Wilson A Practical Guide to Body Language

Read & Send the Right Signals
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-84831-437-5
Verlag: Icon Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Reihe: Practical Guide Series

An INTRODUCING PRACTICAL GUIDE to understanding the body language of others and being aware of your own. INTRODUCING BODY LANGUAGE explains how to read other people and how to be more aware of what you are saying with your own body language. This easy to read guide teaches you how to understand non-verbal messages, dealing separately with different parts of the body, such as facial expressions, posture and hand movements.

Glenn Wilson is Visiting Professor of Psychology at Gresham College, London. Previously he was Reader in Personality at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London, and Adjunct Professor with the University of Nevada, Reno. He has published more than 100 scientific articles and some 33 books, on topics ranging from personality and attitude measurement.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wilson, Glenn

Leseproben

2. How do I look?

We are often told not to judge a book by its cover. Yet that is precisely what we do a lot of the time. We sum up others at a glance by the way they are dressed and presented and by certain aspects of their body language and facial expression. Are they clean and well-groomed? Is their dress appropriate for the situation? Do they move with a confident gait? Do they smile warmly and make eye contact? It is as though we take an immediate snapshot of a person that is almost indelible and which determines our reaction to them. We might revise our opinion after we hear how they speak, learn what they have to say and what finer personality traits and other virtues they have to offer. But only with great reluctance do we change a negative evaluation based on that initial glance. The first impression sets the stage for all further interaction.

When people are shown photographs of strangers’ faces whose personality has been previously assessed, they are able to detect immediately those who are high in ‘psychoticism’. This is a major personality trait that is partly inherited and which goes with slightly weird behaviour, irresponsibility, risk-taking, criminal activity and delinquency. Quite how we are able to judge this in the faces of others is a bit of a mystery because the facial differences were not obvious to the researchers. However, there are clear survival advantages in spotting someone untrustworthy, especially for a woman choosing a partner. No such ability to detect other personality traits such as extraversion or neuroticism from facial characteristics alone has been found, but there are many other cues we can pick up on.

Gaining an impression

When you are sitting in a park or on a bus and feel like playing a little game, try the following. Pick out a particular individual that you have never met and glance at them for a couple of seconds. Now close your eyes and go through some questions in your head.

1. How old are they?
2. What is their nationality and ethnic group?
3. What is their social class?
4. What job do they do (if any)?
5. Where are they going and what are they involved in doing at present?
6. What is their personality like? Are they friendly or cold, trustworthy or unreliable, aggressive or timid?
7. How well do you think you would get on with them socially?

It doesn’t matter whether you are right or wrong (you will probably never find out) but it is interesting to note that you probably believe you can make these sort of judgements after only a brief glance. So what cues are you working on?

The reason we can assess people so rapidly is that we compare what we see before us with a set of previously established – expectations based on what we have been told and what we have gained from past experience. Usually there is some element of truth in these stereotypes but they can also be misleading.

Getting it wrong

An episode in a British courtroom some years ago illustrates how seriously misleading stereotypes can be. A young black lawyer with dreadlocks was escorting his client, a white man in a suit, into the courtroom at his trial. The usher directed the lawyer towards the prisoner’s dock on the presumption that he was the one who was charged. This resulted in great embarrassment all round. Clearly, the usher had seen many men with dreadlocks in the dock but he had never previously encountered one who was a lawyer.

Obviously, people should be free to present themselves any way they like, but they need to be aware that every choice has consequences with respect to how they are perceived. Young men who hang around street corners wearing ‘hoodies’ and gloves on a warm night can hardly be surprised if they are picked out disproportionately for ‘stop and search’ by the police. Criminals, drug dealers and gang members have uniforms every bit as much as soldiers and police officers.

The recent ‘slut walks’ around the world were intended as a feminist demonstration that dressing provocatively is not an invitation to rape. Certainly, scanty clothing is in no way an invitation, much less a for rape, but most women recognise that the way they dress inevitably transmits signals regarding their sexual interest and availability that is bound to affect the likelihood of unwelcome sexual advances. At the other end of the spectrum is the concealment favoured by nuns and some Islamic groups, which critics claim is an insult to men because it implies they would not otherwise be able to contain their bestial urges. We all have choices to make about how we present ourselves to others but we need to be aware of their likely impact.

Clothes maketh the man (and woman)

What can we tell about a person by the way they dress? For one thing, we might get clues as to how much money they have to spend. It also gives away much about how they want to be seen by others – the image that they choose to project. One can spend a lot on clothes yet still not appear as ostentatious. Designer labels do not have to be vaunted by massive letters that are intended to impress others. Expensive fabrics may be evident simply by the way they are tailored and hang on the body without any need for trumpeting.

Regardless of expense, the way we are dressed can show how much pride we take in ourselves and how we value cleanliness. The impression given can range from careless and sloppy to precious and obsessional. Perhaps the most important thing is to be appropriate; we are generally most comfortable when wearing the right thing for the occasion. The man who wears a suit at the beach looks slightly ridiculous, as does the man who wears trainers with a dinner jacket and bow tie.

Broadly speaking, men dress to display status. They use their clothes as a kind of uniform or badge of identity. Many men still wear a tie as a symbol of occupational status or respectability. However, showing freedom from the necessity of being ‘bonded’ in this way may be an even greater statement of social power. Top actors like Colin Firth and businessmen like Richard Branson feel no need to ‘conform’ in this way. A bow tie comes across as slightly arty and eccentric, if possibly a bit affected. Choice of colour may also be telling: research suggests that ambitious men and introverts favour discreet colours like grey, blue and brown, while extraverts and thrill-seekers go for brighter colours like red and orange.

Women dress largely to enhance sexual signals or to damp them down, depending on their interest at the time. They may also be sending signals to other women concerning their wealth and social position, or that of their partner. Expensive jewellery, hairstyles, hats and blatantly displayed designer labels help them to do this. Increasingly, though, as women move into positions of power, their style of dress, and their motivations, begin to merge with those of men.

Psychoanalyst J.C. Flugel introduced the concept of as early as 1930. His idea was that people who wanted to get ahead in the world should dress for dominance, with large shoulder pads, vertical stripes to increase apparent height, and sharp, pointy, ‘masculine’ lines to their clothes. Whereas women’s clothes were traditionally soft, rounded, pink and fluffy (in line with their passive role and skin texture), men’s clothes were supposed to reflect their active, thrusting role, being hard-edged and angular. For Flugel, the black brolly, tails, bowler hat, blade-shaped tie and lapels and shiny black shoes were all to some degree phallic symbols. Certainly, they could be regarded as the antithesis of feminine softness.

This theory helps to explain why polishing boots is such an important military ritual and why mediaeval authorities condemned pointed-toe shoes as lecherous and provocative. A fifteenth-century Papal Bull described the (upturned shoe) as ‘scoffing against God and the Church’. Likewise, during the reign of Edward IV, it was decreed that ‘no knight under the rank of a lord … shall wear shoes or boots having pikes or points exceeding the length of two inches, under forfeiture of forty pence’. The concern was that people should know their place and reflect it properly in their style of dress.

As women have moved into occupations that were once male-dominated they have also had to engage in power dressing in order to compete (recall the monstrous lapels worn by women in American soaps of the 1970s and 80s like and ). Remnants of this persist today in that women in executive positions often wear pin-striped suits and shorter haircuts in order to increase their credibility in the workplace by appearing more masculine. Paradoxically, ‘phallic’ characteristics can seem very sexy to heterosexual men when worn by women. A man does not need to be a total fetishist to find a certain frisson in black high-heeled shoes and women in uniform. A mild degree of ‘disciplinary threat’ can be advantageous in the bedroom as well as the boardroom.

What do a man’s shoes tell you?

Imagine that you can see only the shoes that a man is wearing. What do you think you might be able to infer from that? Many men think their shoes are unimportant because they are below the usual gaze line. This is quite mistaken. Shoes are boundary markers and thus stand out with greater significance. We talk about people being ‘down...