Nonverbal marginalization

Abstract The nonverbal cues that accompany speech (for example, facial expressions, gestures, and eye gaze) can be as communicatively significant as the content of the speech itself. I identify what I argue is a very common—but largely philosophically unexamined—phenomenon: our tendency to allocate nonverbal cues in ways that are sensitive to conversational participants' levels of respective social power such that people with more power receive comparatively more positive and affirming nonverbal cues than people with less power. I call this ‘nonverbal marginalization’ and argue that it reflects and reinforces harmful social prejudices. In this paper, I introduce and empirically situate nonverbal marginalization within a broader account of nonverbal communication, showing how implicit and explicit biases are subtly reflected in automatic patterns of nonverbal behavior. I go on to propose a new conceptual resource and intervention stratagy to identify and address the various ethical, psychological, and epistemic harms of nonverbal marginalization.