Imagine you’re grabbing lunch with your brother, talking a mile a minute about your exciting plans for after graduation. He’s staring off into space. You wonder if you’re boring him. But when you look closer, you notice that his face is ashen, he isn’t making eye contact with you, and he hasn’t shaved in a few days. You pause and ask, “Hey, is everything OK with you? You seem . . . not yourself.” Your brother looks up somewhat startled, tries to smile, and says, “What? Oh! Yes, everything’s great.”

You’ve just experienced channel discrepancy, a situation in which one set of behaviors says one thing and another set says something different. In this case, your brother’s verbal communication says he is fine, but his nonverbal communication says he is not fine at all. So which message do you believe? In most cases, you’ll believe the nonverbal message. Like most of us, you assume your brother has less control over his nonverbal behaviors, so they are more “reliable” indicators of how he is feeling. Research supports your assumption. Studies show that we tend to give more weight to nonverbal behavior than to verbal behavior when we

However, just because we tend to place more stock in nonverbal communication doesn’t mean that we always interpret that communication accurately. Your brother might be fine, just as he says he is. Perhaps he is growing a “playoff beard” along with the rest of his hockey team and is thinking about the next day’s game rather than listening to you talk about your plans. Even when we know others very well, we often fail to detect deception or read their nonverbal behaviors accurately (Knapp & Hall, 2010; Van Swol, Malhotr, & Braun, 2012; Vrij, 2006).