Nonverbal Communication: Public Observations
Perhaps the most striking difference between men and women in terms of their nonverbal communication is their use of personal space. Riding on a bus or in a waiting room, males tend to spread out, sometimes taking up two seats or more. It is not unusual to see a male with his legs open and hands dangling between them. This looks almost like a challenging posture, even if he is apparently relaxed and not being openly threatened.
In contrast, even a woman who seems confident and is casually dressed in jeans will often assume a contained posture in a similar public environment. She will cross her legs, thereby making herself smaller, rather than occupying even her full allocation of space. In the waiting room I observed, I noticed that when a woman sat next to a man she would often be particularly intent upon squeezing her legs together and slightly move away from his bulk,...
The women looked at their cell phones or PDAs or selected magazines. Some of the men, obviously wanting to talk, would try to make eye contact with the women, but the women usually just stared somewhere else and pretended not to notice the men.
Despite the attempts of one or two of the men to make a connection with the women, the males in the room studiously avoided making eye contact with one another and simply stared into space when only males were present. There was less of an attempt to look studiously 'busy,' however, versus the females in the room sitting next to overly friendly males.
One striking…
