PART 1:
Throughout my experience when trying this experiment I will have to say became very difficult for me trying to get my point across without using my voice or writing to my partners. Usually I am a person that keeps to herself and likes to listen to other peoples opinions and concerns but I never really realized how much of an effect it had on me before trying this experiment. I believe that I always took this ability for granted and didn't notice how much I would miss being able to speak whenever I would like to, to get my point across. My parents did alter the way they communicated with me because of my absence of communication. When we began this experiment they seemed to think it was pretty funny but little by little they did seem to get irritated because they couldn't understand or get my opinion because of the assignment. So instead they became frustrated and decided not to try anymore.
During this conversation I would have to say that the person with the power to control it was my friend amy. Amy is usually the person who tries and speaks her mind about a certain situation that was going on in her personal life and usually gets the opinion and honorable comments from myself and my friend ashley. This time we tried to do the same but with the experiment going on. At first she explained what her troubles were and toward the end she waited for us to comment on what we thought. I tried to express myself after ashley did and but was unable to get my feelings through to her because of the lack of misunderstanding when they tried to pay attention to what i was trying to put out there. Towards the end this just initially irritated both of them which cause them to ignore me and just speak within themselves and just have me there listening even if I tried to express as much as I could.
If my partners and I represented two different cultures , one that speaks and one that didn't I most definitely believe that the culture with the advantage would be the one that speaks. A culture that is able to briefly describe exactly what is needed and the many things that need to change in a way that gives them a visual understanding in their imagination of course is going to help them completely when trying to understand what is going. Trying to communicate with my friends without speaking really showed me how much of a difficult time people who are unable to speak or do anything complicates their relationships with others with a completely different culture. Even though they can be surrounded with people just like themselves I personally believe it can still be a struggle when trying to get their opinions or thoughts across for everyone else to understand when you cant word for word what exactly it is you want to say. A culture I would have to use for this example would be the death community and the community that is able to speak and hear. Yes the death community isn't able to hear but they do have that ability to use hand gestures and say what they want to say by showing it with their hands but of course they aren't able to fully hear or understand what a person with the ability to speak and hear could.
PART 2:
During my experience with this second experiment I thought of it as a bit more complicated than the first experiment. With this experiment i had a really hard time communicating with my parents rather than how I did in the first experiment. Not being able to move around and try to explain I was only able to look at things but was unable to help my partners understand what I had to say. This became a struggle after a couple of minutes when I would be asked questions because they had no idea what i was explaining to them no matter how much I insisted in trying.
I believe the use of sign in our language is very important especially when we need to communicate with people that aren't able to speak with us. With out sign in our language I think it can really affect those people who are in need of it. With this sign language in our lives it allows those people to communicate with us and have a normal conversation just as if they were speaking normally. Body language I believe helps a lot while this experience was going on. After I was trying to talk to my partners they explained to me that they thought that the way my body language was, was something that helped them out when they tried to figure out what i was saying. With my body language they were able to tell if i was saying something that was stressful, exciting or something sad that had happened with me.
The ability to read body language helps a person survive, obtain resources, and reproduce successfully by allowing those around him/her understand what types of emotions they are feeling without having to speak or explain what they are going through.
I do believe there are people that have difficulty reading body language. About a week or two I became to realize that one of my closet cousins isn't quick to realize when someone is personally going through a situation that affects the way they socialize. During this time my cousin wouldn't stop going on and on about having fun going to do certain things but never noticed what this person was feeling. Maybe a situation in which a person is unable to hear or see could be where there might be a benefit to not reading someone body language.
Part 1: I think that you made great points and that's good that you realized how much of an effect it had on you. Part 2: I completely agree with you that some people don't realize body language like the next person would simply due to the fact that they're blinded by what they choose to see rather than look at a person as a whole.
ReplyDeleteI'm confused as to who your partners were for the first experiment? You mention your parents in the first paragraph and then a friend later in the second.
ReplyDeleteCan you generalize your impressions on the issue of control and power? I'm not looking for a specific person who had the control, but was it you or your speaking partners? Why did that individual seem to have more power in the conversation?
I agree with your conclusion on the matter of communicating complex ideas. By 'death community' did you mean 'deaf community'? Big difference! If that is indeed what you meant, I agree with that example.
Interesting that your partners seemed to have difficulty understanding you even though you had complete use of spoken language. Why do you think this was the case?
I don't disagree with your conclusions regarding the information we receive from body language, but you are only considering the situation where body language matches and supports the information you receive from spoken language. What does it tell you when the body language doesn't match the spoken language? Humans tend to use body language as a type of lie detector. If spoken words don't match with the body language, we are more inclined to believe the body language and doubt the words. Think about how being able to detect liars might help an individual's ability to survive and reproduce (which applies to the next section).
How does understanding emotions of others help us obtain resources better? Can you be more explicit on this line of logic? Does reading body language help us with more concrete benefits, such as negotiating and reasoning with other people, detecting danger from others, and perhaps figuring out who can or cannot be counted on as allies?
Like all human traits, there is normal variation in expression, and the ability to read body language is no different. But beyond that, there are groups of people who have great difficulty or an outright inability to read body language due to physical or mental disability, such as those who are in the autism spectrum or those who are blind (though they can read vocal intonation).
I'm not sure I understand how it would be a benefit to you to not read the body language of someone who is deaf of blind? Would you be getting false or misleading information from them in some way? Think about when the body language of others might mislead you and so it would be better to ignore it? Do all cultures use the same system of body language? If you travel to another country, can you trust the information you get from their body language?
I have a few friends that are also in anthropology and did a similar assignment, and when I talked to them about it they said that their partners also started to ignore them after a while and just talked amongst themselves. It wasn't that they wanted to be rude, but more that they felt there was not conversation really going on amongst us anyways. Interesting that that happened to you too!
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