Nonverbal Communication

Where Nature Meets Culture

Ullica Segerstrale,Peter Molnar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351243117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The field of nonverbal communication is a strategic site for demonstrating the inextricable interrelationship between nature and culture in human behaviour. This book, originally published in 1997, aims to explode the misconception that "biology" is something that automatically precludes or excludes "culture". Instead, it points to the necessary grounding of our social and cultural capabilities in biological givens and elucidates how biological factors are systematically co-opted for cultural purposes.

The book presents a complex picture of human communicative ability as simultaneously biologically and socioculturally influenced, with some capacities apparently more biologically hard-wired than others: face recognition, imitation, emotional communication, and the capacity for language. It also suggests that the dividing line between nonverbal and linguistic communication is becoming much less clear-cut.

The contributing authors are leading researchers in a variety of fields, writing here for a general audience. The book is divided into sections dealing with, respectively, human universals, evolutionary and developmental aspects of nonverbal behaviour within a sociocultural context, and finally, the multifaceted relationships between nonverbal communication and culture.

1

NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION: CROSSING THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN CULTURE AND NATURE

Ullica Segerstråle

Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago

Peter Molnár

Semmelweis University Medical School, Budapest

NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION AS AN INTERFACE BETWEEN SOCIAL SCIENCE AND BIOLOGY

One of the basic aims of this book is to convince the reader of the utter artificiality of the supposed opposition between culture and biology. This opposition has a long tradition in academia, and it is perhaps no surprise that some recent controversies such as the sociobiology debate have been conducted within the standard framework of nature versus nurture. However, such a contrast is not only artificial, but it also represents a biologically quite outdated way of thinking. At least since the modern synthesis during the first half of the 20th century, the paradigm of gene-environment interactionism has prevailed within biology—if this had been adopted also by social scientists, their obvious conclusion would long since have been that it is not a question of nature versus nurture, but of both at the same time. Unfortunately, the prevailing division of labor in academia and a lingering “biophobia” in the social sciences have made a rapprochement difficult for those who study human behavior from a biological and a social scientific perspective. However, we believe that the field of nonverbal communication is a strategic site for demonstrating the inextricable interrelationship between nature and culture in human behavior. We hope that the chapters presented in this volume will persuade social scientists that much of the new research now going on in the life sciences could be of direct relevance to their own most fundamental theoretical quests.

Nonverbal communication is a field that encompasses a wide variety of disciplines within both the social and natural sciences. If there ever was a field that could be labeled “the missing link” between the social and natural sciences, this would be it. Nonverbal communication is not only naturally multidisciplinary, it also approaches the multifaceted connections between biology and culture from a broad spectrum of intellectual angles. In fact, the typically interdisciplinary interests of students of nonverbal communication sometimes make it hard to classify these researchers as belonging to either natural or social science. This is particularly true because epistemological and methodological views in this field freely cross the supposed divide between the two cultures. At present, relevant research goes on in a range of academic disciplines, from neurophysiology, psychophysiology, behavioral ecology, and ethology to social psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, and linguistics.

Despite an overlap of interests and methodological approaches, students of nonverbal phenomena in different disciplines may not always be aware of one another’s research. The academic organization of fields and specialties encourages relatively narrow specialization, and publications are typically directed to an expert audience. Based on our conviction that nonverbal communication might serve as a model for the much-needed rapprochement between the natural and social sciences, we requested the assistance of the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (ZiF) to provide an opportunity for us to organize a conference on this topic as part of the group project Biological Foundations of Human Culture. With the support of ZiF, we were able to invite the foremost students of nonverbal communication from a wide variety of fields to share their recent recearch with each other and our group in nontechnical language. This book is an edited version of the papers presented at the conference “Nonverbal Communication and the Genesis of Culture,” held at ZiF in March 1992. We hope that this book will convey some of the interdisciplinary spirit and many individual “aha!” experiences of that conference.

The opposition to biology in the social sciences has a long tradition. For some, it may even seem that resisting biological explanations of human behavior ought to be the epistemological raison d’etre for a social scientist. However, such a view represents a relatively recent paradigm in the social sciences. It should be pointed out that ever since their beginning, the social sciences have had an off-again, on-again relationship with biology. Thus, there have existed periods when social scientists have felt quite free to seek explanations for human behavior in biological factors. For instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, evolutionary biology was taken as a basis for many social scientific theories. Interestingly, at that time, biological arguments were used for both conservative and progressive social policy programs. However, the social sciences’ involvement with biology later followed a (mistaken) view of human genetics as Mendelian, which got them implicated in contemporary racial theorizing and eugenics. After World War II, the tide turned again. Several factors contributed to a decline of the biological paradigm and a shift to environmentalism in the social sciences: the realization that earlier assumptions about the inheritance of human traits could not be biologically supported any longer, the revulsion to Nazi doctrine, and the emerging cultural relativist paradigm promoted by Boas and his students. Ever since World War II, particularly after the famous 1952 UNESCO statement on race, the environmentalist paradigm has prevailed. This means that for the last four decades, biology has been not only black-boxed but black-listed. However, we believe that it is now high time that for intellectual reasons social scientists take a new look at the biological sciences and the potential insights they may provide for social scientific theorizing.

It seems clear, however, that the initiative for a reconciliation between biology and the social sciences would have to come from the latter. A good example of how not to try to integrate biology and the social sciences was probably Wilson’s (1975) suggestion to “biologize” the social sciences, judging from the strong reaction his Sociobiology provoked (e.g., Leach, 1981; Sahlins, 1976; Wiegele, 1979). Indeed, overselling biology to the social sciences may trigger all kinds of epistemological and political resistance, particularly because any consideration of biological factors tends to be immediately labeled “reductionism” or “biological determinism” (see, e.g., Segerstråle, 1992). However, an additional reason for social scientists’ lack of sympathy for sociobiology may well have been the different time scales involved in social scientific and evolutionary biological theorizing. Sociobiological reasoning deals with long-range evolutionary scenarios and adaptive explanations for particular behaviors. Such a way of thinking is quite alien to social scientists, who deal with contemporary or at most historical behaviors. Therefore, among biological fields, the closest field to the social sciences is probably ethology. Interestingly, this discipline has not been overtly recognized as relevant to the social sciences (even though ethological notions have been smuggled in through the back door in the footnotes of sociologists such as Goffman, 1972; see also Collins, 1975, for an explicit interest in ethology).

It should be noted, however, that not all types of biological arguments have been rejected by social scientists. At least three biological givens seem to have been largely incorporated as part of the social scientific body of knowledge: the “hard-wiredness” of the human capacity for language, the existence of critical periods in language development, and the importance of social interaction for normal human development. This at least opens up the possibility that social scientists might also be interested in further studies concerning the biological basis of human communicative abilities, including the results of today’s sophisticated psychophysiological and neurophysiological research. Indeed, what emerges today is an increasingly complex picture of human communicative ability as simultaneously biologically and socioculturally influenced, with a few capacities apparently more biologically “hardwired” than others (and therefore probably crucial as communicational building blocks): face recognition, imitation, emotional communication, and the capacity for language. This is dealt with in more detail later.

OVERCOMING THE FALSE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN NATURE AND NURTURE

Nonverbal communication has not been sufficiently appreciated in the social sciences so far. The main reason is probably that the social sciences have tended to strongly emphasize the unique human capacity for language (i.e., symbolic communication). However, considering that nonverbal communication is obviously an important everyday phenomenon—there have been estimates that up to two thirds of our behavior in dyadic interaction is nonverbal (Birdwhistell in Knapp, 1978, p. 30)—it is high time for the important insights from this field to get integrated in the social scientific domain. It is safe to say that much of our de facto understanding of one another—and of total strangers—is rooted in our nonverbal abilities and their relationships to our shared human neurology and physiology. This everyday experience seems to have been played down in much abstract social science discourse. In sociology, the most notable exception is the symbolic interactionist school, represented by Mead (1934), who introduced the notion of a “conversation of gestures” to explain the origin of the social Self (G. H. Mead, 1934). Later on, the role of nonverbal communication has been recognized particularly within the traditions of microsociology (Collins, 1975, 1981; Goffman, 1959, 1972; Scheff, 1990) and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), and occasionally in more general social theory (e.g., Giddens, 1984).

Another reason for the relative invisibility of nonverbal communication within the social sciences is the particular history of this type of research, originating in fields outside the mainstream. One of the two main orientations of early nonverbal communication research, beginning in the mid-1950s, resulted from a collaboration among structural linguists, psychiatrists and anthropologists who were inspired by the new developments in information theory and cybernetics. The representatives of this “structural” approach or “context analysis” were interested in the organization of behavior, patterns of interaction, and the like. Because it drew inspiration from anthropological linguistics in the Sapir-Whorf tradition (Sapir, 1949; Whorf, 1956), this strand of early nonverbal research saw itself as falling on the “culture” side of a hypothetical academic divide. For instance, Birdwhistell (1970), the founder of kinesics (the language of body movement), insisted on the total determination of nonverbal behavior by culture or language group. The same was true for Hall, the founder of proxemics (the language of space), who extended the linguistic relativity thesis to cultural differences in conceptions of space and time (E. T. Hall, 1959, 1966).

Meanwhile, research on the nature side in nonverbal communication concentrated on finding evidence of human behavioral universals. Ultimately, this line of research derives from Darwin’s (1872/1965) famous The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Ekman, 1973). The evidence here came from several sources: primatological studies indicating homologies between primate and human facial expressions (Chevalier-Skolnikoff, 1973; van Hooff, 1972); human ethological research on facial expressions of blind, deaf, and later even thalidomide children (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1973, 1989); identification of cultural universals (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1972, 1989); and cross-cultural research on facial expressions (Ekman, 1973; Ekman & Friesen, 1969, 1975, 1978; Ekman & Keltner, chap. 2, this volume; Izard, 1977; Tomkins, 1962; Zajonc, 1980). Still another important type of research involves the psychophysiology of the human face (Dimberg, 1982; Öhman & Dimberg, 1978).

Until recently, these two main strands of research saw themselves as, and were also presented as, representing serious alternative viewpoints (see, e.g., Knapp, 1978). Now it is no longer possible to postulate a simple either-or situation when it comes to culture and biology. Additional evidence has accumulated to tip the balance in favor of the biological foundations of nonverbal behavior, or, more correctly, toward an answer that inseparably involves both culture and biology (see also Hinde, 1987; Reynolds, 1980). This volume is designed to make this point as explicitly as possible. Furthermore, today the dividing lines between nonverbal and language communication appear much less defined than before. The same is true for the distinction between human and animal communication. Language experts are increasingly turning to preverbal communication...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• 1 Nonverbal Communication: Crossing the Boundary Between Culture and Nature: Ullica Segerstråle and Peter Molnár
• PART I NEW FINDINGS ON THE UNIVERSALITY OF HUMAN NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION
• PART II DEVELOPMENT OF EMOTIONS IN A SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT
• PART III THE SOCIAL ROLE OF NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION AND EMOTIONS: EVOLUTIONARY INFERENCES
• PART IV NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION AS A MEDIATOR BETWEEN NATURE AND CULTURE
• LIST OF AUTHORS
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX