This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.
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What is the power of nonverbal communication? How does the nonverbal communication of others affect your decisions?
We’ll cover the power of nonverbal communication and discuss why your biases may not be your own, but rather adopted based on someone else’s nonverbal signals.
The Power of Nonverbal Communication and Bias in the News
An experiment performed during the 1984 presidential campaign between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale revealed how news anchors’ slight facial expressions could bias viewers’ opinions and votes. This is the power of nonverbal communication. Researchers gathered recordings of three news anchors’ faces while they reported on each of the two candidates. Then they played the clips for people on mute, and asked participants to use a 21-point scale to rate how positive or negative the anchors’ facial expressions looked.
The first two anchors — Dan Rather on CBS and Tom Brokaw on NBC — scored right in the middle, meaning they had a neutral expression when talking about either candidate. The third anchor, Peter Jennings on ABC, scored about two points higher than neutral when reporting on Mondale and six points above neutral when talking about Reagan.
- Participants in the experiment also scored the anchors’ facial expressions while watching muted clips of reports on both objectively sad and happy topics. This control test proved that Jennings did not merely have a more positive expression all the time. (In fact, the opposite was true.)
After the election, the researchers found that ABC viewers around the country voted in higher numbers for Reagan than CBS and NBC viewers. When asked about their preference, these pro-Reagan ABC viewers had no conscious recognition of Jennings’s subtle biased facial expressions; instead, viewers insisted they preferred Reagan’s policies. Researchers also found that ABC’s story selection was more hostile toward Reagan, meaning the nonverbal cues from Jennings’s facial expressions actually overpowered more explicit editorial bias. This demonstrates the power of nonverbal communication.
This experiment raises three important points about the power of nonverbal communication.
- Small actions make a big impact. The subtlety of Jennings’s facial expressions may not have even registered for viewers — and probably only for the research participants because they were asked to rate the expressions on such a detailed scale — but it was enough to apparently sway their opinions and votes. If Jennings had given a more blatant verbal endorsement of Reagan, it might not have been as effective because viewers could consciously process this message and potentially disagree. But without recognizing the bias, their defenses were down and they were more susceptible to its influence. This is the power of nonverbal communication.
- Nonverbal communication is as — or more — impactful than verbal messages. As mentioned, ABC was deemed to be more hostile toward Reagan in its story selection than the other news networks. This means that Jennings’s subtle facial expressions were enough to counteract and even tip the scales against the network’s verbal messaging.
- We often don’t recognize the forces that are persuading us. The viewers who were interviewed after the election did not say that they voted for Reagan because Jennings’s face lit up when he reported on the candidate; that notion would probably strike them as ridiculous. They would reason that his policies and experience appealed to them more than Mondale’s.
The Power of Nonverbal Communication in Spreading Your Message
Salesmen are one group that knows the power of nonverbal communication. We can learn from them how to make our own ideas persuasive and contagious.
Salesmen have all the right words as well as a distinct energy, enthusiasm, charm, and likability that makes people want to listen to them. But there’s something more: Salesmen instinctively know how to use nonverbal communication to reinforce their power of persuasion.
Nonverbal communication includes hand gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, eye contact, posture, cadence of speech, and body language. Nonverbal communication has a powerful impact on us, even when they are so subtle that we don’t notice them.
Everyone engages in nonverbal communication, and the nonverbal messages you send reveal whether you agree or disagree with someone, if you’re making an effort to connect with them, or if you are totally disinterested. This is the power of nonverbal communication.
When people talk, research shows that they subconsciously synchronize their movements and gestures with each other almost immediately. They quickly match each other’s volume, pitch, and speaking rhythm. Salesmen are especially adept at drawing people into their own conversational rhythms, allowing them to set the tone for the interaction.
In addition to conversational harmonizing, people imitate each other’s emotional expressions. This is called motor mimicry: If someone frowns, you are likely to frown as an automatic response. What’s more, physical expressions influence your actual emotions, so through motor mimicry, you can have a strong influence on others’ emotions, again displaying the power of nonverbal communication.
In this way, emotions are contagious. For example, if someone you’re talking to is happy about something, she’d smile as she talks to you. In automatic response, you smile back. Subconsciously, this smile brings you some happiness.
You feel more interested and enthralled with people with whom you have a high level of synchrony. Salesmen effortlessly pull you into harmony with them. Their uncanny ability to draw people into their conversational rhythms and emotional expressions make Salesmen particularly skillful at influencing people’s emotions. And that is a very powerful tool of persuasion.
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- What makes some movements tip into social epidemics
- The 3 key types of people you need on your side
- How to cause tipping points in business and life
