Adaptation Theory

The adaptation theory suggests that individual’s simultaneously adapt their communication behaviors to each other. In the past I never really paid attention to what people do during a conversation, however, when I conducted my experiment I realized there are so many nonverbal and verbal gestures that take part of a simple conversation.
For my observations, I used one of my friends from home, one of my friends of school, and a friend of another sex. I choose these people because I thought it would be interesting to see how these 3 different types of people would conduct their conversation.

The first conversation was with a friend from Rider, and we discussed the problems with the water. I decided to start this conversation with how upset and annoyed I was with the situation, and soon enough she felt the same. As we started to get upset with the situation, I noticed with both used a lot of hand gestures to show that we agreed with one another. I felt that this conversation agreed with the theory because we made adjustments simultaneously in order to get our point across.

The second conversation I had was with a friend from home. Since I haven’t seen her in awhile, we were just catching up about what has been happening in our lives. This conversation was different because I felt there was more touching, including touching of the shoulders, and arms. Throughout the conversation, I noticed that there were less hand gestures and more facial and nonverbal gestures. After this conversation, I realized that not all parties tend to the make the same adjustments and it matters who and what your discussing.

The third conversation I had was with a male friend from Rider. I wanted to see if having a conversation with the different sex would make a difference. We also discussed the recent water problem. I noticed there weren’t too many differences because he was also bothered by the problem and felt the same about the situation. However, I noticed he used less hand gestures but expressed his feelings more verbally. Through these 3 different conversations, I found that all three people proved the theory right but they all had different ways of expressing it.