Read People Like a Pro

Chapter-1

1. ACQUIRING THE SKILLS FOR READING GESTURES

ANairport is an excellent spot for viewing the entire human emotional spectrum. As travelers arrive and

depart, you can see the woman who is very apprehensive about flying pinching the fleshy part of her hand

for reassurance, as if she were saying to herself, It’s going to be all right. In the same manner people

say, I had to pinch myself to make sure that it wasn’t a dream. A male waiting for departure time may

also be unsure about flying. However, he is sitting in a rigid, upright position with his ankles locked. His

hands are clenched together, making one big fist, while he rhythmically massages one thumb against the

other on top of his interlocked hands. These gestures indicate a nervous attitude.

Walking away from the departure area, you see three men in telephone booths. One of them (Figure 1)

is standing with his body at attention. His coat is buttoned. He gives the impressionthat whoever he is

talking to is very important to him. He might be a salesman talking to a customer on the telephone as if he

were actually in his presence.

The second caller’s body is relaxed (Figure 2). He slouches over, shifts his weight from foot to foot, and

rests his chin on his chest. He appears to be looking at the floor and nods his head as if saying, "Yeah,

yeah." Reading this person further, you get the impression that he is comfortable but possibly bored with

the conversation and attempting to hide the fact. The receiver of the call can be taken for granted. It is

probably his wife or an old friend.

From these clues, can you visualize how a third caller might look as he talks to his girlfriend? This caller’s

face is hidden. His hunched shoulder may be concealing it from view or his body may be completely

turned away from passers-by. His head is probably tilted to one side, and he handles the phone as if it

were the object of his affection (Figure 3).

As you move toward the baggage-claim area, you may see a family group, which you can identify by the

striking similarity in the way they all walk. Others on their way to the baggage-claim counter who have

been met by family or friends usually appear the happiest and walk with a great deal of enthusiasm.

Those who are waiting to be met keep rising on their toes and looking around.

During our brief visit to the airport we have become aware of the different actions of people. Merely by

noting a variety of gestures we have been able to make guesses about people: attitudes, relationships, and

situations. We have even conjured up an image of the person on the other end of the telephone line. Our

observations have been of people acting and reacting in the real world, not in an isolated laboratory

situation. In short, we have been exposed to the vast field of nonverbal communication that complements

and supplements and can even displace verbal exchange. We have begun to read a person like a book. 

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1. The salesman 2. The husband 3. The lover

Life, the True Testing Ground

It’s as large as life, and twice as natural!

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Automobile manufacturers subject any new car accessory to extensive testing. However, it is not until

the accessory is exposed to real-life situations that its success or failure can be definitively determined.

Some years ago the Ford Motor Company decided to improve the safety of its automobile by adding an

accessory called the vacuum automatic door lock, a device designed to lock the door automatically as

soon as the car reached a speed of 9 m.p.h. After cars with the new locks were on the market, however,

Ford began receiving complaint after complaint.

Whenever the buyers of these cars went to automatic car-washing stations they had trouble. As the

automobile went down the washing line, the wheels were spun on the white-wall automatic washers and

the car reached a relative speed of 9 m.p.h. The doors automatically locked, and at the end of the

car-wash production line the drivers had to get a locksmith to pick the lock so they could get back into

their own automobiles. So Ford went back to the drawing board and back to manually operated door

locks.

In the same manner, life situations also offer better tests for the interpretation of gestures. The

comprehension of gestures has not been achieved through the limited behavioral-laboratory approach,

one which attempts to study individual parts abstracted from meaningful groups of gestures. It is a human

process, and the methods that men have intuitively used for hundreds of thousands of years to understand

one another naturally lend themselves as techniques for understanding gestures.

Our own awareness of nonverbal communications was an outgrowth of our interest in developing and

teaching the artof negotiating. When we met and joined together to present workshops and seminars on

negotiating to top executives in the United States and abroad, we were both aware of the vital role

nonverbal communications play in every negotiating situation. We found that verbal exchange does not 

operate in a vacuum; rather, it is a complex process involving people, words, and body movements. It

was only by considering these elements together that we could follow the progress of a negotiation.

We found that one limiting factor to studying gestures has been the lack of a simple system of

transcribing or reproducing an actual situation where individuals could be thoroughly observed and the

interaction or expressive behavior between subjects studied systematically. With the video-tape recorder

we were able to eliminate this first difficulty.

Ray Birdwhistell, senior research scientist at Eastern Pennsylvania Research Institute, is presently

engaged in filming encounters and noting them through kinesics, a science that sets out to analyze

individual gestures by considering their component parts. This book considers the problem of nonverbal

communication in a different manner. We have considered Norbert Wiener’s admonition inCybernetics:

"Many a missionary has fixed his own misunderstanding of a primitive language as law eternal in the

process of reducing it to writing. There is much in the social habits of a people which is dispersed and

distorted by the mere act of making inquiries about it." In addition to viewing individual gestures we

present the myriad of attitudes expressed by not one gesture but a series of related ones. These we call

gesture-clusters. They are groups of nonverbal communications associated with different attitudes. The

gestures that comprise a cluster can occur at the same time, as locking arms and ankles and making a fist,

or occur one after the other. In video-tape recording we have a useful tool for capturing and preserving

these gesture-clusters, and the seminar participants’ role-playing for gesture-analysisin negotiating

situations have provided us with our raw material.

We have held hundreds of seminars with thousands of participants and have recorded 2,500 negotiating

situations. Our audiences have not only provided the research material on gestures but also acted as the

researchers. We presented the gestures to them individually and in video-taped clusters and then asked

our seminar audiences what they recognized, what the feeling or message of the nonverbal

communication was. We first merely wanted the audience to recognize the gestures by separating them

from nonmeaningful body movements. We then wanted the audience to give gestures their meaning.

As a result of many discussions it came to our attention that when the audiences began to recognize the

meaning of certain gestures, they more or less relied upon getting the meaning by a subconscious

empathy. That is, the viewer would empathize with the observed, empathize with his body tensions and

positions, and understand the gesture’s meaning by putting himself in the place of the person he was

viewing. However, when gestures are merely read subconsciously, only unconscious assumptions about

them can be made. Sigmund Freud wrote, "The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of

another without passing through the conscious." These unconscious reactions then become untested

facts to which we respond. If we subconsciously conceive of the gesture as unfriendly, without

conscious control we bring about a belligerent reaction that degenerates into a vicious cycle of hostility.

As thinking men, we should be able to evaluate most stimuli before reacting to them.

If we could stop and read gestures consciously, if we could subject them to examination and verification,

it is possible that before communications degenerate we could elevate the process to a different plane.

We might read our own gestures and find that we are precipitating the other person’s reactions.Or the

gestures that we find undesirable might be found to be merely the result of the other person’s physical

idiosyncrasies. For example, a certain judge grimaced and blinked at lawyers appearing before him,

causing considerable alarm among those inclined to be self-conscious or nervous. The judge suffered

from the results of a stroke that left him with gestural scars. There are also misunderstandings because the

same gesture can produce completely different responses in different cultures. Still other gestures may be

repeated merely because of habit and do not signal a currently held attitude, whatever their origin.

Gestures, then, appear to be made more meaningful by being brought out of the subconscious and

recognized on the conscious level. We can term thisthinking through to the subconscious. In this way 

we get a message rather than just a subconscious empathetic feeling.

Gestures Come in Clusters

"His nose should pant and his lip should curl.

His cheek should flame and his brow should furl.

His bosom should heave and his heart should glow,

And his fist be ever ready for a knock-down blow."

— W. S. Gilbert, H.M.S. Pinafore

The understanding of gestures is very difficult when the various elements are separated from their

context. However, when gestures are fitted together into their composite positions, a complete picture

evolves.

Each gesture is like a word in a language. In order to be understood in a language, one must structure his

words into units, or sentences, that express complete thoughts. It is not unusual for attendees at our

seminars to attempt to bridgethis word/sentence gap quickly. Some sincerely believe that a cursory

exposure to the world of nonverbal communication equips them to speak the language fluently. On the

contrary, this serves only to bring their awareness to a conscious level, not to make them experts. We

attempt to discourage individuals from jumping to immediate conclusions based on the observation and

comprehension of isolated gestures. Understanding the congruence of gestures in harmony with one

another is far more important. A static gesture lasting several seconds might be contradicted by a prior

body movement (incongruence), which in turn might be further repudiated by a subsequent gesture.

The so-called nervous laugh is a good example of incongruity. In every instance that we have recorded

of the nervous laugh there has been an incongruity between the sound, which should indicate amusement,

and the rest of the gesture-cluster, which signals extreme discomfort. Not only are there nervous arm and

leg movements, but the entire body shifts as though trying to escape from