Body Language

In my class tonight, the professor lectured about communications. When she got to the bit about body language and oh if you cross your arms like so, it is communicating that you are closed off, one of my classmates pointed out that many of the theories of body language are based on bad research from the 1960’s and 70’s, pop psychology, and folk wisdom.

He was, of course, right.

The common set of most of the knowledge we walk around with is blurred with inaccurate folk knowledge. No field is immune.

Everything I know about passwords? Wrong. Misguided. Soon to be out-dated.

Literary analysis? Not my specialty.

Communications? Sorry, my community college class doesn’t help.

Music? Ha.

Getting by with a mix of real knowledge and folk wisdom in any field is only natural. True depth in anything requires, on average, about $1000 investment value in equipment, reading, classes, and so on, and ten years practice. Well, about ten years, some are slower or faster than others. And far too many chase the dollar investment thinking it’ll make up for the ten years thing. And even then, the conventional wisdom baggage never goes away.

Nothing is immune until humanity gets the brain-in-a-vat thing figured out.

So this poor classmate of mine points out, in a largish university class, this concept, and that it has blurred the lines between what is true researched body language, and what is hearsay.

The teacher is pretty sure about the whole arm crossing thing. Pretty sure. Another classmate is a psychology major and asserts that body language does exist, but that not everyone has the same body language. Another classmate asserts that body language is reliable and that they use it at work. Another classmate is open to the idea that body language is different for everybody, but points out that kids do the arm crossing thing.

The entire time these bastards are berating the man for what they seemed to understand as his dismissal of body language entirely, I’m watching him. Watching his body language.

He wanted to cross his arms.

He didn’t. That would be giving in.

I knew this like I imagine poker players know each other’s tells after years of playing together. He wanted to cross his arms and swivel his chair so that he would no longer be directly shoulders-square with the rest of us.

That I knew this, because he was being lectured to by a class full of students, wasn’t the interesting thing. What intrigues me now, an hour later, is that I knew he knew that we knew that he knew.

I love that.