Social Engineering Blogs

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Silent Political Power?

Many commentators are keen to read into the nonverbal behavior of political leaders, but is that even really possible?

After Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki last week, it’s safe to say that they completely dominated the news cycle. In a presumable effort for a fresh take, the Washington Post interviewed nonverbal behavior experts, concluding that Putin was the “clear winner” of a “battle for nonverbal dominance.”

This leads to two pressing questions: is it really possible to analyze nonverbal behavior in those settings and, if so, did Putin really win?

First of all, nobody can really say there is a “clear winner” to any nonverbal interactions. This is especially true when somebody is just watching their behavior in the news.

Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto dismissed much of such commentary on the Putin-Trump summit, saying “Whenever there’s a big meeting of leaders, you see all the body language ‘experts’ on TV with interpretations. But the reality is little of that is validated by science.”

This is not to say that we can’t pick up on some nonverbal behaviors, but they have to be carefully distinguished from mere “noise.” Moreover, they can only ever be indicators rather than tell-tale signs of emotional states.

The Washington Post interviewed Dr. Carrie Keating of Colgate University who emphasized how the leaders walked, their gestures, and the extent to which they paid attention to the audience in an effort to analyze the social dynamic. Keating stressed that the most important feature was Putin’s ability to talk first and longest, which she claimed established him as the dominant man in the room.

Dr. Matsumoto did agree that experts can look into certain nonverbal behaviors and microexpressions, pointing out such subtleties as fleeting looks of contempt or disgust, as well as Putin clearing his throat in an apparent effort to control the dialogue.

However, Dr. Matsumoto emphasized that “there are real limits” to any sort of deduction about internal mental states. Expressions must be carefully dissected and coded in a scientific fashion, and the context matters: “You can’t compare Trump walking into meeting with Putin or standing at podium, for example, to video of him sitting down with Angela Merkel. They’re different settings and actions,” he explained.

Followers of this blog know that nonverbal behavior can tell us a lot about an interaction, but it is not a simple process. Yes, we can derive a wealth of information from observing Putin and Trump’s body language and expressions, but it is difficult to figure out which ones signal something interesting and what are just noise.

Similarly, we must be cautious about making claims about somebody’s internal state from their non-verbal behavior. An expression or gesture may suggest that they are lying, but it cannot definitely tell it. This is especially true with people we don’t personally know, as comparisons to that person’s emotional “baseline” are critical.

Still, this is not to say that people can’t learn something about politicians’ motivations and emotions by watching them. In a series of posts during the election, Dr. Matsumoto presented numerous approaches for reading between the lines when following the news. Similarly, this handy quiz helps show us how subtly opinions can be passed off as factual statements.

Failure at the World Cup

All triumphant athletes look alike, but do all distraught and disappointed ones?

In past blogs, we have noted frequent observations of the universal “triumphant” pose amongst victors in sports competitions, but sports reveal other universal poses as well. For instance, as David Gendelman writes for The New York Times, this summer’s World Cup helps showcase a similar “disappointed pose.”

Mr. Gendelman noticed that athlete after athlete reacted with the same pose to a missed goal: a look of shock accompanied by the perplexed raising of both arms to clutch the back of the head. If you’ve been watching the games, I’d imagine you immediately recognized it!

This inspired him to ask psychologists and other professionals about this phenomenon, such as Dr. Jessica Tracy from the University of British Columbia. Dr. Tracy emphasized that clutching the head indicated shame but also that “the constriction of the body, in the way that the player is moving his arms around his head, almost to make himself smaller. Those are very classical shame display elements.”

She went on to describe the gesture as conveying a message of failure to fellow teammates: “I get it and I’m sorry, therefore you don’t have to kick me out of the group, you don’t have to kill me.”

Dr. Tracy actually published similar findings with Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto in their 2008 study of blind Olympians. Through this research, they found that athletes exhibited both triumphant and shameful expressions upon victory or defeat. While we have focused on the triumphant poses in other blogs, the universality of shameful expressions across blind and sighted athletes of different cultures suggests a poignant universality to these gestures as well.

Other psychologists situated this gesture deeper in our evolutionary history, which shouldn’t be surprising to followers of this blog. Dr. Dacher Keltner, of the University of California, Berkeley, sees this gesture as rooted in defense of one’s head: “The oldest kind of behavioral intention in that class of behaviors is to protect your head from blows.”

This observation certainly fits with the idea that triumphant and shameful gestures serve as a sort of message to others in the group. This connects to research presented in a past blog that sees universal emotions as rooted in their function as a form of social communication.

Dr. Keltner’s point is further supported by the fact that many fellow athletes, as well as their fans, will mimic the same gesture upon watching the game. There is a strong group component here. Not only is the gesture universal, but it is also something taken up by those who empathize with and share the emotion.

The World Cup serves as a great source of entertainment and as a showcase of athletic prowess, but it also reveals a lot about human psychology. Like the Olympics, the cross-cultural nature of such an international event lets us see what is deeply common about the psychologies of people across cultures.

This is just a start however, as Humintell has focused on how deeply these cultural similarities (and differences) impact our ability to read people and understand their diverse perspectives.

Expressing Control or Displaying Expression?

When understanding how other cultures express emotions, it is almost as important to reflect on our own cultural norms as it is to recognize differing ones.

This is essentially what Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and his team find in a recent publication. Dr. Matsumoto studied the role that one’s own cultural norms and sense of emotional regulation have in evaluating the expressions of other people. Excitingly, they found a close link between our cultural norms of emotional displays and our own sense of emotional regulation, as they relate to evaluations of other people’s emotional states.

Their study sought to address the challenges in recognizing the often muted expressions of those from more subdued emotional cultures, but it also hoped to disentangle the perceiver’s own expectations and judgments from their evaluations.

In order to accomplish these aims, Dr. Matsumoto and his team conducted two studies. Both of these asking participants to identify the expression displayed in a series of images of faces, in addition to rating the intensity of the expression. Notably, the judges were split between English speakers raised in the United States and native-born Japanese participants, and the pictures included both American and Japanese faces.

In the first of these studies, judges were also asked to report their own emotional state’s intensity while judging images of faces, and they completed a measure intended to capture “cultural display rules” or the extent to which a culture encourages intense emotional expressions.

They found that cultural differences accounted for significant variations in how the judges evaluated the intensity of expressions, with Japanese judges tending to infer that an expression showcased more emotion than American judges.

The second study built on this work by replicating the same experiment only this time asking judges to evaluate their own emotional responsiveness. Dr. Matsumoto connects this to cultural display rules, because both have to do with the “management and modification of emotional expressions and reactions.”

After being shown expressive images, the judges would again make judgments as to the intensity of the emotion displayed, but this time they would also complete self-reported measures of emotional regulation. The results suggested that emotional regulation was at least as strong in mediating judgments as cultural norms.

The fact that cultural display norms and one’s own emotional regulation both mediate our perception of others’ emotions has profound implications for anyone attempting to better learn to read people. It is not enough for us to learn other people’s cultures, but we also have to critically reflect on our own norms, both personal and cultural.

This makes the process of emotional recognition just that much harder, which is why Humintell is trying to help by training you in the skill of reading people and understanding cultural differences.