to make an evaluation of someone in the observed group?
  • Was the evaluation positive, negative, or neutral?
  • Did you attribute any personal characteristics based on the behavior?
  • What?
• Overview of non-verbal
• Questions
• Next assignment

Non-verbal Communication

The perfect subject for Valentine's Day

(Keyton, c. 2, p. 28-33; Hirokawa et al, c. 15)

• Some estimate that 65% to 90% of meaning occurs via non-verbal communication
  • Big numbers. How do we get there
    • First approach: Is a picture worth a thousand words?
      • Counter: Can a word be worth a thousand pictures?
      • Perhaps a sign or symbol is worth a thousand memories
        • Language (semiotics) gives us access to experience (phenomenology)
        • Semiosis triggers phenomenal recollection
      • A picture may be worth a thousand words, but its not how we get there.
    • Second approach: What kind of non-verbal communication is associated with Instant Messenger?
      • What do we see?
        • Emoticons
          • Kinesics
        • Fonts, color, font size
          • Paralanguage
        • Capitalization
        • Silence
        • How long we wait to respond (timing)
          • Ambiguity
        • Buddy icons
          • Low speed compared with emoticons
          • Like the difference between clothes and facial expression
        • Language choice and abbreviations
        • Blocking
        • Warning
      • If we can find this much non-verbal in a written medium, can we understand how easy it is to find that 65% to 90% of meaning in interpersonal is non-verbal
• So how do we know when its our turn to talk
• In conversation analysis research we find that:
  • most of the time pauses don't predict at all
  • most exchanges are as rapid as a frame in film
    • .05 seconds from one person's end to another's start
    • compare with
      • .03 seconds for old movies (18 frames per second)
      • .025 seconds for current moves (24 frames per second)
      • .02 seconds for television (30 frames per second)
      • .01 seconds for IMAX (60 frames per second
  • and faster than normal human response time
    • .1 seconds to get to the brake of a car
• Knowing when its our turn to talk is mostly anticipation
  • But we make mistakes
    • Interrupting
    • Talking at the same time
    • Floor fights
  • Long pauses matter
    • They most often correspond to topic shifts
    • But often occur, without interruption, when we talk
  • But we do control the floor non-verbally
    • Explicitly passing the floor
      • gesture (hand motion, head nods)
      • eye contact
      • facial expression
• Some variations on non-verbal codes
  • Kinesics - gesture, posture and body movement
  • Eye contact
  • Facial Expression (Smiles, Frowns, Blushes, etc
  • Vocalics and paralanguage/Vocal cues (one, pitch, pauses, pacing)
  • Proxemics/Personal Space and Territoriality (manipulation of space)
    • intimate distance (up to 18 inches)
    • personal distance (18 inches to 4 feet)
    • social distance (4 to 12 feet)
    • public distance (12 feet or more)
    • in small groups, seating is often important
      • who is central and peripheral
      • who occupies the power positions
      • who sits next to whom
  • Haptics - touch
  • Chronemics - time and timing
  • Artifacts
• All of these forms of non-verbal communication matter to small group communication
• Challenges of non-verbal Communication
  • Ambiguous
  • Continuous
  • Multichanneled
  • Culture-based
  • Difficult to interpret
  • Not always under our control (physiologically-biased)
• We use non-verbal communication for various purposes
  • Communicating attitudes and feelings (affect displays)
  • Detecting Inconsistency
    • Non-0verbal is often considered more believable
    • via behavior side effects (adaptors)
  • Enhancing meaning (illustrators)
  • Communicating content (emblems)
  • Communicating relationship
  • Regulating interaction (regulators)
• Different elements of Non-Verbal Communication operate at different levels
  • Groups establish norms for some elements of non-verbal
    • proxemics
    • posture
    • touch
    • these elements rarely change once norms are established
  • Other elements are more dynamic and individual
    • Silence
    • Facial Expression
    • Kinesics
    • Vocalics and Paralanguage
    • We can use these as indicators of group process

Index Card Assignment due Thursday

Listen to a conversation that you are not a part of for a few minutes. Do not participate in the conversation at all. Instead, write down three things that you would want to say if you were participating in that conversation.