What is the best way to learn/decode body language?

Post Reply New Topic

Watch the show Lie to Me.

It's a detective show about a group of detectives who are specially-trained experts at reading nonverbal cues. The makers of the show got advice from Paul Ekman, who is a well-respected psychologist specializing in nonverbal cues. When a character shows a plot-important nonverbal cue, they highlight it to draw your attention to it, and a little while later they explain what it means.

I found it very helpful, personally.

So once again, “fictional media portrayal of social science theory leads to confusion between fiction and fact,” the researchers write. “Viewers (of the show) may come away with the false sense they can better detect lies..."

But remember: Lie to Me is fiction.



LINK

The problem is you need good baseline knowledge of a persons body language and behavior to truly detect when they're really lying. Some people are naturally more nervous than others whether they are lying or not. Law enforcement going by things like lack of eye contact, looking down, or nervousness is outright discriminatory against people who might be on the autism spectrum or people who are generally uncomfortable being questioned regardless of guilt or innocence. On the other hand, the true psychopaths might be overconfident when lying. Judging whether people are telling the truth based on whether you can intimidate them and make them nervous is discriminatory bullying BS. Cops can be full of crap. I think a lot of them like to harass innocent people for no reason because they are power tripping a**holes.

Good eye contact is usually a start, not staring, but looking as if you're engaged and interested.

There are several general pieces of evidence to suggest that at least some nonverbal communication is automatic. First, and as noted, there are numerous demands on relatively limited conscious cognitive resources; the sheer amount of these resources needed to process all nonverbal communication in a controlled manner makes this possibility exceedingly unlikely. Second, because the basis of verbal communication is largely conscious, humans have a tendency to direct their focus to what is said and not to focus consciously on the nonverbal cues that are, by definition, unsaid (DePaulo & Friedman, 1998). Yet it is clear that this information is still being processed cognitively because it regulates interactions effectively (see Cappella & Schreiber, this volume). Third, some nonverbal cues cannot be controlled easily, and when efforts to control those behaviors are exerted, they are not usually successful (see later sections in this chapter). Finally, although some researchers have argued that nonverbal communication is deliberate and strategic, there is recent evidence that even strategic behaviors can occur automatically (Lakin & Chartrand, 2003; Lakin, Chartrand, & Arkin, 2005)

Although impression management and self-presentation can certainly be conscious (see Keating, this volume), these communicative functions can also occur relatively effortlessly and without conscious guidance, particularly in cases where people are not particularly motivated to convey a desired identity. Moreover, it is also clear that people may infer traits and make attributions from the nonverbal behaviors of others automatically and that these judgments can be quite accurate. Together, this literature suggests that people often express their personality and decode personality information about others automatically through nonverbal behaviors. People tend to use different self-presentational strategies in different situations and with different types of people. For example, when people are instructed to make an interaction partner like them, they nod, smile, and make more eye contact than do people who did not receive these instructions (Godfrey, Jones, & Lord, 1986). People copy the postures of interaction partners more when they are told those partners might be helpful than when opportunities to get help from the partners are not available (La France, 1985). Nonverbal behaviors are also dependent on the people for whom the display occurs (see DePaulo & Friedman, 1998, for a review). Finally, the ecological theory of perception suggests that people are able to gain, relatively automatically, information about other people from their appearances and movements, information that Gibson (1979) calls affordances. This information is able to be gathered easily because appearance and behavior express some personality characteristics accurately (Zebrowitz & Collins, 1997). Nonverbal communication is therefore sensitive to conscious goals and situational constraints. Although this strategic use of nonverbal behaviors suggests that their cognitive basis is conscious, being strategic does not demand consciousness. There are several lines of research that suggest that people alter their nonverbal behaviors automatically. Tice, Butler, Muraven, and Stillwell (1995) hypothesized that people’s default self-presentational strategy with strangers is to present a positive image, whereas people’s default self-presentational strategy with friends is to present a modest image. Consistent with this proposition, when participants behaved consistently with their default tendencies, their self-presentations used few cognitive resources, which led to increased memory of the details of the interaction. Participants who used nondefault self-presentational strategies (e.g., modesty with strangers) were not able to pursue these strategies automatically and used conscious cognitive resources to accomplish their goals (see also Patterson, Churchill, Farag, & Borden, 1991/1992). Other research has also demonstrated that self-presenting in a way that is inconsistent with personality is cognitively taxing and requires attentional resources (Pontari & Schlenker, 2000).