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Body Language Books Get It Wrong:
The Truth About Reading Nonverbal Cues
Defensive, uncertain, confident, confrontational: can your body language reveal what youâre thinking?
Most of us have heard the one about if you cross your arms over your chest youâre feeling defensive or if youâre fiddling with your hair while talking you feel nervous â but is there really any truth to some of these body language stereotypes?
Reading body language can be a useful skill in understanding how someone is feeling or what they might be thinking. But itâs important to remember that itâs not an exact science and there can be cultural or individual variations in how people express themselves through body language. For example, eye contact in Japan can be considered an act of aggression or rudeness.
Indeed, you canât trust everything you read in body language guides. For example, in a book published in 1970, author Ray Birdwhistell claimed that humans have 20,000 different facial expressions. But in the Definitive Book of Body Language published in 2004 by Allan and Barbara Pease, that number suddenly increased to 250,000.
A quarter of a million different facial expressions â no wonder you need to read a guide on body language to decode those. More recent scientific research suggests that the real number of facial expressions is actually closer to 21.
There are body language books that promise success in the boardroom, the bedroom, bars and restaurants. They promise success at work and at home along with how to read the âtellsâ of your friends and neighbours. These popular books have two main aims (apart from making money) â they explain how to âexpertlyâ read body language but also how to fake it for maximum effect.
Dominant displays
The Definitive Book of Body Language, for example, tells us that the crotch display (legs open, crotch slightly thrust forward, hand on the belt) is used by âmacho men and tough guysâ. Itâs a powerful sexual signal the authors say and they claim it works. They write: âThis gesture tells others, âI am virile â I can dominateâ which is why itâs a regular for men on the prowl.â
Millions of people buy these books and try to recreate the crotch display or the âcatapultâ â the seated version of the hands-on-hip pose, with the hands behind the head and the elbows âmenacingly pointed outâ. The authors say this is an almost exclusively male gesture âused to intimidate othersâ.
Itâs hard not to find either display a little comical partly because these âsecretâ meanings have been so widely shared in these bestselling books and partly because they are just inherently ridiculous.
These books are full of static images of the body language of effective âcommunicatorsâ â and thatâs one fundamental issue because body language is dynamic: the body is in motion. You canât stand in a crotch display or sit in the catapult all day.
But thatâs not to say body language isnât important. Its significance is immense, although itâs not 12 times more powerful than verbal communication â as some have claimed.
Fake vs real
In my book Rethinking Body Language, I argue that to read body language accurately you need to know where to look. There may not be 20,000 different facial expressions, but the face can still be very revealing of underlying emotional states. That is until the person starts to try to control it, for example, by masking emotions with a smile.
So how can you tell a fake smile from a genuine smile? A genuine one involves the muscles around the eyes and fades slowly from the face. A fake masking smile leaves the face abruptly, as the US psychologist, Paul Ekman, has shown in his pioneering experiments linking emotions and facial expressions. So to decode facial expressions more accurately, you need to focus on whatâs going on when the fake smile disappears. Itâs very brief but it can be very revealing.
Another problem with the static nature of these body language books is that speech and body language are intimately connected, as US psychologist and expert in psycholinguistics (the psychology of language), David McNeill argued in his 2000 book Language and Gesture.
When people talk they often make spontaneous and unconscious hand movements that illustrate the content of what theyâre saying. Thereâs no dictionary for these movements but theyâre generated alongside speech itself. My own research has shown that meanings are expressed in these movements â and when people canât see these gestures they miss important information.
Sometimes the gestural movement and the speech do not match. A speaker might say âmy partner and I are very closeâ but their hands indicate a significant gap, rather than closeness. Another person says âI have very high ambitionsâ but their hand doesnât rise that far, which you would expect if a person really felt that way.
I have argued in Rethinking Body Language that, in cases like this, the unconscious gesture is often the more reliable indicator of the underlying thought. But you need to know what theyâre talking about to read the gestural movements.
Itâs much easier to lie effectively in speech than in the accompanying gesture because these movements have intricate timings linked to the speech itself. The hand movement starts just before the speech and then the meaningful part of the gesture coincides exactly with the relevant word. Itâs hard to get these timings right when lying. Again itâs all in the movement and the timing â and the close and unconscious connection between speech and body language.
Geoff Beattie, Professor of Psychology, Edge Hill University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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