Observing nonverbal behaviors in communication

Nonverbal Communication: Public Observations

Perhaps the most striking difference between men and women in terms of their nonverbal communication is their use of personal space. Riding on a bus or in a waiting room, males tend to spread out, sometimes taking up two seats or more. It is not unusual to see a male with his legs open and hands dangling between them. This looks almost like a challenging posture, even if he is apparently relaxed and not being openly threatened.

In contrast, even a woman who seems confident and is casually dressed in jeans will often assume a contained posture in a similar public environment. She will cross her legs, thereby making herself smaller, rather than occupying even her full allocation of space. In the waiting room I observed, I noticed that when a woman sat next to a man she would often be particularly intent upon squeezing her legs together and slightly move away from his bulk, perhaps in an effort not to seem 'interested,' given that overly friendly physical behavior of women is often interpreted as flirting in our culture.

I also noticed that women were more apt to find something to occupy their eyes while waiting, to avoid having a conversation with a strange male. The women looked at their cell phones or PDAs or selected magazines. Some of the men, obviously wanting to talk, would try to make eye contact with the women, but the women usually just stared somewhere else and pretended not to notice the men.

Despite the attempts of one or two of the men to make a connection with the women, the males in the room studiously avoided making eye contact with one another and simply stared into space when only males were present. There was less of an attempt to look studiously 'busy,' however, versus the females in the room sitting next to overly friendly males.

One striking nonverbal behavior of both sexes was the comfort with which they accepted cell phone calls as they waited. Both a man and a woman received phone calls while talking to the receptionist, and, without missing a beat, answered the call, and only briefly looked away from the receptionist while speaking. This could be interpreted as dominant (male), indicating that the person answering the phone call clearly regarded their personal business as more important than being polite and engaged with the receptionist at the front desk. On the other hand, it could also be seen as feminine in terms of the apparent interest it exhibits in the social behavior and social connection of intimates over strangers.

People often tend to behave less politely in waiting rooms, given that they do not know the people they are waiting with and are unlikely to see them again. They are more likely to violate minor social taboos, such as the women who openly ignored the attempts of males to start a conversation using eye contact. There was also a great deal of defensive posturing by both men and women if they felt that things were taking too long: both sexes looked at the clock, crossed their arms, got up and paced a bit, and sighed.