As mentioned last week, here are some of the ‘tells’ that, according to Peter Collett, people exhibit subliminally, and what they usually mean. In The Book of Tells Collett doesn’t just describe body language, but other clues — speech, behaviour etc. — that may give away your intentions, fears or state of mind. He also explores political tells, the tells of British royalty, smokers’ tells (and an explanation of the inherent eroticism of smoking), and even how the meaning of physical expressions differs from country to country. I’m more intrigued by the straight body language tells, the tacit, surreptitious signs that things are not all they seem. It is not surprising that more than half of all tells exhibit either dominant or submissive tendencies. Before humans invented language, these signals were used more overtly to establish the pecking order in prehistoric tribes. This ranking was not merely done as an act of bravado — your placement in the pecking order from alpha to omega male or female was a critical determinant of your role in the tribe, and hence literally provided pre-literate instruction for ‘what you did for a living’ as part of the tribal community. Although Collett doesn’t make the distinction explicitly, he suggests that the dominant and submissive signals each come in three ‘flavours’:
There’s no mistaking the dog’s DC signals and the fawn’s SH signals in the picture above. But can you pick out the three dominant (DC) and three submissive (SD and SH) signals in the picture below? (Apologies for stealing this picture at random off the net, but it was an ideal illustration of Collett’s theories) Here are some clues:
Here are some other tells, not specifically with dominant or submissive messages, and their usual meaning:
The most important message of the book is that being alert for tells is far more important than researching what they probably mean. In many cases, especially if we know someone well, we become ‘blind’ to their body language, and even with strangers you need merely be observant to pick up on the visual clues presented by people with their posture, hand, body, facial and eye movements — usually the meaning is quite obvious. After all, this is how we communicated as a species before we invented language, so we shouldn’t be surprised that to the careful observer, most tells are dead give-aways. Some other interesting tidbits from the book:
Do I really buy all of this? No, and I’ve excluded some of the signals in the book that I thought were way over the top. Jumping to conclusions based on signals that may just indicate sunburn or asthma or a bad night’s sleep, is foolish, even dangerous. But pop psychology is fun if you don’t take it too seriously. It makes people-watching in restaurants and meetings a hoot. It makes you more observant, about other things beside subliminal signals. What’s hard is explaining to people that you think you’ve ‘caught’ what you’re laughing about. (Top photo above is circulating by e-mail, and I don’t know where it originated. Bottom photo is from the Northeast Illinois U website, identity of the people depicted unknown. ) |
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I recently read a book titled Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson in which he discusses how our brain works in relative, but easy to read, detail. At one point he discusses how we, mostly subconsciously, determine a person’s mood just by looking at somones eyes in static pictures. Interestingly enough, when you look at a static image of someones eyes your first reaction (the subconscious one) is almost guaranteed to be more accutate than the one you get when you study the image and consciously analyze the persons eyes.I suspect that posture/handsignals/speech/etc. signaling dominant/submissive nature is very much the same in that you are much better going with your gut instinct than analyzing what is going on and trying to draw a rational/reasoned conclusion. Your subconscious mind has taken millions of years of evolution to develop and is far more complex and substantially faster at analysis than our conscious mind with a table outlining dominant and submissive signals. That said, it is pretty interesting studying all the subtle signals we give each other.
Aha, another advocate of ‘Trust Your Instincts’! As I mentioned, the real value of the book is making you more observant. Once you start, it’s hard to turn it off again.
The author of this book was featured in a series of programmes on Channel 4 here in the UK, I think. Although I didn’t watch them, so I can’t say for sure.If you’re into this, you might enjoy Derren Brown (www.derrenbrown.co.uk) – I’m a big fan of his. He’s a former magician turned “psychological illusionist”. It’s very hard to describe what he does though. If you’ve heard of him it’s probably from his Russian Roulette stunt, but there’s much, much more to him than that, and his DVD is really worth checking out if it’s available where you are. There’s some clips of what he does here:http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/M/mindcontrol/(Re-reading that it sounds incredibly spammy, but I am honestly just a fan!)