🍁 Body Language outweighs Words
✍🏻 Julia Wood & Ann Schweitzer:
In conversation, is your “default” hand position palm up or palm down? Professor Allan Pease gave an amusing and illuminating talk (Pease, 2013) showing that one’s opinion of a speaker is almost immediate. When making presentations, we can encourage listeners to see a trustworthy and approachable presenter by learning to use palm-up gestures.
If a doctor has to report an error in a medical treatment, the patient may be better served by a face-to-face meeting than by a simple telephone call. The nonverbal messages given when face to face help the listener understand the message. In a study (Hannawa, 2014), patients viewed videos of such message giving, where nonverbal cues were both present and not present, and then responded to a questionnaire. Being able to receive nonverbal cues helps the patient better understand an error and its consequences.
When we approach an important meeting such as a job interview, how we enter the room may be more important than what we say. Deborah Gruenfeld (2013) puts the importance of our words at 7 percent, and body language at 55 percent. She cites power and influence as results of the ways we use body language to appear authoritative and approachable. Women are more skilled at using body language that reflects lower status; when a woman uses body language that reflects power, she is more likely to be judged harshly than a man with the same credentials. Gruenfeld advises women in particular to balance authoritativeness and approachability in business settings, and to use voice, eye contact, and space occupied to present an image of strength and competence. (Wood & Schweitzer, 2017: 164)
📚 Wood, Julia & Schweitzer, Ann. (2017). Everyday Encounters: An Introduction to Interpersonal Communication. 5th Canadian edition. Nelson Education.
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