Week 1 Post 2 Nonverbal Communication and Deception

     Nonverbal communication conveys the majority of meaning when people communicate. Around 66% of meaning is nonverbal, However, nonverbal communication is not universal. People with cultural differences can, and do miscommunicate through nonverbals because of cultural differences behind nonverbals. For instance, in America we do a thumbs up gesture to nonverbally communicate "good job", while in Australia the same gesture likely will be taken as "up yours", an equivalent to flipping them off. Conversely there are some universal nonverbals, such as basic facial expressions like smiling and screwing up one's nose in disgust, along with pitch of voice, which all communicate some level of emotion. These are thought to be almost instinctive as they are used and recognized across most cultures.

    Nonverbal communication is the main way we can identify weather someone is lying or being deceptive. The pitch of voice is the most reliable indicator of deception but overall there is no reliable way to tell of someone is being deceptive. Most people, including police officers and members of the intelligence community (FBI, CIA, NSA, ect...) cannot identify deception around 50% of the time. Only highly trained individuals such as Secret Service agents show an overall higher rate in identifying deception. So it is possible to be able to learn how to identify deception, and therefore possibly recreate deception, or learn how NOT to recreate it, even when you truly are lying.