A key part of communication is nonverbal. In fact, most of the message that we get is from the nonverbal cues. Now, sometimes nonverbal cues are pretty funny. So here's president George Bush and Angela Merkel at the G8 Summit in 2006 in St. Petersburg. And George Bush thought it was going to be appropriate to walk over to Angela Merkel and give her a back rub. And so you see pictures of this, this was front page news after it happened. [LAUGH] George Bush starts giving Angela Merkel a back rub, and her nonverbal cues make it very clear she doesn't feel comfortable. So George Bush is cueing that he wants a close relationship, or is presuming a close relationship. Angela Merkel is signaling that he's crossed a boundary and wants to create some distance. So these nonverbal cues without any exchange of words is conveying a great deal of information. Now, this is true in general. So by some studies, 70-90% of the message that we get is nonverbal. How people are standing, the way they're speaking or the way they're looking or not looking at you. So nonverbal communication is important when we're communicating with other people. We can communicate far more effectively with nonverbal cues. And we're trying to interpret other people. We can do that far better if we're paying attention carefully to nonverbal cues. Now, there are cross-cultural differences. There are some cultures where the message really is in how it's being said. So these high-context cultures, often in Asia and Latin America and many Middle Eastern cultures, how the message is being conveyed is almost the entirety of the message. So somebody in Japan might say, That would be difficult, and what they really mean is there's no way we could ever do that. And you've gotta be paying attention to how it's being said. In low-context cultures, we rely more on the content of the text, what is actually being said, so in North America and Europe. But even in low-context cultures, how things are said dramatically influence the meaning of what's said. So if I were to say, That's no problem, the way I say that matters profoundly. So if I say, That's no problem, or That's no problem, I'm sending very different messages. In fact, we can flip the meaning of something, like I'm happy to do that, or I'm happy to do that. We can send it completely in opposite directions depending on how we say it. And, of course, cross culturally, there are different signals when we hold hands or pat someone on the head. We're sending messages and cross culturally we're going to be sensitive to that. In some cases, we can offend people merely by using gestures that we think are pretty innocuous, like the ok symbol. So when we think about nonverbal cues, here are the dimensions that we should be paying attention to. One part are kinesics, so symbols that we use created by the body. So gestures like the ok symbol, or gesticulations, facial expressions, eye contact, appearance. There are a lot of cues around how we look. There are paralanguage cues, so the tempo, the emphasis. So I gave examples with I'm happy to do that or I'm happy to do that. We can emphasize things quite differently. And in writing, paralanguage cues are things like writing in all caps. So I text you a message in all caps, and you might write back, Why are you yelling at me? Haptics involve touching. Every mammal group is very fond of contact, this tactile contact, so shaking hands, patting somebody on the back, patting somebody on the head. These are conveying a lot of information, or like George Bush giving Angela Merkel a back rub. We're engaging in contact in a way that's communicating some important message. Now, this is related to proxemics, how far apart are we? Again, there are cross-cultural differences. So in Eastern Europe distances are much smaller. In the United States, we have our sort of personal bubble of about a foot and a half. So anybody that invades our personal space should be a very close friend or an intimate partner. We have public distance at sort of different spaces, and we think about where our comfort zone is. The way we arrange this space can make you more or less comfortable. And what I'm suggesting is that we can think about this deliberately, rather than feeling like, Hey, I'm uncomfortable, I don't really know why. I'm suggesting we can figure out why, we can figure out how the space that we're in can make us more or less comfortable. And that use of space, so the room size, the color, the lighting, the way we've configured the office can really change the message that we're conveying. So if I want to convey a sense of equality, we might have a circular table and we're all at seats that are similar. If I want to convey a sense of inequality, we can have a table and we could have somebody on a higher chair than somebody else. So we can think about this space and the messages that we're conveying implicitly in those cues. Chronemics, the use of time, so is somebody on time, are they prompt? Are they delayed or they show up late for meetings? And again, if we want to communicate a sense of equality and caring, we're prompt and on time. And again, there are cross-cultural differences. So Germanic peoples might be very punctual. Latin peoples might be less punctual, and they're not meaning anything by it. We should be sensitive to those cross-cultural differences.
