Tag Archives: emotions

Non-Verbal Behavior: Our Most Powerful Form of Communication

WHEN VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL BEHAVIORS ARE INCONSISTENT

You are nervous before an interview. But you’ve rehearsed what you are going to say, and during the interview you say the words you planned on saying. However, your nervousness expressed a different message through your non-verbal behaviors—your facial expression, the tone of your voice and your body language. They said, “I lack confidence. I’m nervous. I’m anxious.” Unfortunately, the interviewers, like everyone else, have a Mirror Neuron System (MNS). It enables them to feel what you are feeling and expressing through your non-verbal behaviors.

You have experienced this yourself. When you are around a person who is depressed they don’t have to say a word and you will feel slightly depressed. We feel what others feel and their feelings are expressed non-verbally.

Now here comes the bad part. Studies show that when your non-verbal behaviors and the words you speak don’t match, people believe the non-verbal behaviors and not the words that were spoken. In other words, you can work on what you are going to say for months and have it come undone by what you are expressing non-verbally.

https://i0.wp.com/www.pauwelsconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Verbal-and-non-verbal-communication-during-job-interviews.jpg?w=604&ssl=1In Amy Cuddy’s TED talk (I highly recommend viewing this), the high-power posers and the low-power poses went through mock interviews and their videotapes were graded by coders. The two groups scored the same on the words they said. But the high-power posers scored higher on the non-verbal expressions that she defined as “presence.” They spoke with confidence, and the coders felt this confidence and wanted to hire them and pass over the low-power posers.

IT TAKES SECONDS

The non-verbal problem gets worse. A 1993 study by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal illustrates how we can quickly and accurately evaluate people after seeing only a few seconds of non-verbal behavior. They took videotapes of entire class sessions from thirteen teachers and extracted three ten-second video clips from them, and then removed the sound track. Nine college students rated these instructors on attributes such as confidence, enthusiasm, optimism, likability and warmth on a scale from one to nine. There was a high degree of consistency between the student’s ratings, even though they only had thirty seconds of non-verbal behavior to go on.

At the end of the semester the instructor’s actual students rated them on these same attributes. The evaluations of the two groups were significantly correlated on nine of the fifteen measures.
Wow! Thirty seconds of non-verbal behavior produced assessments that were similar to a semester’s worth of in-class evaluation. This indicates we have a sophisticated evaluation capability based on the observation of a small amount of non-verbal behavior. And that amount of non-verbal behavior was about to shrink.

Next, they had a student, who was unfamiliar with the study, randomly pick five-second and two-second clips from the original ten-second clips. They picked a new group to rate the teachers based on these shorter clips. The correlation between the end-of-semester evaluations and the five-second and two-second clips was not as high as the ten-second clips, but there was still a high degree of correlation. [1]

People who observed just three, two-second video-clips of non-verbal behavior were able to accurately evaluate another person’s confidence, dominance, warmth and likability! This suggests our non-verbal map of the world—something that is stored in our cognitive unconscious—is vast and capable of immediately generating assessments of others. These assessments, or intuitions, are automatic, and they influence the decisions of the conscious mind.

THE GOOD NEWS

We are often unaware of all of the fast assessments of non-verbal behavior that are made by the cognitive unconscious. But we don’t need to be aware of them for this to affect our conscious decisions, or those of hiring authorities, as you will see in my May 12th seminar on mastering non-verbal communication. It is free and open to the public.

The good news is this: Non-verbal behavior, even though it is a subconscious phenomenon, can be controlled.

You may have experienced this as well. At the end of an interview, hiring authorities sometimes struggle to provide reasons why they did not hire you, and you seemed to be such a good fit. You want to know why you weren’t chosen and the recruiter was given no clue. He presses the hiring authority to give you some helpful feedback and can only extract the following default response, “Oh, that candidate was a poor fit.”

One of the reasons why they struggle to provide feedback is because their decision was heavily influenced by suggestions from the cognitive unconscious, and they have no direct access to this powerful subconscious mind. No one does. In other words, this interviewer’s decision was partly the result of subconscious processes of which he was and is unaware.

We need to master non-verbal communication if we want to ensure stronger interviewing performances, and this is within everyone’s reach.

THE PATH TO JOB SEARCH SUCCESS:

The following link will take you to my eBook, The Path to Job Search Success: A Neuroscientific Approach to Interviewing, Negotiating and Networking. It details the seven techniques that enable you to gain control of your non-verbal voice, among other things.

http://amzn.to/1dETvOC

[1] The following nine traits were highly correlated: Optimistic .84, Confident .82, Dominant .79, Active .77, Enthusiastic .76, Likable .73, Warm .67, Competent .56, Supportive .55. The other six traits were less so: (Not) anxious .26, Honest .32, Empathetic .45, Attentive .48, Accepting .50, Professional .53. As can be easily seen, four of the six traits that failed to make the statistical cut were still within ten percentage points of the “Supportive” trait that did.

This research appeared in: Ambady, N., & Rosenthal, R. (1993). Half a minute: Predicting teacher evaluations from thin slices of nonverbal behavior and physical attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(3), 431-441.