Chapter 4 Nonverbal Communication 95Nonverbal Communication Is Often Spontaneous
and Unintentional
The best poker players think a great deal about nonverbal communication. They
know how to bluff, or convince their opponents that they are holding a better
(or worse) hand than is actually the case. A player who figures out an opponent’s
“tell”—a nonverbal signal indicating a good or bad hand—can profit from this
knowledge if he, quite literally, plays his cards right. Mike Caro, a poker profes-
sional and author of The Body Language of Poker, warns players not to look at
the cards as they are laid out on the table. Players who look away from “the flop”
have a strong hand, he explains. Those who stare at it—or at their cards—have a
weak one. He also advises players to memorize their hand so opponents won’t see
them looking at their cards and glean cues from this action (Zimbushka, 2008).
Like poker players, we often send nonverbal messages unintentionally—we
roll our eyes, laugh, slouch, or blush without meaning to. And our nonverbal
behaviors can send powerful, unintended messages without us having much time
to think through them (Capella & Greene, 1982). Great poker players know
that they can’t completely eliminate such behaviors. That’s why many of them
wear sunglasses while playing: they want to mask their eyes so their opponents
can’t pick up subtle and unintentional cues from their eye movements.
Nonverbal Communication Is Ambiguous
Professional players like Caro might have a system for reading nonverbal behav-
iors, 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 anxi-
ety 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
GIVING SOMEONE a
big hug is an example of
nonverbal communication,
but communicating with
someone using American
Sign Language is not.
(left) Simon Baker/Getty Images;
(right) AP Photo/Al BehrmanCONNECT
You make sense of your
world and decode nonver-
bal 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.