Nonverbal Communication Is Ambiguous
You make sense of your world and decode nonverbal behavior through schemas, your accumulated experience of people, roles, and situations (Chapter 2). So if you catch your friend in a lie, you might suspect, on the basis of your relational history, that whenever he avoids eye contact with you, he’s lying. But competent communicators must think beyond schemas when determining the meaning of nonverbal communication.
Professional players like Caro might have a system for reading nonverbal behaviors, but even they know that it’s more of an art than a science. That’s because nonverbal communication is inherently ambiguous. Blinking, stammering, or hesitations in speech can indicate deception. But they can also indicate anxiety or uncertainty. In many cases, you can pick up clues about the meaning of behavior from the situational context. If your friend is sighing deeply and blinking rapidly as she heads off to her biochemistry final exam, she’s probably anxious. But you can’t know for sure. Perhaps her boyfriend broke up with her twenty minutes ago and she just doesn’t feel like talking about it. For this reason, it’s best to regard nonverbal behavior (and poker “tells”) as cues to be checked out rather than as facts.
