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Aping Around with Gestures

Many of our gestures and emotions are universal across cultures, but is this limited to just our species?

In an exciting new study by Dr. Kirsty Graham of the University of York, researchers found surprising patterns among gestures utilized by bonobos and chimpanzees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Not only did they find similarities between these closely related species, but they also noticed amazing parallels with another closely related species: humans.

After watching videos of wild apes, Dr. Graham’s team noticed an amazing 90 percent overlap between the gestures of bonobos and chimpanzees. For this study, gestures were defined as clear nonverbal activities that engendered apparently successful communication between two individuals.

One gesture featured an ape scratching their own shoulder as a request to be groomed, and another saw apes stroking each other’s mouths to ask for food. Some common gestures were similar but had different meanings, just like among humans. For example, a raised arm may request on object move for chimpanzees, whereas bonobos use this gesture to initiate grooming or mating. This could certainly be an egregious miscommunication!

These gestures seem alien, but others are very close to home. If a bonobo looks at you and flaps its hand towards you, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans alike will all know that this means “move away”!

While some gestures were clearly learned, others were just as clearly evolved and ingrained at the biological level. Given that all three of our species evolved from a common ancestor, a possible link seems almost intuitive.

Perhaps none of this is surprising. In a past blog, we tracked the development of universal emotions based on evolutionary grounds. This built on research that tied emotional expressions to outside stimuli. This included narrowed eyes for disgust, as though we are trying to reduce the amount of disgusting imagery we have to see.

Darwin himself theorized that universal emotions would emerge from evolutionary processes. Thus, the universal nature of human gestures fits into this schema as well. As we discussed in a past blog, Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto has found that athletes from around the world celebrate the Olympics in similar fashions, displaying a posture of triumph with arms thrown into the air.

Dr. Matsumoto has even pointed out that this triumphant behavior is similar in primates.

Still, the groundbreaking nature of Dr. Graham’s research does not answer all of our questions. Dr. Richard Moore, a cognitive psychologist from Humboldt University in Berlin, points out that this research only shows the potential of apes to mutually understand each other’s gestures. Moreover, it doesn’t address subtle but possibly important variations in gestures that may complicate the picture.

When we are trying to read other people, we may be tempted to just focus on their eyes or their face, but this sort of research shows how crucial reading the whole body is to gain insights. Moreover, while cultural differences complicate the situation, focusing on universal signals, be they emotions or gestures, can help you read just about anybody, including chimpanzees!

Framing a Reciprocal Interview

What is the impact of offering an interviewee a bottle of water?

This seemingly innocuous question actually delves into major questions both with regard to communication but interviewing techniques more specifically. By looking at this basic question in a recent study, Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang were attempting to look at the notion of reciprocity and whether more reciprocal interviewing tactics contribute to boosting rapport and information gathering.

The subject of reciprocity essentially looks at the idea that people want to return or reciprocate favors offered to them. So, if an interviewee is offered the simple kindness of bottled water, they would be more likely to feel obliged to provide additional information during the course of the interview.

Reciprocity is just one form of what is known as “social influence.” The theoretical literature identifies six principles of social influence that hold across cultures, but this study focuses on reciprocity which had been identified as one of the more powerful and pervasive aspects of social influence.

The study in question divided experimental groups around this simple treatment, offering water to half the participants. They hypothesized that this would boost rapport between interviewer and interviewee and would result in more relevant and plausible information.

These experimental groups were also divided internally between those who were asked to lie and those asked to tell the truth about whether they had stolen a $200 check. The experiment was set up to incentivize participants to lie to their best ability, as they were told that being suspected of deception would result in an extra-long questionnaire after the interview.

Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang found general support for their hypotheses. Liars tended to give more relevant and plausible details after being offered water. Interestingly, neither ethnicity nor culture had an impact. Rapport was also boosted by the reciprocal treatment.

This has significant ramifications for both interviewing tactics and efforts to boost rapport in social situations. When rapport was high, the interrogation proved more fruitful, and reciprocity helped accomplish that! This means that when interviewing an individual, efforts intended to elicit reciprocity may be helpful, even though an actual interview situation is generally a bit higher stakes.

But what does this mean for those of us who are just trying to get better at reading people? Sure, we can offer people we meet bottles of water, but that might be socially out of place! However, the basic principle of reciprocity will hold.

By offering something, be it a compliment, personal information about ourselves, or a gift, we can help create a sense of reciprocity, boosting rapport and better enabling us to know about other people. This is not just some manipulative tactic but also a way of developing better interactions and getting to know people!

Culture and Body Posture

While research into cross-cultural non-verbal communication often focuses on facial expressions, body posture is also an important consideration. This may seem intuitive, as we all have experienced the role that body posture has in communicating emotions, but it has been neglected in most research, at the expense of its valuable potential for effectively reading people.

However, in a pair of studies, Dr. David Matsumoto sought to examine how body posture serves as a different non-verbal cue for people from American or Japanese cultures. While both of these studies date back to the 1980s, the evergreen and often neglected nature of this research merits consideration.

The first of these papers, coauthored with Dr. Tsutomu Kudoh, sought to test conventional wisdom about the role of posture in social situations against the possibility that these were limited only to Western culture. Past research had emphasized the immediacy of a reaction and the level of relaxation shown as the main predictors for how those postures would be understood.

In order to test these theories, Drs. Matsumoto and Kudoh recruited a large sample of Japanese subjects and asked them to develop a list of postures that they had encountered in real life. This resulted in a list of 40 postures which were then rated based on 16 criteria that included confident, respectful, friendly, or calm.

The participants were then instructed to imagine individuals they knew showcasing each of these postures and to rank them based on the aforementioned criteria. This allowed the researchers to assess the role that particular hierarchical roles may have in shaping these evaluations.

In fact, they found that their Japanese participants did evaluate posture in a significantly different way than Western-centric research had found. While Westerners emphasized like or dislike cues, these participants relied on cues rooted in status and power.

In another study with Dr. Kudoh, the researchers further examined the role of cultural norms in interpreting the emotions behind different postures. Given the conclusions of the previous paper, they emphasized that while the United States fosters an individualist culture, Japanese society is more characterized by status.

This paper gathered both American and Japanese students and asked each of these participants to rate the same postures with the same rubric from the last study. Interestingly, none of these postures were unknown to Americans, even though the list was developed by individuals from Japan.

Again, they found that the role of status differed dramatically between cultural groups, as Drs. Matsumoto and Kudoh found that considerations of status impacted social judgments of internal states and interpersonal interactions. They also found considerable variance between evaluations of different attitudes, such as pleasure and dominance.

Not only do these results help expand our understanding of cross-cultural behavior, but they also serve as a caution to avoid expectations that members of other cultures behave in the same way as do members of our own. This has crucial ramifications in attempting to read people, as we explicate in our cross-cultural communication workshops!