Misconceptions around non-verbal communication

Non-verbal communication is a booming field – not just for research, but for authors, presenters and businesses making money out of offering advice and training on everything from how to read a celebrity's body language to the 'tells' that will reveal if a courtroom defendant is lying.

But there's a problem with all this, write Miles Patterson, Alan Fridlund and Carlos Crivelli, in a new paper in Perspectives in Psychological Science: the field of non-verbal communication is plagued with persistent misconceptions and incorrect 'truths'. 'These "truths" have taken on mythlike status as a kind of received wisdom impervious to evidence, so that they endure as pseudoscience,' the team writes. And when they are used to guide the reasoning of jurors, employers, law enforcement agencies and romantic partners, not to mention researchers, they have the potential to be very damaging indeed. 

Benign metaphor or secret language?

Patterson, Fridlund and Crivelli start their critical evaluation of the field with the concept of 'body language'. The idea that someone's posture, gaze, use of touch, facial expressions, and so on, are reliable signals to how they are truly feeling has been around for decades. But with the recent explosion of social media, the body language industry has proliferated, the team writes. If you want to learn how to 'read' your partner's, your boss's or your friends' body language, there are plenty of products out there that promise to tell you.

However, 'body language' is not like English or sign language. If you say, 'I like you', your meaning is clear. But non-verbal behaviours are often not so easily interpreted. The team gives this example: 'If you ask a friend about the weather outside and she scowls, her expression may mean that a. it is lousy outside; b. it is so lousy outside it is ridiculous that we asked; c. she has far more important things on her mind than the weather; or d. she is still upset from the argument we had yesterday and the last thing she wants to talk about is the weather. '

In other words, non-verbal behaviour is imprecise. To draw conclusions about what it means, we must use wider context, make inferences, attempt to read the other person's mind and guess. Our resulting conclusions might be correct – but they may also be wrong.

'If "body language" were only a benign metaphor, the term would simply be misleading,' the researchers write. But it has led to an industry that promises to be a reliable guide to what every bit of 'body language' means. 'Consumers should be wary of claims that they can purchase access to any secret language of the body,' Patterson and his colleagues conclude.

Interpersonal space

Another major misconception is, they argue, that we each have a stable 'personal space' – that there's a kind of bubble around us into which we don't like other people to intrude. After a dip in interest in this topic in the 2000s, there was then a resurgence in the number of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations and books dealing with the idea of personal space, and this continues today, the team reports. However, 'this notion does not capture the complexity of how we use space and respond spatially to others.'

Work on 'interpersonal distance' – the actual physical distance that people keep from others in social settings – shows that, in fact, all kinds of factors, including sex, culture, context and familiarity (whether you're with a stranger or a close friend, say) affect our preferred interpersonal distances. So, they are malleable. 'Like body language, the construct of a stable, insulating personal space is a simplistic one that impedes our understanding of non-verbal communication and its everyday application,' the team argues.

Basic emotions

Another common misconception is truly pervasive, found everywhere from schools to workplaces, as well as in research: that basic emotions are expressed by universal, automatic facial 'expressions'. According to this view, happiness is expressed on the face in the same way, no matter where you're from: with a smile. The other emotions that are claimed to be reliably expressed on the human face are sadness, anger, disgust and surprise (though some models include other emotions in this list).

But, as Fridlund and Crivelli argued in 2018, there are all kinds of problems with these claims. Firstly, Crivelli, among others, has gathered evidence from small-scale societies that contradicts the idea that there are universal, 'pre-wired', facial expressions of emotion. Secondly, Fridlund has pioneered the idea that our 'facial displays' are really social tools to influence whoever we are with. So, a smile, rather than expressing 'happiness', indicates a willingness to have a positive social encounter – which is why you might smile at your dentist, for example, while a frown conveys condemnation, a 'fear' face signals submission, and a 'disgust' face signals revulsion.

Since 2018, various additional studies have supported this view. In 2021, for example, a paper in Emotion from Juan I. Durán and José-Miguel Fernandez-Dols concluded that feelings of happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear and surprise 'do not reliably co-occur with their predicted facial signal'. So, even though we, in the West, at least, have had it drilled into us that a smile expresses 'happiness' or a 'surprise face' surprise, when we feel these emotions, even we don't reliably adopt the 'appropriate' face.

Lying

Misguided ideas about facial 'expressions' feed into the fourth big misconception about non-verbal communication highlighted in the new paper: that there are reliable cues that indicate when someone else is lying.

The basic idea that we can spot a lie is itself a misconception. A classic meta-analysis (dating back to 2006) found that people can correctly identify whether someone is telling the truth or lying about 54% of the time – i.e. only a little better than chance. In one recent paper led by Sarah Volz, an analysis of more than 45,000 truth/lie judgements produced an even lower accuracy figure: just 51 per cent. (This paper also refuted the misconception that some people are brilliant liars, while others are terrible.)  And this doesn't apply only to members of the public. Studies have suggested that even law enforcement professionals are useless at detecting lies.

Research does suggest that some people, at least, may show certain non-verbal behaviours, such as fidgeting, while they are lying. However, witnessing that behaviour in an individual can't be taken to indicate that they are lying, because both liars and non-liars will do the same thing in other contexts – like when they are feeling anxious about a job interview. A person might be feeling anxious and even fidgeting during questioning because they know they're guilty and they're lying, or because they find the questioning nerve-wracking, even though they are innocent.

In a 2019 review, Aldert Vrij at Portsmouth University and colleagues note that many misconceptions about non-verbal communication and lie detection still exist. 'People are mediocre lie catchers when they pay attention to behaviour,' the team concludes. And yet: 'The belief in the detectability of lies is also built into many legal presumptions – for example, jurors in criminal cases are often asked to pay attention to the defendant's nonverbal behaviour to assess their truthfulness.'

A complex interplay

Misguided ideas about non-verbal communication need to be challenged – and need to change, argue Patterson and his colleagues. Great advances have been made toward understanding the patterns and functions of nonverbal behaviour in social settings, they write. But, they argue, that progress has been hindered by many of these popular misconceptions.

As far as future research in this field is concerned, the teams think it will be critical to understand non-verbal communication as a complex interplay between people, affected by context and culture – not as a set of behaviours or movements that can be understood in isolation. For the rest of us, it's clearly also important, in many different aspects of our lives, to be aware that so much of the received wisdom about non-verbal communication is wrong. 

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