The Effects of Nonverbal Communication on Credi

The Effects of Nonverbal Communication

The old saying, "It's not what you say; it's how you say it," well represents the importance of nonverbal behaviors to the emergence of leadership and the establishment of credibility. Several nonverbal behaviors can greatly increase or decrease the opportunities for emergence of leadership and credibility. Studies have explored all aspects of the link between nonverbal communication and the establishment of leadership and credibility. Nonverbal factors fit into five categories: eye contact, gesticulations, paralanguage, posture, and overall facial expression. Also, environmental factors such as seating arrangement and setting have a great effect on leadership emergence and credibility. Use of this information can be important to a communicator because receivers interpret specific actions as having specific credibility and leadership meanings. This paper explores the nonverbal behaviors and environmental factors important to leadership and credibility establishment and the ones detrimental to it.

People's credibility is measured by the people with whom they are interacting. Credibility is the believability of a person as measured by another person. Although the output of credibility can be controlled by a communicator, the measure of credibility is still made by the receiver (Leathers, 1986). Thus, one's nonverbal communication is vital to the establishment of credibility. The rec

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nt to abortion, for example. Changes in pitch are expected by receivers and make a communicator more colorful and dynamic. A monotonous pitch throughout a conversation will probably be perceived as neither competent nor dynamic. The pronunciation of a communicator is vital to credibility establishment because pronunciation is probably the most obvious semantic feature of a voice. A speaker with poor pronunciation is perceived to be lower in competence, trustworthiness and dynamism than a speaker with good pronunciation. If these semantic qualities are used while communicating, the communicator will have the "confident voice," according to a study by Scherer, London and Wolf (1973). In that study, texts were read with confident and doubtful voices to observers. As expected, the speakers with confident voices were rated more credible. Also, a speaker with a doubtful text and confident voice was more credible than a speaker with a confident text and a doubtful voice. This shows how important the semantics of a communicator are to perception by the audience. At times, paralanguage is actually more important than the words. In general, the communicator should avoid long pauses, repetition of words, and constant filler words

Category: Psychology - T