The Definitive Book of Body Language - Barbara Pease [3]
All Things Are Not What They Seem
The ability to work out what is really happening with a person is simple—not easy, but simple. It's about matching what you see and hear in the environment in which it all happens and drawing probable conclusions. Most people, however, only see the things they think they are seeing. Here's a story to demonstrate the point:
Two men were walking through the woods when they came across a big deep hole.
“Wow… that looks deep,” says one. “Let's toss a few pebbles in and see how deep it is.”
They threw in a few pebbles and waited, but there was no sound.
“Gee—that is a really deep hole. Let's throw one of these big rocks in. That should make a noise.”
They picked up two football-sized rocks and tossed them into the hole and waited, but still they heard nothing.
“There's a railway sleeper over here in the weeds,” said one. “If we toss that in, it's definitely going to make some noise.” They dragged the heavy sleeper over to the hole and heaved it in, but not a sound came from the hole.
Suddenly, out of the nearby woods, a goat appeared, running like the wind. It rushed toward the two men and ran right between them, running as fast as its legs could go. Then it leaped into the air and disappeared into the hole. The two men stood there, astonished at what they'd just seen.
Out of the woods came a farmer who said, “Hey! Did you guys see my goat?”
“You bet we did! It was the craziest thing we've ever seen! It came running like the wind out of the woods and jumped into that hole!”
“Nah,” says the farmer. “That couldn't have been my goat. My goat was chained to a railway sleeper!”
How Well Do You Know the Back of Your Hand?
Sometimes we say we know something “like the back of our hand” but experiments prove that less than 5 percent of people can identify the back of their hands from a photograph. The results of a simple experiment we conducted for a television program showed that most people are generally not good at reading body-language signals, either. We set up a large mirror at the end of a long hotel lobby, giving the illusion that, as you entered the hotel, there was a long corridor going through the hotel and out the back of the lobby. We hung large plants from the ceiling to a distance of five feet above the floor so that, as each person entered the lobby, it looked as if another person was entering at the same time from the other end. The “other person” was not readily recognizable because the plants covered their face, but you could clearly see their body and movement. Each guest observed the other “guest” for five to six seconds before turning left to the reception desk. When asked if they had recognized the other “guest,” 85 percent of men answered no. Most men had failed to recognize themselves in a mirror, one saying, “You mean that fat, ugly guy?” Unsurprisingly, 58 percent of the women said it was a mirror and 30 percent said the other “guest” looked “familiar.”
Most men and nearly half of all women
don't know what they look like from the neck down.
How Well Can You Spot Body-Language Contradictions?
People everywhere have developed a fascination with the body language of politicians because everyone knows that politicians sometimes pretend to believe in something that they don't believe in, or imply that they are someone other than who they really are. Politicians spend much of their time ducking, dodging, avoiding, pretending, lying, hiding their emotions and feelings, using smoke screens or mirrors and waving to imaginary friends in the crowd. But we instinctively know that they will eventually be tripped up by contradictory body-language signals, so we love to watch them closely, in anticipation of catching them out.
What signal alerts you that a politician is lying?
His lips