Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (24 page)

National Insurance contributions to fund developments in the NHS in the next Parliament, if Labour were to be returned to power. At the beginning of the sentence, Blair sweeps his left hand from the left side of his body to the centre position of his body as he talks about rises in National Insurance contributions in the last Parliament. He then says that these rises will continue to fund developments in the NHS through the next Parliament. One would expect the gesture to continue moving across the body, signalling this continuation. However, instead of continuing to move across the body, the hand stops halfway across the body when he says ‘last Parliament’ and rather unnaturally sticks there, as shown in
Figure 11.11
.

The abrupt halt of the accompanying gesture may be interpreted as an indication that Tony Blair did not genuinely feel that those past rises would be enough to continue to fund NHS development in the succeeding period of Parliament.

I argue that in each of these examples people may be revealing what they are
actually
thinking (see Beattie 2003). While the speech can be consciously edited and controlled, the gestures are difficult, if not impossible, to edit or control in
real
time, and so the true thoughts and feelings of the speaker may become manifest in the gesture.

Tony Blair: ‘[Rises in National Insurance contributions funded development in the NHS right through the last Parliament] and will continue to fund them through the next Parliament.

 

Figure 11.11
Tony Blair’s gesture–speech mismatch.

Source: ITN Source.

Although researchers have examined gesture–speech mismatches in situations like this, no one, thus far, has looked for gesture–speech mismatches where there is a clash between a person’s implicit and explicit attitudes. But we might well expect those whose implicit and explicit attitudes diverge to display some evidence of this in gesture–speech mismatches. In contrast, people whose attitudes converge should show a higher level of matching speech and gestures (although we might find some evidence of mismatches here which we will have to consider in detail: mismatches may, after all, occur for a variety of other reasons). Gesture– speech mismatches, thus, could potentially allow us to pinpoint individuals whose underlying attitudes are not conducive to green behaviour (regardless of what they actually say). This could prove extremely useful in the future; and also very embarrassing to the likes of me, who might well fit into this group of non-congruent fakers.

Thus, from a contemporary psychological perspective, talk is seen as a complex multichannel activity which involves the expression of thoughts and ideas through both language and expressive movement, and particularly through the expressive movements of the hands and arms (see McNeill 1992, 2000; Beattie 2003). These expressive movements are imagistic and iconic in form and closely temporally integrated with the speech itself. Ideas are jointly expressed through the speech and the movement (Beattie and Shovelton 1999a, 1999b, 2001, 2005) and this has led David McNeill to the startling conclusion that ‘To exclude the gesture side, as has been traditional, is tantamount to ignoring half of the message out of the brain’ (2000:139).

It is important to point out that there are different conceptual models of how this whole process of gestures and speech cooperating to communicate meaning actually works. McNeill (2005) proposed a psychological model based on the rather complex concept of the ‘growth point’ – the minimal unit of an imagery–language dialectic.

A growth point is a package that has both linguistic categorical and imagistic components, and it has these components irreducibly. It is a minimal unit in the Vygotskian [Vygotsky 1986] sense, the smallest package that retains the property of being a whole; in this case the imagery–language whole that we see in synchronized combinations of co-expressive speech and gestures. (McNeill 2005:105)

In McNeill’s model, the construction of meaning and talk is ‘a dynamic, continuously updated process in which new fields of oppositions [his terminology for a particular understanding of context] are formed and new GPs [growth points] or psychological predicates are differentiated in ongoing cycles of thinking and speaking’ (McNeill 2005:107). McNeill shows how this model can explain the form and timing of the gestural movements that accompany speech. In an example where a participant retells a cartoon story, the concept of the growth point is illustrated when someone says verbally ‘drops it [a bowling ball] down the drainpipe’. The accompanying gesture has a distinctive shape and is not the gesture shown in the original cartoon. McNeill’s conclusion is that ‘The gesture and sentence … reflected the speaker’s conceptualizing of the cartoon as much as the objective cartoon content’ (McNeill 2005:121). McNeill’s (2005) model in which he makes speech and gesture absolutely integral to the process of meaning generation gives us a new way of analysing talk to glimpse the conceptualisation process of utterances in real time.

Others have recognised that gesture is an integral aspect of everyday communication but have not necessarily subscribed to the growth point theory. One other influential model is the Information Packaging Hypothesis (IPH) of Kita (2000), discussed extensively by McNeill. The IPH considers speech and gesture to be independent cognitive streams in speech, running simultaneously. The IPH is more of a modular conception of speech and gesture with the two modules as ‘separate’ intertwining streams (in McNeill’s words). McNeill says that the imagery in the gesture is categorised linguistically, whereas in the IPH gesture is viewed as visual thinking. The IPH requires an interface for the imagery and gesture modules for the exchange of relevant information. McNeill’s growth point model does not have such an interface because here gesture and language combine dialectically (see McNeill 2005:132).

Thus, there are a number of significantly different theoretical interpretations of the exact relationship between gesture and speech, but they all agree on a number of theoretical points, mainly that gesture is an essential
component of speaking and that communication between conversational partners depends critically on this component (see also Beattie and Shovelton 1999a, 1999b, 2001, 2005). The other thing they agree on is that our very conception of the nature of human communication has changed in the past few years.

There is one feature of gestural communication in particular that might be extremely relevant to our current considerations, and that is how unconscious this process of generating gestures actually is. Speakers, as I have suggested, may have good conscious awareness of how their speech is unfolding in real time but they seem to be much less aware of the exact form and timing of their gestural movements. This has been emphasised by a number of leading researchers in this area. Thus Cienki and Müller (2008) wrote that ‘Gestures are less monitored than speech and they are to a great extent unconscious. Speakers are often unaware that they are gesturing at all’ (2008:94). Danesi (1999) argued that ‘when people speak they gesture unconsciously, literally “drawing” the concepts they are conveying orally’ (1999:35). Nelson (2007) stated that:

gesture is a parallel component of human verbal communication, sometimes used unconsciously to accompany the message conveyed by words (Goldin-Meadow 1997) … [gestures] are often acquired and used without conscious intent. To the extent this is the case, it verifies the continuing existence of a mode of unconscious meaning unconsciously expressed. (1997:96)

The possibility of using this mode of unconscious meaning unconsciously expressed to gain insights into the implicit aspects of underlying attitudes is an intriguing one. Could we analyse the gestures and speech in detail, specifically focusing on individual gestures and speech that do not match in terms of meaning for a possible insight into implicit–explicit discrepancies? Could we find evidence of dissociation between implicit and explicit attitudes through a micro-analysis of the everyday behaviour of people simply talking about their views? Further, if the gestures are a

 

Figure 12.1
Professor Geoff Beattie giving a talk in London. Even though he has studied gesture for many years, he was still unaware of what this particular gesture meant (it is much more than a pointing gesture, by the way).

mode of unconscious meaning unconsciously expressed, can we ‘read’ the implicit attitudes of the speaker in this mode of representation, even when the conscious verbal channel says something quite different?

Of course, a parallel sort of enquiry was started over a century earlier by Freud (1901/1975) in his analysis of slips of the tongue. Since the first descriptions of such slips (Meringer and Mayer 1895) there has been a widespread difference of opinion on what kinds of mechanisms are required to explain them. Wundt (1900) attempted to explain them through the ‘contact effect of sounds’ or what subsequent generations of linguists and psychologists might call psycholinguistic mechanisms – the processes and rules
that generate speech production (see Ellis and Beattie 1986). But Freud was adamant that:

Among slips of the tongue that I have collected myself, I can find hardly one in which I should be obliged to trace the disturbance of speech simply and solely to what Wundt (1900:392) calls ‘the contact effect of sounds’. I almost invariably discover a disturbing influence in addition which comes from something
outside
the intended utterance; and the disturbing element is either a single thought that has remained unconscious, which manifests itself in the slip of the tongue and which can often be brought to consciousness only by means of searching analysis, or it is a more general physical motive force which is directed against the entire utterance. (1901/1975:103)

His carefully chosen examples seem to support his thesis. There may be a phonetic similarity between the origin and target of the slip, but there may well be some additional evidence of the unconscious breaking through into the conscious medium of speech.

Thus, according to Freud:

A slip of the tongue had a similar mechanism in the case of another woman patient, whose memory failed her in the middle of reproducing a long-lost recollection of childhood. Her memory would not tell her what part of her body had been grasped by a prying and lascivious hand. Immediately afterwards she called on a friend with whom she discussed summer residences. When she was asked where her cottage at M. was situated she answered: ‘on the
Berglende
[hill-thigh]’ instead of
Berglehne
[hill-side].

When I asked another woman patient at the end of the session how her uncle was, she answered: ‘I don’t know, nowadays I only see him
in flagranti
.’ Next day she began: ‘I am really ashamed of myself for having given you such a stupid answer. You must of course have thought me a very uneducated person who is always getting foreign
words mixed up. I meant to say:
en passant
.’ We did not as yet know the source of the foreign phrase which she had wrongly applied. In the same session, however, while continuing the previous day’s topic, she brought up a reminiscence in which the chief role was played by being caught
in flagranti
. The slip of the tongue of the day before had therefore anticipated the memory which at the time had not yet become conscious. (1901/1975:105–106)

But imagine if Freud had had video recordings to work with and the new model of how thoughts are expressed through both speech and movement. What might a similar analysis of gesture, capable of generating its meaning well below the radar of consciousness, have revealed? That is the question we tackle here. Furthermore, we can be more targeted in our quest. With Freud, all we have is the observed behaviour; the rest is inference. Here we will have the behaviour – direct concrete evidence of gestures and speech that match or fail to match – but, in addition, we will have our independent measures of what their implicit and explicit attitudes actually are. This should help us focus our search and our interpretation in a much more systematic way.