Nonverbal Auditory Cues Allow Relationship Quality to be Inferred During Conversations

R I M Dunbar,Ignacio Tamarit,Emma Smith,Juan-Pablo Robledo,Ian Cross

doi:10.1007/s10919-021-00386-y

Abstract

The claim that nonverbal cues provide more information than the linguistic content of a conversational exchange (the Mehrabian Conjecture) has been widely cited and equally widely disputed, mainly on methodological grounds. Most studies that have tested the Conjecture have used individual words or short phrases spoken by actors imitating emotions. While cue recognition is certainly important, speech evolved to manage interactions and relationships rather than simple information exchange. In a cross-cultural design, we tested participants’ ability to identify the quality of the interaction (rapport) in naturalistic third party conversations in their own and a less familiar language, using full auditory content versus audio clips whose verbal content has been digitally altered to differing extents. We found that, using nonverbal content alone, people are 75–90% as accurate as they are with full audio cues in identifying positive vs negative relationships, and 45–53% as accurate in identifying eight different relationship types. The results broadly support Mehrabian’s claim that a significant amount of information about others’ social relationships is conveyed in the nonverbal component of speech.

Highlights

Language has been the single most important evolutionary development achieved by humans, and, aside from its obviously central role in culture, much has been made of its value as a medium through which information can be transmitted and cooperation negotiated (Tomasello, 2010)
Claims were made for the pre-eminence of nonverbal cues, at least with respect to the communication of affect, with more than 90% of the information in conversation-based exchanges conveyed by nonverbal cues like intonation, phrasing, and facial expressions (Mehrabian, 1972)
Samples of natural everyday conversations indicate that two-thirds or more of conversation time is devoted to the exchange of social information about the conversants or a third party, with only a relatively modest 10% devoted to technical information exchange (Dahmardeh & Dunbar, 2017; Dunbar et al, 1997; Wiessner, 2014)

Summary

Introduction

Language has been the single most important evolutionary development achieved by humans, and, aside from its obviously central role in culture, much has been made of its value as a medium through which information can be transmitted and cooperation negotiated (Tomasello, 2010). Pearce et al (2017) have pointed out that the human (and primate) social world is much more complex than that implied in most psychological and neuroscience approaches where the focus has been entirely on dyadic interactions and the recognition of affect They argue that, at the very least, we should distinguish between three distinct levels of sociality: social predispositions, dyadic relationships, and social networks (where third-party relationships become important) (see Dunbar, 2018). One recent attempt to rise to this challenge found that hearing a short clip of two people laughing together was sufficient to allow the listener to predict whether the pair were friends or strangers (with an accuracy of 53–67% across 24 different cultures) (Bryant et al, 2016) This is only just above chance level (at 50%), these results suggest that it may be possible to infer something about the quality of a social interaction from nonverbal cues alone. In understanding both the origins of speech and usages to which spoken exchanges are put, it is these social contexts that are by far the most important

Methods

Results

Conclusion