Nonverbal signal: what it says and how to control it.

I’ve always been told I am too intimidating to approach, and it’s strange to me that they can’t see how soft my heart is.

J.R. Rogue

We saw that one difference between verbal and nonverbal communication is the fact that verbal communication is always conscious (exception made for sleep-talkers). It might not always be fully under control, but we are all conscious of when we are talking; what we’re saying can be a bit more complicated to control and we can end up trapped in a sentence we can’t finish but have to, otherwise what was the point in starting it? On the other hand, nonverbal signals can be sent without our full control and we’re never sure how someone will interpret what they see. After all, a same nonverbal signal (a tattoo, for example) can be perceived completely differently based on who’s watching/receiving the signal. If we can’t control everything that is leaking out of us, it is however possible to control and affect the general message sent.

For example, we can control the way we look… or does the way we look control us? There is an interesting concept (one among others) in psychology called “The Dorian Gray Effect”. Short background information to start: The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel by Oscar Wilde in which a young man becomes obsessed with his image and youth and will go to great lengths to preserve it, as far as pledging his soul for his portrait to grow old in his place. Not only does the picture age, it also starts reflecting all the other deviant aspects of Dorian’s personality: narcissism, cruelty, disdain, and soon enough the painting becomes hideous. It is a tale warning against the effects of self-absorption and narcissism.

Psychologists have used this story to name some symptoms and effects symptomatic of modern times. The Dorian Gray symptom, for instance, is a resistance towards aging and an extreme fear that one’s body will get deformed as the years go by. It becomes pathological when it affects one’s behaviour and leads to dangerous practices to hold back aging. The Dorian Gray effect, which I’ve mentioned, is not pathological but plays with the idea that you become how you look. In other words, the way you dress can impact the way you behave. I’m pretty sure we’ve all experienced the shift in mindset between spending the day at work, dressed in a smart-casual fashion, and coming home put on the comfiest clothes you can find. The shift between professional and comfy selves. Which also means that when putting an effort in how we dress, we should always remember to choose clothes in which we feel right… or it will show in how we behave. The choice of clothes is not anodyne and can be quite stressful – should we wear red or white? Skirt, trousers, or dress? Shirt or T-shirt? Heels or flat shoes? Finding the right outfit can take forever BECAUSE of the impact we know it has on how others perceive us. Speaking of which…

You’ve finally chosen what to wear, you’ve done your hair – you’re ready. You’re walking down the street and you see someone walking towards you. You glance towards them and by doing so you gather a lot of information and decide whether to stay on this side or cross to the other side of the street. When our guts tell us to move away, we listen. But what did our guts use to make this judgement? By looking at someone walking, we get a sense of their general physiology, we can guess their gender, have a sense about their social status, and gather a sense of aggressiveness coming from them. By looking at someone’s gait we can even guess their sexuality, have a feel about their emotional state, and even know a bit about their personality. Crazy, right, the amount of information you can get from just looking at someone’s gait! Taking everything together (the way we look, the way we walk, the way we gesture and make faces), we now know what feeds first impressions.

Tricky things they are, first impressions… Did you know that within 3 seconds of seeing someone walk, you get a sense of whether you like this person or not? 3 seconds. You’ve never talked with them, you might never will, but you already have an opinion of them.

The thing about first impression is that they are long-lasting, and they matter. The first impression you get of someone can make the difference between talking to them or ignoring them all night. The first impression can be the last impression. And they matter because… well because you only have one shot at making a good first impression. We can probably all relate to a situation in which you had a bad impression of someone. We never took too much time to talk to them because of a feeling we had when we first met them, and maybe because of gossip or stories we’ve heard about said person, we never thought they were worth spending time with. Then one day, you happen to talk to them. At first, it’s a bit cold but as the conversation goes on you realise you misjudged that person… or made a bang-on judgement and cannot wait for them to stop their self-centred monologue. Remember though – it’s a double-edged sword: we all have first impressions about everybody, and first impressions can also be impacted by factors outside our control (style/gait/gesture). Your culture, your social background, or even your current emotional state can impact how you first perceive someone. We all tend to make judgement about others, some of us are more judgement-prone than others, and there are even some beautiful souls out there that do not even understand the concept of “having a bad feeling about someone”. I wish I was able to scrap all my judgements and approach someone with no pre-conceptions… but then, I wasn’t wrong often enough for me not to trust those a priori.

To sum up so far, verbal communication happens consciously but isn’t always under control. Nonverbal communication can be conscious or unconscious and is not always under our control. Nonverbal communication is highly subjective and faces not only a vocabulary barrier, like is the case with verbal communication, but also a socio-cultural barrier. By looking at someone, you can get information about how they feel at the time, you can guess their social status, maybe their culture, probably their gender, and have a sense of who they are. By looking at someone, without talking to them, you can get a feel about their personality. But what is it that we mean by “personality”? Come back next week and I’ll tell you!