BODY LANGUAGE IS OF PARTICULAR IMPORTANCE IN LARGE GROUPS

At a social science conference the participants initially listened somewhat
attentively to the various speakers. The seminar was held at relatively high
intellectual and low emotional levels. At one point during the conference,
however, one of the speakers started to deliver a paper that could be described
as not "politically correct." The audience started to show their disapproval by
taking up reading materials, others frowned and yet others started to look around
to try to read each others' opinions. It seemed that the only way for the speaker
to retain the attention would be with an emotional outburst.

Meetings can be an effective tool for communication, unification and complex problem
solving, but often deteriorate and become unproductive. Reading newspapers, frowning and
looking around are only some of the limitless ways participants can disregard and protest the
verbal content. On the other hand, attentiveness can underscore the verbal content. In this note
I apply scaling arguments to communication in meetings and suggest that as meetings get larger,
it becomes more and more important to deal with the non-verbal messages. I also suggest how
one can track and optimize the mix of verbal and non-verbal communication, simply by changing
the seating arrangement.

Quantifying Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication in a Meeting

While thoroughly defining and quantifying the modes of communication in a meeting is a
near impossible task, we can make a very simple first approximation:

At any one time, each participant can emit verbal as well as non-verbal messages. A
communication "channel" is open for non-verbal messages when a second person is watching
the “emitter,” and open for verbal messages when a second person is listening to the emitter. In a
meeting of N members, we thus have, in principle, N-1 people watching or hearing the first
person, N-1 people watching or hearing the second person, etc. The total number of channels
open for verbal and non-verbal information is, in principle, the same:

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