Rethinking Body Language

How Hand Movements Reveal Hidden Thoughts

Geoffrey Beattie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415538886
• eBook ISBN: 9781134744824
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Challenging all of our old assumptions about the subject, Rethinking Body Language builds on the most recent cutting-edge research to offer a new theoretical perspective on this subject that will transform the way we look at other people. In contrast to the traditional view that body language is primarily concerned with the expression of emotions and the negotiation of social relationships, author Geoff Beattie argues instead that gestures reflect aspects of our thinking but in a different way to verbal language. Critically, the spontaneous hand movements that people make when they talk often communicate a good deal more than they intend.

This ground-breaking book takes body language analysis to a whole new level. Engagingly written by one of the leading experts in the field, it shows how we can detect deception in gesture–speech mismatches and how these unconscious movements can give us real insight into people's underlying implicit attitudes.

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1
INTRODUCTION: A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON AN OLD PROBLEM

In this book, I am going to present a new theoretical perspective on bodily communication. It will be very new to the vast majority of people; indeed, it may directly challenge what you think you know about body language. Bodily communication is incredibly significant, indeed more significant than we had ever assumed, but not necessarily in the way that we traditionally imagined. Bodily communication does not just reveal our emotions and how we feel about another person, it reveals our hidden thoughts. In the past few years, new research in psychology has made significant progress in understanding what people do when they communicate to one another, and more importantly exactly how they do it, and this new research challenges many of our long-standing beliefs on this subject. You need to be prepared for a few shocks along the way, to have a few core beliefs shaken. I know enough about human communication to warn you in advance.

I say ‘bodily communication’ but the focus is really on one important component of bodily communication, namely the movements of the hands and arms that people make when speaking. This might seem overly restrictive but believe me, this in itself is a very large domain of research. I will argue that such movements are not part of some system of communication completely divorced from speech, some system of ‘body language’ vs ‘verbal language’, as many psychologists of the past seem to have assumed; rather these bodily movements are intimately connected with speaking and with thinking. The late Michael Argyle, one of the leading British social psychologists for many years, and the clinical psychologist Peter Trower once wrote that ‘Humans use two quite separate languages, each with its own function’ (Argyle and Trower 1979: 22). The separate languages they were referring to here were ‘verbal language’ and ‘body language’. According to this view, verbal language, unlike body language, conveys semantic information – information about the world, be it our very private inner world (‘you have caused me so much pain’) or the outer world (‘I was stuck in the house because it was raining, watching the people walk by’). It also, of course, conveys ideas and plans, it makes accusations and excuses, insults and compliments, and it cajoles, persuades and disciplines. Body language, they argued, does different things, and is separate from the verbal channel. Body language is the social and emotional channel for conveying emotions and relationships; it signals power, liking, attraction, anxiety and confidence. Of course, it should be immediately obvious that verbal language can do all of these social and emotional things as well; after all, we can simply say ‘I am really down’ (conveying emotion), ‘Can I see you again?’ (negotiating relationships), ‘I told you to sit down’ (signalling power), ‘I really find you fascinating’ (communicating liking), ‘I love your hair’ (perhaps indicating attraction, depending upon the context), ‘I’m incredibly agitated today’ (revealing anxiety) or ‘That was so easy’ (signalling confidence). None of this might be very subtle when it comes to negotiating the intricacies of social relationships or expressing how we feel, but verbal language clearly has a role to play here. However, this new theory argues for the other side of the argument as well; it suggests that hand gesture communicates semantic information (the traditionally accepted domain of verbal language), acting alongside the speech itself. This new theory argues that these movements of the hands and arms reflect our thinking, like language but in a completely different manner, using a different sort of system of communication with very different properties.

There are a number of major differences between how the two systems of communication work, as we will see, but I just want to mention one here. We seem to be much less aware of what our hands are communicating than what we are saying verbally and for that reason the information in the hands can be incredibly important. One might say that hand gestures actually embody our thinking through bodily action with little or no conscious awareness. I will attempt to persuade you that such behaviours provide us with a glimpse of our hidden unarticulated thoughts. Movements of the hands and arms act as a window on the human mind; they make thought visible. The fact that they do this without our conscious awareness makes them particularly interesting for both psychologists and the general public in their everyday lives.

Speech, of course, also reveals our thoughts; that is after all what speech is designed to do. However, as we all know, we sometimes do not say exactly what we mean, we obfuscate and deviate, we avoid the issue, we talk our way around things, we cheat and we lie, and we can do all of this because our speech is conscious and controlled. Sometimes we give the game away, usually through those bits of speech over which we have least control. When we lie, the pitch of our speech sometimes rises when we feel particularly anxious about getting found out (Streeter et al. 1977), certain pauses may lengthen as we plan our lie (Benus et al. 2006), but a lot of the time we get away with it. Hand movements can be more revealing for one very simple reason: most of them are unconsciously produced in everyday life alongside speech and contain information that we, as the speaker, are unaware is actually there. When we are gesturing we are not only unaware of the exact form and trajectory of our gestures, and what our gestures are ‘saying’, we are usually unaware of the sheer extent of the gestures, and sometimes we are even unaware of whether we are moving our hands at all.

The major challenge for us here is to start thinking afresh about the very nature of everyday communication in which people express their underlying thoughts and ideas.

The starting point of the book is really the very simple observation that when human beings talk, they make many bodily movements, but in particular they make frequent, and I suggest largely unconscious, movements of the hands and arms. They do this in every possible situation – in face-to-face communication, on the telephone, even when the hands are below a desk and thus out of sight of their interlocutor (I have many recordings of these and similar occurrences). It is as if human beings are neuro biologically programmed to make these movements whilst they talk, that these movements are so important, and they would seem to be (in evolutionary terms) a good deal more primitive than speech itself, with language evolving on the back of these visible movements (or alongside these movements according to McNeill 2012). People who have been blind from birth still gesture even though they have never actually seen gestures themselves, and they continue to gesture even when conversing with other blind people that they know are blind (Iverson and Goldin-Meadow 1997). These gestures are often imagistic in form, and the resultant images are closely integrated in time with the speech itself (on other occasions, however, the movements are simpler than this and appear to be timed with the stress points in the speech). The imagistic movements when they refer to concrete objects, events and actions are called ‘iconic gestures’ because of their mode of repre sentation; the simpler stress-timed movements are called ‘beats’. Words have an arbitrary relationship with the things they represent (and thus are ‘non-iconic’). Why do we call a particular object a ‘shoe’ or that large four-legged creature a ‘horse’? They could just as well be called something completely different (and, of course, they are called something completely different in other languages). But the unconscious imagistic gestural movements that we generate when we talk do not have this arbitrary relationship with the thing they are representing. The imagistic form of these gestures somehow captures certain aspects of the thing that they are representing (hence they are called ‘iconic’) and there is often a good deal of cross-cultural similarity in their actual form (as well as some important differences depending upon the structural features of the language).

If you are alone in a room when you are reading this just visualise someone speaking, if you are reading this in public just look around you. What do you see? You see lots of talk and lots of movement in the face, in the eyes, in the body and particularly in the arms and hands. In Figure 1.1 we see just one speaker, but quite a famous speaker at that, who seems pretty engrossed in what he is saying. He was the CEO of a very large and successful multinational, and he is talking in an interview about future developments of the PC and other ‘intelligent edge devices’. I have transcribed this speech using some well-known conventions developed by a Conversation Analyst called Gail Jefferson for representing speech and conversational talk (see Table 1.1). I have slightly adapted these for gesture– speech transcription. The idea behind this particular transcription method is that if you understand the symbols used, you should be able to recreate the speech as it was originally said. The square brackets [text] show which words were accompanied by gestures.

Table 1.1 A glossary of Gail Jefferson’s transcription symbols (Jefferson 2004)

(.)	Micro-pause	A brief pause, usually less than 0.2 seconds.
. or down arrow	Period or Down Arrow	Indicates falling pitch or intonation.
? or up arrow	Question Mark or Up Arrow	Indicates rising pitch or intonation.
,	Comma	Indicates a temporary rise or fall in intonation.
!-	Hyphen	Indicates an abrupt halt or interruption in utterance.
>text<	Greater than/ Less than symbols	Indicates that the enclosed speech was delivered more rapidly than usual for the speaker.
<text>	Less than/Greater than symbols	Indicates that the enclosed speech was delivered more slowly than usual for the speaker.
°	Degree symbol	Indicates whisper, reduced volume or quiet speech.
All Caps	Capitalised text	Indicates shouted or increased-volume speech.
underline	Underlined text	Indicates the speaker is emphasising or stressing the speech.
:::	Colon(s)	Indicates prolongation of a sound.
hhh		Audible exhalation
.hhh		Audible inhalation
(text)	Parentheses	Speech which is unclear or in doubt in the transcript.
[text]	Square brackets	Speech within square brackets is accompanied by the meaningful part of the gesture – the so-called ‘stroke phase’.

Just look at these hand movements, drawing out images in the space in front of his body. I will argue, following the pioneering work of David McNeill and others, that these imagistic gestures do not merely ‘illustrate’ the content of the speech; rather I will argue that they are a core part of the underlying message. The speaker does not say what he intends to sa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: a new perspective on an old problem
• 2. Two separate languages?
• 3. Where the action is
• 4. ‘A remarkable biological miracle’
• 5. Images in the hands, images in the mind
• 6. Different vehicles of meaning
• 7. Gestures and the frustrations of everyday life
• 8. Speech is only half the story
• 9. Who or what the hands portray
• 10. How our eyes are drawn to the gestures of others
• 11. ‘The gesture limits itself intelligently to what matters’
• 12. Manipulating the salience of individual elements to see how gestures respond
• 13. How metaphoric gestures affect us
• 14. Putting iconic gestures into TV advertisements
• 15. How iconic gestures can leak the truth
• 16. Unconscious gesture can leak unconscious attitude
• 17. Concluding remarks
• References
• Index