Life, the True Testing Ground
“It’s as large as life, and twice as natural!”
— Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking Glas
Automobile manufacturers subject any new car accessory to extensive testing. However, it is not until the accessory is exposed to real-life situations that its success or failure can be definitively determined. Some years ago the Ford Motor Company decided to improve the safety of its automobile by adding an accessory called the vacuum automatic door lock, a device designed to lock the door automatically as soon as the car reached a speed of 9 m.p.h. After cars with the new locks were on the market, however, Ford began receiving complaint after complaint.
Whenever the buyers of these cars went to automatic car-washing stations they had trouble. As the automobile went down the washing line, the wheels were spun on the white-wall automatic washers and the car reached a relative speed of 9 m.p.h. The doors automatically locked, and at the end of the car-wash production line the drivers had to get a locksmith to pick the lock so they could get back into their own automobiles. So Ford went back to the drawing board and back to manually operated door locks.
In the same manner, life situations also offer better tests for the interpretation of gestures. The comprehension of gestures has not been achieved through the limited behavioral-laboratory approach, one which attempts to study individual parts abstracted from meaningful groups of gestures. It is a human process, and the methods that men have intuitively used for hundreds of thousands of years to understand one another naturally lend themselves as techniques for understanding gestures.
Our own awareness of nonverbal communications was an outgrowth of our interest in developing and teaching the artof negotiating. When we met and joined together to present workshops and seminars on negotiating to top executives in the United States and abroad, we were both aware of the vital role nonverbal communications play in every negotiating situation. We found that verbal exchange does not
 
operate in a vacuum; rather, it is a complex process involving people, words, and body movements. It was only by considering these elements together that we could follow the progress of a negotiation.
We found that one limiting factor to studying gestures has been the lack of a simple system of transcribing or reproducing an actual situation where individuals could be thoroughly observed and the interaction or expressive behavior between subjects studied systematically. With the video-tape recorder we were able to eliminate this first difficulty.
Ray Birdwhistell, senior research scientist at Eastern Pennsylvania Research Institute, is presently engaged in filming encounters and noting them through kinesics, a science that sets out to analyze individual gestures by considering their component parts. This book considers the problem of nonverbal communication