The Situational Context

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Dancing at a funeral. Raising your Starbucks cup to toast your professor. Making long, steady, somewhat flirtatious eye contact with your doctor. Wearing a business suit to a rock concert. Do these situations sound strange or potentially uncomfortable? The situational context has a powerful impact on nonverbal communication. Recall from our model of competent communication in chapter 1 that the situational context includes spheres like the place you are, your comfort level, the event, current events, and the social environment.

Now imagine dancing at a wedding, toasting your friend’s accomplishment, flirting with an attractive friend, or wearing a business suit to a job interview. In each instance, the situational context has changed from those in the examples presented earlier. Situational context determines the rules of behavior and the roles people must play under different conditions. Competent communicators will always consider the appropriateness and effectiveness of nonverbal communication in a given context.

Two of the primary factors involved in situational context are the public-private dimension and the informal-formal dimension. The public-private dimension is the physical space that affects our nonverbal communication. For example, you might touch or caress your partner’s hand while chatting over dinner at your kitchen table, but you would be much less likely to do that at your brother’s kitchen table or during a meeting at city hall. The informal-formal dimension is more psychological, dealing with our perceptions of personal versus impersonal situations. The formality of a situation is signaled by various nonverbal cues, such as the environment (your local pub versus a five-star restaurant), the event (a child’s first birthday party or a funeral), the level of touch (a business handshake as contrasted with a warm embrace from your aunt), or even the punctuality expected (a wedding beginning promptly at 2:00 P.M. or a barbecue at your friend Nari’s house going from 6:00 P.M. to whenever) (Burgoon & Bacue, 2003). Competently assessing the formality or informality of the situation affects your use of nonverbal communication—you might wear flip-flops and shorts to hang out at Nari’s, but you probably wouldn’t wear them to a wedding and certainly wouldn’t wear them on a job interview.

If your nonverbal communication does not appropriately fit the public-private and formal-informal dimensions, you’ll likely be met with some nonverbal indications that you are not being appropriate or effective (tight smiles, restless body movements, gaze aversion, and vocal tension).