Reading people is more than just gesture and expression. It also involves posture.

This blog tends to focus primarily on gestures and expressions, and we have delved only occasionally into the importance of posture in expressing or detecting various affective states. However, in a comprehensive review of research on nonverbal postures, Dr. Amy Cuddy and her fellow researchers detailed the persistent role of powerful postures in everyday interaction.

While a previous meta-analysis failed to find significant effects, Dr. Cuddy’s project dramatically expanded that dataset to better understand how postures can change an individual’s feeling of power.

This is a critically important topic to both social psychology and to efforts to study people’s thoughts and feelings. The feeling of personal importance, the authors maintain, has fundamental ramifications in understanding “what it is like to be a person” or in other words understanding how people really feel. The ramifications are endless both in deception detection (Is a person lying?) and in people reading (Is this person comfortable? Do they like me? Are they a threat?)

This study specifically looked at different postures that were either expansive or closed. Such postures involve more than just where the head was held but included questions of limb orientation, the openness of the chest and shoulders, and combinations of all of these factors.

After reviewing over fifty studies that examined this question, Dr. Cuddy’s team concluded that there was consistent support for the idea that certain postures led to greater feelings of power. The adoption of an expansive posture, with shoulders back and head up, for instance, is a strong expression of power, and this study helps support the contention that those exhibiting this pose tend to feel more powerful.

It is important to note the causal relationship identified here. Such postures are not necessarily a sign of such a feeling but lead to that underlying emotion. This does not attempt to determine why such postures are adopted to begin with, but it is still crucially important to reading people who showcase such a posture: if it leads to a certain emotion, they are probably feeling that while in that posture.

Similarly, interrogation and similar situations cannot be seen outside of the context of power. When a person feels powerless, they act in fundamentally different ways, especially with regard to the level of truth or insight into their emotions that they are trying to showcase. Hopefully further research delves into this important application.

Still, the fundamental association with postures and power will not be unknown to regular followers of this blog. For example, recall the discussion of triumphant poses by Olympic victors, and look at the illustration in that article. Doesn’t that look a great deal like an open posture? The head is thrown back, the arms are out wide, and the chest is thrust forward. Certainly such an individual feels very powerful indeed.

While more focus needs to be channeled into better understanding the role of postures in effective interpersonal communication, it is just one of many universal gestures and signs that help us know what other people are thinking. Many of Humintell’s training programs incorporate posture into a broader discussion of gestures, expressions, and even gait!

Learning how to read people extends beyond one on one conversation into the realm of politics and media studies.

A recent study published in Science has sought to analyze the ways in which such false stories get promoted and circulated throughout social media. While many news commentators have pointed to the role of automated bots in spreading such “fake news”, Dr. Soroush Vosoughi and his team found that it’s humans themselves that are most responsible for this phenomena.

They looked at the idea of “rumor cascades” by tracking news stories from their origin along a series of “retweets” or shares on Twitter. This allowed them to first look at the origin of a social media story but also the path that story took among its online audience.

Stories were distinguished between fact-checked and verified stories and those debunked as hoaxes and “fake news”. These consisted of many topics, including political stories about elections and urban legends, with political stories being the most commonly shared and analyzed.

The political nature of many of these stories seems quite relevant, as they spiked during particularly salient times such as the 2012 and 2016 elections.

Moreover, false and true stories diffused in markedly different ways. False stories spread much faster in all of the topic categories, reaching more people more quickly than true stories. In fact, controlling for many factors, the average false story was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the average true story. This was especially true for political stories.

So far, this has matched the media narratives that warn of the vast diffusion of false news stories, especially during the 2016 election. However, when the media points to the role of bots in promoting these stories, they begin to drift from the truth themselves.

Instead, when excluding bots from the analysis, Dr. Vosoughi and his team found identical results, suggesting that it was not bots but humans who were spreading false stories. Perhaps we have nobody to blame but our own human judgment and inability to properly detect deception. The notion of confirmation bias may be important here, as our brains tend to emphasize what supports our convictions.

The authors declined to offer a firm reason for why this would be the case, but they ruled out the possibility that particularly influential users were promoting false stories. Rather, they emphasized the role of novelty in resulting in assessments that the story was more important. If everyone has already heard a story on CNN, what point is there in sharing it?

In attempting to evaluate this hypothesis, they found that false stories were more generally novel and also that many users expressed surprise in their response. Yet, this is not the whole story, as these same users frequently also showcased reactions of disgust.

While a great deal of questions remain, the proliferation of false news stories emphasizes the applicability of lie detection and people reading in a broader political environment. While we cannot use the same lie detection skills that this blog has discussed at length, Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto’s advice is always relevant.

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!