Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

The Personality of Walking

Often in crowded cities, we clash with those who walk much more slowly, or we hold up those who walk faster. Is there an explanation for this variation?

According to a team of researchers, personality traits may help predict how quickly or slowly we will walk. In a creative study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, Dr. Yannick Stephan and his team looked at over 15 thousand individuals, tracking how quickly they walked and also measures of traditional personality traits like extraversion and neuroticism.

We rarely talk about walking speed, but isn’t it an important nonverbal behavior?

While past research has connecting walking speed to health, there are also compelling connections between personality traits and health. For instance, those high in neuroticism and low in extraversion tend to exercise less frequently and be in poorer health. While gait speed might not sound that important, this study attempts to further explore the relationship between our physical health and our personality.

For context, the researchers utilize a measure of five personality traits that has long been common in psychology. This includes neuroticism (a disposition towards negative emotions), extraversion, openness to new experiences, conscientiousness (a measure of organization and self-discipline), and agreeableness.

It might be suspected that data on gait speed would be hard to come by, but amazingly the researchers employed an incredible treasure trove of information on individuals’ personality traits and walking speeds. Some of this was even longitudinal, allowing an understanding of these relationships over time.

Overall, they found that personality features successfully predict walking speed, even when measured years before. They tended to find similar relationships even between different samples and age/demographic groups.

Extraversion and conscientiousness consistently predict higher walking speeds. This may seem intuitive, if we imagine an extraverted friend or someone who is quite self-disciplined. However, the opposite was true of neuroticism which declined more steadily over time and was associated slower gait speeds initially.

These findings are consistent with previous research finding the same connections between those personality types and health. By seeing how this is manifest in gait speed, a great deal of information can be inferred and further explored about how we express our personalities. Gait speed can then be used as a reliable predictor for both health and personality type, benefitting researchers, patients, and diagnosticians alike.

While this might seem a bit far afield from Humintell’s usual work, it really isn’t. Gait speed can be seen as an important nonverbal behavior!

Can you attempt to read people based on their pace? Rather than being in a hurry, they might just be really extraverted!

Landmarks in the Field of Nonverbal Behavior

We spend a great deal of time talking about Humintell’s work on nonverbal behavior, but it’s important to know that this is a wide and exciting field!

In a recent paper in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, a pair of researchers sought to map out the major authors and major papers that have dominated the field. Instead of just looking at new developments, this was an important way of seeing what the lay of the land in the field is, so to speak, and this sort of work is incredibly valuable to those trying to expand the field and to those trying to understand the academic consensus.

One of the exciting features of this research was also an analysis of the most frequently cited and published scholars in the field. We were proud to see Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto listed in the top five scholars!

In mapping the discipline, Drs. Pierrich Plusquellec and Vincent Denault leveraged a massive bibliographic database that included more than 200 million articles from thousands of journals, not limited to psychology. However, they subset this database to a series of important keywords that were relevant to nonverbal behavior and folded in citation counts to each article to determine its importance.

The first intriguing finding was a calculation of the most common words used in the titles of relevant articles. This tells us what most scholars tend to focus on and included “emotion,” “facial,” “expressions,” and “recognition.” However, these were often paired with applications including “children,” “psychiatric illness,” and “depression.”

Second, the study authors also tracked the frequency of highly cited articles over time. By looking only at the thousand most cited articles, they were able to track the development of seminal works and the emergence of increased interest in the field. They found that the field emerged during the 1960s but that most of these articles were actually quite recent.

This last finding indicates that, while the field has been developing for over 50 years, it has gained newfound emphasis and popularity recently.

These over-time findings were further explored by looking at how frequently used words over time, i.e. which words were most frequent during given decades. “Facial expression” tends to be one of the most frequent across the whole time period, though this was not so pronounced until the 1990s and 2000s.

So what exactly does this tell any of us about the field?

A main takeaway seem to be the primacy of studying facial expressions within nonverbal behavioral studies, which is notably different from looking at body language or even microexpressions more narrowly.

Another important conclusion is also the exciting nature of the current period of this field. It appears that the last 15 years have experience a sharp increase in interest, academic and otherwise, in nonverbal behavior, and we are optimistic that this trend continues!

Farming and the Evolution of Speech

As we know, many of our nonverbal behaviors have deep roots in our own process of evolution, but maybe our verbal behaviors have historical roots too.

While perhaps not quite as deeply ingrained as biological evolution, a new study in Science found evidence that many of our speech patterns can be linked back to changing dietary practices due to the dawn of agriculture. Specifically, our use of sounds like “F” and “V” can be linked to changing jaw and overbite structures that arose around that time.

Postdoctoral researchers Damián Blasi and Steven Moran got their idea from 34 year old linguistic analyses that found that contemporary hunter-gatherers lacked some of the linguistic types, called labiodentals, that many agricultural based people had.

When humans became accustomed to chewing foods high in fibers, the jaw bone is put under pressure and molars are worn down. This results in a more even mouth, developing away from an overbite and also making it easier to pronounce sounds like “F” and “V”.

While this idea may have some intuitive credibility, such an attitude was not shared in linguistic communities when linguist Charles Hockett made these unusual observations. Instead, he was met with skepticism, and it was that skepticism that Blasi and Moran sought to validate by proving Hockett wrong.

But they were very surprised. In order to assess Hockett’s claim, they made use of computer models to simulate how the human mouth makes sounds with varying degrees of overbite, and they analyzed languages around the world to see which languages most frequently used labiodental sounds.

The results are incredible striking. The computer models indicate that overbites make labiodental sounds much harder, with contemporary edge-to-edge teeth reducing the necessary effort by almost 30 percent.

Similarly, they discovered that labiodentals were much less common among languages used by hunter-gatherer communities. What might be most striking about these findings is the fact that they were able to track the progress of labiodentals emerging in languages throughout history, finding a steady increase in their use as societies developed and became more focused on expansive settled agriculture.

It is not all good news for those of us who enjoy our labiodentals, as we are also more at risk of cavities and of our teeth becoming overcrowded.

However, this study makes important strides in tracking how our communicative patterns are closely tied to our evolution and to our society. This is important if you are trying to better understand people of different cultures.

For instance, this study shows certain commonalities among those who speak Indo-European languages, emphasizing cross-cultural similarities. Yet, on the other hand, the fact that these speech patterns only emerged because of certain social arrangements also shows how deep the communicative gap can be between people of different cultures.

Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to better read people and communicate across cultural divides. This is one of Humintell’s specialties, and we even offer a cross-cultural training class!