Nonverbal Cues & Dominance

How Nonverbal Cues Shape Dominance in Group Conversations

Have you ever noticed that in almost every group conversation, someone naturally takes charge? Within minutes of a discussion starting — even between strangers — a kind of unspoken hierarchy forms (Rosa and Mazur, 1979).

This dominance is a key player in how we connect and communicate. Whether it’s a team meeting, a casual chat, or a big negotiation, dominance influences who leads, who follows, and how decisions get made (Burgoon and Dunbar, 2006).

And it’s not just what people say that matters, it’s how they behave.

Why Dominance Matters — and How It Can Go Wrong

Dominance isn’t all bad. In the right context, a confident leader can help a group stay focused and get things done. But too much dominance — or dominance from the wrong person — can hurt group dynamics, silence important voices, and lead to poor decisions.

That’s why researchers are so interested in understanding how dominance shows up in group settings. In fact, the study of group behaviour now combines fields like psychology, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and even wearable technology (Pentland, 2005; Gatica-Perez, 2006).

Reading Between the Lines: The Power of Nonverbal Cues

What you say matters — but how you say it (or even how you move while listening) can be even more revealing (Dillard and Tusing, 2000; Schmid Mast, 2002).

Researchers have found that dominant people tend to:

Move their bodies more — using broader gestures, shifting posture, and taking up more physical space (Dunbar and Burgoon, 2005; Burgoon and Dunbar, 2006)

• Speak more often and for longer stretches

• Use louder and deeper voices

• Speak more slowly

• Make direct eye contact

• Taking up more physical space (spreading out, open posture)

• Interrupting others while talking

• Initiating physical contact (like patting someone on the back)

• Controlling conversations (setting the topic, steering discussions)

• Standing tall or towering over others

• Commanding or directive language ("Do this," "You need to...")

• Minimal smiling (especially forced or “polite” smiling)

• Facing people head-on (square shoulders, direct stance)

• Marking territory (placing objects to claim space, like bags or hands on chairs)

  
  

These signals are so reliable that they’re now being used to train computers to detect dominance automatically, based on simple audio and video recordings (Hung et al., 2007). We may soon have apps that could tell you who’s leading a meeting just by analysing nonverbal behaviour!

Humans Are Great at Picking Up Dominance (Even Without Realising It)

Even when we’re not consciously thinking about it, we’re good at sensing who holds power in a conversation. Whether you’re part of the chat or just observing from the outside, you’ll likely pick up on the subtle signs of who’s in charge (Dovidio and Ellyson, 1982).

Studies show that external observers — people watching a conversation from the sidelines — are often just as accurate as participants when it comes to judging dominance (Dunbar and Burgoon, 2005). That’s a good sign for researchers building systems that rely on third-party observation.

Why This Matters in a Digital World

Understanding nonverbal dominance isn’t just an academic exercise. As workplaces become more collaborative (and more remote), being able to read the room — even through a screen — is a huge advantage.

Imagine using technology to:

• Provide real-time feedback during team meetings

• Help train leaders to project authority without being overbearing

• Create more inclusive conversations by balancing participation (DiMicco et al., 2004; Kulyk et al., 2006)

  
  

The potential applications are endless — and they all start by tuning into the language beyond words.

References

• Basu, S., Choudhury, T., Clarkson, B., and Pentland, A. (2001) 'Towards measuring human interactions in conversational settings', Proceedings of the IEEE CVPR International Workshop on Cues in Communication (CVPR-CUES), Kauai.

• Burgoon, J.K. and Dunbar, N.E. (2006) 'Nonverbal expressions of dominance and power in human relationships', in Manusov, V. and Patterson, M. (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Nonverbal Communication. Sage.

• Choudhury, T. and Basu, S. (2004) 'Modeling conversational dynamics as a mixed memory Markov process', Proceedings of NIPS.

• DiMicco, J., Pandolfo, A., and Bender, W. (2004) 'Influencing group participation with a shared display', Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), New York.

• Dillard, J.P. and Tusing, K.J. (2000) 'The sounds of dominance: Vocal precursors of perceived dominance during interpersonal influence', Human Communication Research, 26(1), pp. 148–171.

• Dovidio, J.F. and Ellyson, S.L. (1982) 'Decoding visual dominance: Attributions of power based on relative percentages of looking while speaking and looking while listening', Social Psychology Quarterly, 45(2), pp. 106–113.

• Dunbar, N.E. and Burgoon, J.K. (2005) 'Perceptions of power and interactional dominance in interpersonal relationships', Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 22(2), pp. 207–233.

• Gatica-Perez, D. (2006) 'Analysing human interaction in conversations: a review', Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems (MFI), Heidelberg.

• Hung, H., Huang, Y., Friedland, G., and Gatica-Perez, D. (2007) 'Estimating the dominant person in multi-party conversations using speaker diarization strategies', International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Las Vegas.

• Jovanovic, N., op den Akker, R., and Nijholt, A. (2006) 'Addressee identification in face-to-face meetings', Proceedings of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Trento.

• Kulyk, O., Wang, J., and Terken, J. (2006) 'Real-Time Feedback on Nonverbal Behaviour to Enhance Social Dynamics in Small Group Meetings', Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multimodal Interaction and Related Machine Learning Algorithms (MLMI), 3869, pp. 150–161.

• McCowan, I., Gatica-Perez, D., Bengio, S., Lathoud, G., Barnard, M., and Zhang, D. (2005) 'Automatic analysis of multimodal group actions in meetings', IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 27(3), pp. 305–317.

• Pentland, A. (2005) 'Socially aware computation and communication', IEEE Computer, pp. 63–70.

• Rienks, R.J. and Heylen, D. (2005) 'Automatic dominance detection in meetings using easily detectable features', Proceedings of the Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction (MLMI), Edinburgh.

• Rosa, E. and Mazur, A. (1979) 'Incipient status in small groups', Social Forces, 58(1), pp. 18–37.

• Schmid Mast, M. (2002) 'Dominance as expressed and inferred through speaking time: A meta-analysis', Human Communication Research, 28(3), pp. 420–450.

• Wrede, B. and Shriberg, E. (2003) 'Spotting hotspots in meetings: Human judgments and prosodic cues', Proceedings of Eurospeech, Geneva.

• Zancanaro, M., Lepri, B., and Pianesi, F. (2006) 'Automatic detection of group functional roles in face to face interactions', Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI), Banff.