Body Talk

Faking It

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.

Faking it

This deeper understanding of how tells work together makes it clear that it is difficult to fake your body language. Producing one dominant tell, like a palm-down handshake, is unlikely to convince somebody that you're a strong person if your posture is slumped, you don't make eye contact and you stumble over your words.

Everything about you contributes to what you communicate. Some politicians adopt power tells when they rise to the top but still carry some of their old body language habits with them. These tells of a more bashful youth can sometimes undermine the new projection of authority.

Freud believed that: 'He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.'

In fact, that's not entirely true. Whether or not you can fake your body language seems to depend on how comfortable you are about doing it. Actors fake tells for a living. So do politicians. Likewise, in a recent experiment, sales personnel were found to be able to tell either lies or the truth without significant changes in body language.

What is likely is that adopting the tells of confidence, for instance, can actually increase your confidence as you see other people changing their reaction to you. Or adopting the tells of flirting is one way of etting people know you're interested. Faking it is certainly possible but it needs competence, a comprehensive approach and a decided lack of conscience! Practice makes perfect.

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