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How is it that people come to use certain nonverbal behaviours in specific settings, or associate a particularbehaviour (e.g., smiling) with a particular meaning (e.g., happiness)? A sociocultural approach toanswering these questions focuses on the ways in which behaviours and their meanings are prescribed atsocial or cultural levels and on the ways in which people come to acquire them. Encompassing a number ofmodels and theories, the sociocultural paradigm emphasizes the influence of human interaction in creatingand transmitting understanding; thus, it highlights the effects of culture, class, religion, sexuality, power, orother socially maintained factors on the enactment and meaning of behaviour.

The fundamental assumption underlying the sociocultural paradigm is that interpersonal behaviour and itsmeanings are learned through the diffusion of social or cultural knowledge and are, therefore, malleable.Because interpersonal behaviours are learned rather than innate, both behaviours and their meanings canbe altered by changing the knowledge that is conveyed. This can explain, for instance, not only whycultures vary one from another in both their behaviours and the meanings of those behaviours, but alsowhy, without access to another culture’s knowledge, people often find cross-cultural communication sochallenging.

Central to the sociocultural paradigm, then, are two ideas: i) Most nonverbal communication is learned,rather than innate, and, ii) Most non-verbal behaviours do not have inherent meanings, but rather, theirmeanings are products of social consensus. These principles have found widespread acceptance within thefield of human communication, perhaps, in part, because of their considerable intuitive appeal. It is easy toidentify examples of behavioural learning simply by considering the apparent influence of parents,teachers, gender roles, cultural norms, and the media on children’s behaviours. Consequently, theparadigm seems to have face validity as an approach that is isomorphic with people’s everydayexperiences.

A related strength of the sociocultural paradigm is found in the magnitude of the empirical evidence thathas been marshalled in support of it. Perhaps as a result of its intuitive appeal, many researchers haveapplied the tenets of the paradigm to their own work and have found support for the influence of learning,or for the social embeddedness of meaning, across a wide range of topics, ranging from personalitydevelopment and child discipline, to gender role acquisition, doctor-patient communication, and therelational messages of nonverbal behaviours.

One potential criticism of the sociocultural paradigm is that its emphasis on the social influences onlearning behaviour and creating meaning obscures what may be substantial non-social influences on thesame outcomes, including the influence of genetics. Certainly, any paradigm will lead its proponents toattend to particular variables more than others; the problem lies in the potential to misinterpret geneticeffects, for instance, as the effects of learning or socialization. An important example derives from thestudy of parental influence on child personality development. As Harris (1998) noted in her detailed review,there is no shortage of social science research showing that children are more likely than not to grow upwith personalities similar to those of their parents. That is, pleasant, affectionate parents tend to rearpleasant, affectionate children, whereas aggressive, violent parents tend to rear children who are likewiseaggressive and violent. Working from the framework of the sociocultural paradigm, one would find littledifficulty explaining these robust patterns as products of socialization: children observe their parentsbehaving in a pleasant, affectionate manner and come to adopt the same disposition themselves. However,as Harris (1995) pointed out, much of the research examining parental-offspring congruence in dispositionhas failed to control for an important alternative hypothesis: children are similar to their parents because oftheir genetic relatedness to the parents, not because of how they were socialized. To the extent thatresearchers in this area have failed to entertain (and, consequently, to control for) such an alternative, therefore, they may run the risk of misattributing—or at least, overattributing—the observed similaritybetween parents and children to a social influence, when a non-social influence is also operative.