Silence For An Entire Day (PO Blog)

I see myself as someone who is not very assertive, but at the same time I am not a quite individual. On the contrary, I have been told on many occasions that I am a very loud person. On multiple occasions I have been asked to keep my voice down when I was already talking at what I thought was a reasonably low volume. Additionally, I have a self-schema (Markus, 1977), which are beliefs that people have about themselves, for being loud not very assertive, but that when I do speak up that others hear me, and I feel that I am a good communicator with my words, that I am able to articulate my words well enough for others to get the point. So in order to go against what I see myself as, and how others see me, I decided to go the complete opposite side of the spectrum, and I was completely silent for an entire day by not speaking or writing anything anything that would communicate a message to others. I decided to do this on a dat when I would be interacting with my family, my girlfriend and a bunch of strangers. So I spent a good deal of the morning and afternoon with my family, where we ran errands together, and even went to lunch. The errands were not too difficult to get around, especially once my family just accepted that I wasn't going to talk to them. This in itself was a pain to get to however, because my nonverbal behavior (Darwin, 1872) which is expression of how one feels through means other than talking, isn't very effective. When my family began to think that I was upset with them because I wasn't talking to them, I tried to tell them that I wasn't through hand gestures (a moment in time when I wished I knew sign language) and making facial expressions, only for my family to become confused and just give up on trying to get any sort of concrete answer out of me that didn't consist of a head nod or shake. We then went to lunch at a place called Jack Allan's Kitchen (which was quite delicious), and was honestly kind of awkward to be almost non-communicating when your only source of entertainment while your waiting for you food is to talk to the people at your table. My family began to accept and work with my limit communication abilities around this point, and I began to learn how to communicate things a little bit better, and facial expressions accompanied by hand gestures, as I found out first hand, are almost necessary to have the people your trying to communicate with understand your message. I probably looked something like a fish flailing about on land during lunch just so I could attempt to convey my messages to my family. Ordering the food itself was pretty easy, all I had to do was point at the thing on the menu and nod when the waitress wanted confirmation. However, I feel like this portion of my day, the part spent with my family, was the least stressful and demanding part of my day. The difficult part came later when I went with my girlfriend and her family to a wedding for one of their neighbors (who is around my age, which is still mind blowing). I had to break the no communication rule in order to text (which I felt was a lesser offense to calling) my girlfriend, and only asked what time I needed to be at her parents house for us to drive over. Not gonna lie, being able to communicate like I'm accustomed to felt very good after a solid five hours of flailing my hands and contorting my face, especially since it was acting within my self-schema (Markus, 1977). When I arrived at my girlfriends parents home, it was one of the most nerve wracking things I have ever experienced, because even though I have spent a fair amount of time with her parents, and I am positive that they very much like me, me being completely silent goes against their impression they had formed about me, which coincides with impression formation (Asch, 1946), where people take information about a person and form an impression of what kind of person they are, and what to expect of them. They probably had formed an impression that I would be happy given the occasion of the day (I like weddings) and would be very talkative. When they didnt get this reaction from me, my girlfriends father (who is more of an assertive, straight forward guy), immediately asked me what was wrong, why I wasn't talking and if I had lost my voice. I did my best to try and communicate that everything was fine, but my non-verbal communication (Darwin, 1872) was still so bad that I was helpless to try and express and debunk all of those ideas. Additionally, I realized at this point that there was social norm (Hamilton, 1964) expected of me here. Social norms (Hamilton, 1964) are basically the rules of how someone acts when around others. When the father asked me how I was, it was expected of me to respond with some kind of verbal response instead of giving him a thumbs up and a smile. Needless to say, it was incredibly awkward. The worst was having to deal with my girlfriend, who is very perceptive and intelligent, so when I was not talking to anyone, but was attempting to communicate with my flailing motions, she would constantly ask me if what I was doing was for an experiment or for a class. I didn't really know how to respond to this, since I couldn't let her know that the assignment was for a class, so I was completely non-communicative at these questions, which made me feel more awkward, but ended up for the best because my girlfriend then began telling everyone I interacted with that I was not talking for an experiment. While incorrect, it was fantastic to have someone give an excuse for my behavior external to me. This can be seen as a situational attribution (Heider, 1958), in which actions of an individual are explained by things external to the actor, such as conducting an experiment. The opposite was seen by my family and initially her father, that my silence was due to some personal attribution (Heider, 1958) in which the actions of a person can be explained by something internal to them like their mood or a personality trait. My family thought I was upset about something, and my girlfriends father thought something was not right with me, which demonstrates a fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977). This error states that people are too quick to assume that peoples behavior is due to personal reasons and to not take into account that the situation may be the cause of the behavior. Overall, I did not enjoy not being able to communicate verbally with others, because it was just so difficult to get across what I was trying to say to others, and at the same time, people expect you to be able to talk to them and explain to them the reason behind your actions, and when you can't, they have to make up their own, because people like to have reasons as to why things happen, we don't like to have unexplained phenomena. If we did, there wouldn't be science, because that is what science is, attempting to explain things. Self presentation also is something that I find is so much easier to do when you act in a manner that you are comfortable with, which is typically the one within your self-schema ( Markus, 1977) because once you go outside of that, like me not being able to communicate well, it made me very uncomfortable because I am not accustomed to people not understanding what I am trying to say. This exercise helped me see that if individuals act within what they believe themselves to be, then they will be most comfortable in most situations than when they try to act outside of what they believe themselves to be, which makes me appreciate what good actors do all the more since they are able to act as someone different then themselves, but still appear to be natural in that role. That is why I believe Leonardo DiCaprio should get a dang Oscar by this point.

Word count = 1415

References

Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41, 258-290.

Darwin, C. (1872). The expression of the emotiuons in man and animals. London: John Murray.

Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behavior: I and II. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1-52.

Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.

Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 63-78.

Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 279-301.