Culture and Nonverbal Communication
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Hold up one hand, with your thumb and two middle fingers folded in, and wave it at a crowd of people. That’s what then president George W. Bush and members of his family did before cameras during inaugural festivities. The next day, newspapers in Norway ran photos of a smiling Jenna Bush holding her hand in the “Hook ’em Horns” salute to the University of Texas Longhorns (her alma mater), with a headline reading “Shock Greeting from Bush Daughter” (Douglass, 2005). Why all the fuss over a gesture of support for a college football team? Because in Norway (and indeed, in heavy-metal co-cultures around the world) the gesture is commonly understood as a satanic salute.
As this example illustrates, nonverbal communication is highly influenced by culture. What may be an innocent gesture in one group, context, region, or country can convey a different and possibly offensive message elsewhere. Culture affects everything from eye behavior to touch to facial expressions and includes time orientation and notions of physical attractiveness, both of which we explained earlier. For example, in the United States, people tend to make direct eye contact when speaking to someone, whether a colleague, a supervisor, or a professor. Similarly, in the Middle East, engaging in long and direct eye contact with your speaking partner shows interest and helps you assess the sincerity and truth of the other person’s words (Samovar, Porter, & Stefani, 1998). However, in Latin America, Japan, and the Caribbean, such eye behavior is a sign of disrespect.
Similarly, culture affects touch. Some cultures are contact cultures (for example, that of Italy) (Williams & Hughes, 2005) and depend on touch as an important form of communication. Other cultures are noncontact cultures and are touch sensitive or even tend to avoid touch. Latin American, Mediterranean, and Eastern European cultures, for example, rely on touch much more than Scandinavian cultures do. Public touch, linked to the type of interpersonal relationship that exists and the culture in which it occurs, affects both the amount of touch and the area of the body that is appropriate to touch (Avtgis & Rancer, 2003; McDaniel & Andersen, 1998). Social-polite touch, for example, involves a handshake between American men but a kiss between Arabic men. And some religions prohibit opposite-sex touch between unmarried or unrelated individuals.
Sex and gender also influence nonverbal communication. Women usually pay more attention to both verbal and nonverbal cues when evaluating their partners and deciding how much of themselves they should reveal to those partners, whereas men attend more to verbal information (Gore, 2009). Women also engage in more eye contact than men, initiate touch more often, and smile more (Hall, 1998; Stewart, Cooper, & Steward, 2003).
Such differences are not necessarily biologically based. For example, mothers may use more varied facial expressions with their daughters because they believe that women are more expressive (or are supposed to be more expressive) than men. A more emotionally expressive and varied environment in childhood may present women with more opportunities to develop nonverbal skills (Hall, Carter, & Hogan, 2000). Adult gender roles may also play a part. Since women are expected to look out for the welfare of others, smiling—as well as other affirming nonverbal behaviors—may help women meet situational, gendered expectations (Hall, Carter, & Hogan; 2000). This may also help explain why women exhibit greater sensitivity to nonverbal messages. They tend to exhibit more signs of interest (such as head tilts and paralinguistic encouragers like “uh-huh” and “ah”) and also decode others’ nonverbal behaviors more accurately, particularly those involving the face (Burgoon & Bacue, 2003).