Week #7 Question #1

1). Because nonverbal messages can be ambiguous, they are open to misinterpretation. Have you ever been wrong about the meaning of someone's nonverbal message? Describe what happened. How can people increase the accuracy with which they interpret nonverbal messages.

One of the most interesting cases of a misunderstood nonverbal message(s), which I also found myself guilty of, is images used by the Hells Angels motorcycle club. Growing up on the East Coast of the U.S. motorcycle culture was something that only came to town with the yearly bike rallies. When I moved to Miami, they became even more rare. I grew up with a culturally learned notion that bikers were nothing but a gang on wheels and the Hells Angels, they were the worst of them all. I saw images of swastika covered jackets, SS lightning bolts wherever they could fit, skulls and cross bones on helmets, and defaced American flag patches. Needless to say the word "evil" seemed to fit quite well with my learned preconception of the Hells Angels. It was later that I read a book by Hunter S. Thompson, by the name of Hells Angels, which documented a few years of Thompson's life on the road with the motorcycle club as a freelance journalist. While Thompson in no way refutes that the Hells Angels are in every way a group of brutes who revel in an orgy of violence, rape, and the road, he was able to peer into the mindset of the Hells Angels themselves. This understanding of the workings of a Hells Angel's thought process allowed him to understand their use of symbols. Thompson came to the conclusion that the Angels didn't wear these hate symbols because they themselves were full of hate or evil, but rather because they enjoy instigating violence where ever and whenever possible. Thompson alludes to countless occasions in which a civilian attempted to fight an Angel due to worn symbols only to be gleefully beaten by the entire gang in response, just as if the entire scenario was a trap. So, while I and the rest of the United States were interpreting these images in a way which would seem normal in our culture, the Hells Angels knew this and used it against anyone unlucky enough to cross their path. Just as the Venus fly trap draws in its prey, so do the Hells Angels. This belief of Thompson's was reinforced when I met a group of first generation Angels who road with the infamous Oakland club, lead by Sonny Barger. They confirmed that many of the symbols they wore were just to get a rise out of people and tempt them into throwing the first punch. In the same conversation the entire group also adamant in stating that Thompson was a lunatic idiot who had no idea what he was talking about...one can only wonder. None the less, my notions of the Hells Angels were inherently wrong based upon my use of culturally learned interpretations of their symbols rather than taking an non-ethnocentric view and interpreting them as an Angel, and not as an American.
I believe a way in which people can educate themselves on nonverbal messages is to watch visual media from other countries. By observing television shows, movies, art, and people of other cultures, as represented in visual media, one could pick up on nonverbal messages and their meanings. Another way someone can increase the accuracy in which they interpret nonverbal messages is by attempting to leave any preconceived notions behind and interpreting the message through the lens of the observed, and not the observer.