Page 61 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 21

Here Buber sounds similar to Kierkegaard and As humans we think that we are really profi-
his emphasis on the encounter with the divine.
Mar�n Buber and Emmanuel Levinas
Buber is reminding us that true communica�on
is always between people not objects. Between
people of intrinsic worth. As Werner notes in
his reference to Emmanuel Levinas, and as Bu-
ber would surely have agreed, others are en-
countered facially and in the revela�on of their
need to be ‘seen’, ‘voiced’ and given loving
compassion.
Whole Body Language – pu�ng in the effort
needed
If the face is a portal to the soul, it is vital that ca�on is 55% nonverbal, 38% vocal, and 7%
we learn nonverbal communica�on. Otherwise
we will be denying ourselves important com-
munica�on subtexts. And there is a danger of
emo�onal lethargy here.
In the 1980s Fiske and Taylor (15) were looking
for ways to describe what research was sho-
wing to be a ‘ubiquitous tendency’ among hu-
mans to think only as much as they feel they
needed to, and no more. And so the metaphor
of ‘cogni�ve miser’ was born. It seems that we
tend to sit on reserves of mental energy and
processing capacity, unwilling to spend much of
it unless we really have to. Sadly, we are not
prepared to put in the emo�onal effort. We
prefer to think fast and shallow rather than
slow and with more depth. (16) Fiske and Taylor
con�nue to show that human thought, like eve-
ry other complex process, is subject to the
‘speed versus accuracy’ trade off. Go fast and
make mistakes, be thorough and diligent and
you take an eternity. So according to Fiske and
Taylor we are ‘mo�vated tac�cians’ when it co-
mes to interpersonal communica�ons, strategi-
cally choosing ease and speed, or effort and ac-
curacy, depending on our mo�va�on. Most of
the �me, just the “gist” will do, so we choose
speed. ‘Cogni�ve misers’ tend to favor shortcut
tools such as assump�ons and heuris�cs. We fa-
vor going for the Reader’s Digest version of the
person and se�le for a ‘first impressions’ evalua-
�on of other people. However, as Paul Tieger no-
tes, “speed reading people” is not advisable (17).
61
cient at reading other people. The truth is, we
are not. (18) Halvorson notes that, “much of
this process of perceiving other people isn’t
even ra�onal. It is biased, incomplete and infle-
xible. It is also largely (but not en�rely) automa-
�c.” (19) The first thing is to understand how
li�le we actually pay a�en�on, and how much
we rely on assump�ons.
The first assump�on to be faced down is that
we tend to believe the universal myth that 90%
of communica�on is nonverbal. This is not the
case as Albert Mehrabain (20) has shown. A
researcher in body language, Mehrabain was
the first to break down the components of face
to face conversa�on. He found that communi-
words only. (21) It is now commonly thought
that nonverbal communica�on preceded ver-
bal communica�on in terms of human evolu�-
on. We also tend to ‘mirror’ each other:
A growing body of evidence suggests that
language evolved from manual gestures,
gradually incorpora�ng motor acts with vo-
cal elements. In this evolu�onary context,
the human mirror mechanism (MM) would
permit the passage from “doing something”
to “communica�ng it to someone else.” This
evolu�onary process is called the “gestural
origin of Language.” (22)
Another person’s facial ‘micro movements’ are
picked up on almost an unconscious level. Ho-
wever, Sam Horn says it is especially important
that we watch people’s eyebrows to know what
they are really thinking. (23) But we now think
much more holis�cally in terms of using the
whole of our physicality when it comes to inter-
personal communica�on. I think it’s about rea-
lizing that I am trying to bring all I am to an in-
terface with all you are, when it comes to com-
munica�on. No easy feat!
Dr. Jeff Thompson believes that we can be�er
understand the complexity of nonverbal com-
munica�on by remembering what he calls the
3 Cs. (24)