We’d all love to know what other people are thinking; but some individuals just can’t accept that the contents of someone else’s head are private and confidential, and are therefore inaccessible.

So, in just a slightly less annoying way than Psychic charlatans and get laid quick guides promise magic bullets and miracles, to part the gullible and lonely from their cash, a whole industry has sprung up writing and promoting books about Body language.

Surprisingly though, many people don’t seem to realise that Body language is the bastard child of Evolutionary Psychology and Astrology. Certainly, we can say that fat people probably enjoy their food a bit too much, and it’s a near certainty that smiling people are happy. There might even be some slight truth in claims such as people point their feet at someone they’re interested in; after all, if you’re interested in someone you’re probably going to speak to them, and if you’re going to speak to someone, you’re more than likely going to face toward them first, and generally people point their feet forwards, most of the time.

As an aside, much is also culturally dependent. If you speak to someone in England, and they nod or shake their head, you know that they are either agreeing or disagreeing with you, respectively. However, if you were to speak to someone in Sri Lanka, this pattern would be reversed.

So, now, we come to myths and dishonesty. We’ve already noted elsewhere that the rather too frequently quoted idea that all communication is 7% Words, 38% Voice tone and 55% Body language is nonsensical rubbish. If words were really only 7% of communication, why would we have to learn foreign languages? And then, how do we cope on the telephone? Many lazy and/or ignorant authors have just blindly copied an attention grabbing snippet of information, without even bothering to check if it’s true or not. This statistic is actually nothing more than a myth derived from a misquoting of an experiment carried out in 1967 by Albert Mehrabian, that asked “what factors does a speaker’s likeability depend on?”, rather than anything concerning someone’s ability to communicate. Certainly, the oft mentioned idea that people with folded arms or crossed legs are defensive must be one of the daftest things I’ve come across though…

Compliance professionals should recognise in the above paragraphs something known as a “Yes set“. - Start your communication by saying something that’s almost certainly true, move to saying something that could possibly be true, and finish with what you want to try to slip under the radar of the person you’re talking to (they have just agreed with the first two statements, and are now more likely to agree with the third). Pretty much all Body language books I’ve browsed through seem to work in that same way.

Now, it would certainly be interesting if there was some top secret way to read peoples minds through Body language, especially since so much of the subject matter appears to deal with sex and relationships. Take the following rather interesting quote that I found recently, as an example:

…men are notoriously bad decoders of women’s [body language], often assuming that a woman is interested in them when she isn’t. That’s because a man automatically assumes that an attractive woman is aiming her availability signals at him personally, when she’s actually broadcasting them to everyone. Men also have a tendency to inflate come-ons in their mind, and to assume that put-offs are only hang-ons. This tendency of men to misread women’s signals is part of a more widespread insensitivity. Not only are men less observant, they are generally not as tuned in to other people’s needs as women are.

Here, the author has invented a system; and presumably hopes that the reader will summon up a male stereotype of a good-for-nothing couch potato in their mind, and reason “Yeah, men are pretty dumb and insensitive, while women generally have a reputation as good empathisers. This Body language must be top stuff”.

So, let’s examine the above quotation more critically:-

If you’ve ever read pseudo-intellectual literature, or perhaps even looked at some of the many various explanations found on the Internet which claim to document how to seduce people, you will realise that often the material is written in such a way that it can be interpreted in two ways. The first is a radical but manifestly false way that grabs headlines and attracts attention to the author, whilst the second is a true but relatively banal way that the author can fall back to, once some bright spark has spotted the deception.

In the quoted paragraph, we’re supposed to accept that men are somehow generally defective, since they often won’t fit into this author’s system. But, if something is to be communicated, we need a compatible sender and receiver, as well as the method of signalling. And then, Evolutionary theory tells us that characteristics will only be selected for, if they are beneficial. Therefore, what is the point of a communication system that doesn’t communicate? That would be like someone trying to ring a cellphone when they know that the battery in the phone being called is flat or the phone is switched off.

If the author was telling us that women have a signalling system that men could detect more than 50% of the time, it would be an interesting idea to test. However, the more likely explanation is that a man sees an attractive woman, and then decides to talk to her simply because he likes how she looks, and thinks she’d be fun in bed; rather than because some sort of erratic subconscious signalling system is in action.

It should also be noted that it’s been claimed before that women are generally pretty good communicators, who apparently have a greater verbal fluency than men. If there’s any truth to this claim, why would women be such good verbal communicators, but such poor non-verbal communicators?

Even assuming that a woman could broadcast signals to everyone, the author’s explanation breaks down, since he claims that the hypothetical man assumes that the woman is interested in him when she isn’t. So, why would a woman broadcast to all, if she only wants the message received by specific men? This would be like someone whispering secrets to a person in the same room, through a megaphone.

Perhaps the woman is especially attractive and has dressed provocatively, in which case she would have plenty of male attention, regardless of other criteria. Ergo, it would make more sense for her signalling system to send selective messages to specific men communicating “stay away”, rather than “come here” as the author suggests.

Finally, in the last sentence of the paragraph we’re analysing, the author just becomes rude (and rather ignorant in my opinion). If men are as insensitive, unobservant and un-empathetic as claimed, then this is a slap in the face for all those men who have entered caring professions, for example, male nurses, social workers, teachers, doctors, therapists, counsellors, etc. Yet, Sociobiologists tell us that men are more visual than women (apparently it’s an adaptation from many years gone by, when men were the hunters, in hunter gatherer communities). So the explanation breaks down yet again.

It seems to me that the people teaching this overcomplicated rubbish owe their students an apology, and also a refund.

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Posted by Jonathan in Philosophy, Sociology