Non-verbal communication across cultures

Read the text and discuss in pairs the different cultural scenarios mentioned in the text.

THE MOVEMENTS THAT BETRAY WHO YOU ARE

Leo Benedictus, 14th September 2020[1]

While leafing through some old research papers, Hillary Elfenbein noticed something strange about the photographs in one famous study. The research from the late 1980s had asked volunteers if they were able to identify emotions in the faces of Japanese and Caucasian people. Some of the “Japanese” faces were posed by Japanese-Americans, the rest by Japanese nationals.

When Elfenbein herself looked at photographs, she realized that she could tell which were which. Her collaborator, Abby Marsh, found that she could too. So, they ran an experiment.

They found that the Americans they tested were also strangely good at spotting who was Japanese and who was Japanese-American, even though they were all ethnically the same. The subjects wore the same clothes and were lit in the same way. When the two groups held neutral expressions, people could barely differentiate between them. But when they showed their feelings, especially sadness, something from Japan or America seemed to emerge.

You may have had this experience yourself, if you’ve ever been abroad and felt suddenly convinced that a passing stranger is one of your fellow countrymen. At times the signal may be obvious.

If you have seen the film Inglourious Basterds, you will know that German and British people indicate the number three with their fingers in different ways. (Germans raise their thumb and first two fingers; Britons pin the little finger with their thumb and raise the rest). Most never realize that this difference exists until they see the alternative, which, to them, looks strange.

Some signals may be random quirks that happened to catch on. Others may have served a purpose. Vladimir Putin is said to display his KGB weapons training in the way he walks, with his “gun arm” hanging motionless by his side.

The way we walk can be distinctive and can often betray information about ourselves, such as with Vladimir Putin's "gunslinger" gait (Credit: Alamy)

Since their initial discovery, Marsh and Elfenbein have detected more of these “non-verbal accents” – physical ways in which we show where we come from without realizing. Americans, for example, can spot Australians from the way they smile, wave or walk.

Scott Morrison. Prime Minister of Australia.

Australians have a distinctive wave that Americans in one study were able to correctly identify (Credit: Alamy)

The Chinese technology company Watrix claims that their software can identify a person from footage of them walking, with accuracy of up to 94%. If an individual’s movements can be so distinctive, then it is not unreasonable to think that groups might share a few in common, and that this might be noticeable to outsiders.

There is already evidence that we read more from body posture than we realize. In a 2012 study, people who were shown photographs of tennis players taken immediately after an important point were much better at knowing whether the player had won or lost from images of their bodies than of their faces. When losing faces were placed on winning bodies, or vice versa, it was the bodies that overwhelmingly guided people’s judgements. A later version of the study produced the same findings, along with the fact that Hong Kong college students did better overall when the athletes were East Asian, which again suggests that we are better at spotting those postural accents that we are most familiar with because we see them in the people around us.

Some faces do seem to record information about the life they’ve lived. When shown a selection of neutral expressions taken from dating apps, participants in a 2017 study were able to tell rich people from poor more accurately than if they were just guessing. Indeed, they could still do it with pictures of only the person’s eyes or, in particular, their mouth. After further investigation, the researchers concluded that rich people just look a little more attractive or more positive (a mixture of happy and likeable) than poor people do. When shown photographs in which everybody was smiling and looking deliberately positive, participants lost their ability to tell rich and poor apart.

The presence of these subtle cues might help to explain the bias that can creep into our thinking about people from different backgrounds. As we’ve seen, non-verbal accents often have the effect of making outsiders more difficult to understand.

When people want to be understood, however, they do have ways to make their feelings clear and they smile more often, as a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests