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Faking It

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Telling fact

Covering the mouth when talking is an important lying tell. It's almost as if you don't want the lie to come out.
Source: The Book of Tells by Peter Collett

Body language is very interesting but how do we know that any particular tell has the given meaning that the books and the nonverbal communication specialists say it does?

The linguist Edward Sapir described body language as 'an elaborate and secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all'.

A lot of nonverbal communication analysis has operated on this premise. It has essentially been the writing down of this code, sanctioned by a consensus of meaning reached between the experiment's participants.

These experiments have often looked at one facet of body language, like raised eyebrows or a breathy voice for example, and deduced a fixed definition for this communication.

Telling the whole story

Increasingly, contemporary social psychologists are arguing that considering an individual tell in isolation is unhelpful.

Originally, body language was conceived of as an entirely separate communication to the spoken word. Words were presumed to convey information and tells were presumed to convey emotion.

The latest body language thinking is that words and nonverbal communication are all part of one complex system of communication that we understand altogether.

This makes it harder to look at one tell in isolation and be able to describe exactly what it means. It is far more reliable to consider a tell as part of a collection of simultaneous communications which reinforce, or in some cases, contradict each other.

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