Interpreting body language can leave you stuck for words

THE problem about being given a goat in Africa is getting it home.

When my boss was presented with one by a tribe he’d been filming for a documentary, he had to ask them to mind it for him until his next visit. Irish customs officers, he explained, tend to have a bad attitude to incoming goats.

He didn’t get into the foot-and-mouth issue, partly because he wasn’t sure if it applied to cloven hoofs, but mainly because he wanted to be diplomatic about not taking the gift home with him. You don’t want to offend a goat-giving tribe. Especially when you know that the tribe has its own special sod-off hand gesture.

Members of this particular tribe, when miffed, extend their right arm, fingers splayed as if holding a tennis ball, and shove it at their enemy a number of times. The sign signifies “Five men were with your mother the night you were conceived. Which, you have to admit, puts the old Harvey Smith double-finger insult in the ha’penny place.

The film crew were delighted to learn the new gesture, but disappointed to find, when they got home, it didn’t travel that well from country to country. You could do the mother-insulting gesture at top volume in Leitrim, for example, and Leitrim would be mystified, rather than collectively enraged about the vile slur on Leitrim motherhood.

It’s the same with signing for people with hearing impairment. Each country has subtly but crucially different sign languages, as I found out when I did a lecture about marketing to an international conference of hearing impaired executives.

Onstage, I was flanked by five simultaneous translators. When I got to the bit about Wonderbra posters cost-effectively causing motorists to drive up each other’s exhaust pipes, each signer translated the point, and each national group got the message. But they all got it at different intervals. Group A laughed long before Group B and then laughed again at Group B getting it later than Group A.

Gestures and their significance differ greatly between nations. They also differ greatly in their importance, depending on context. They’ve been studied for years by behavioural psychologists. All of which makes the facile commentary from supposed experts on Saddam Hussein’s body language during his arraignment so surprising.

Shorn of the verbiage, the interpretation has boiled down to the observation that he was a bit jerky at the beginning but reverted to dogmatic type once he warmed up a bit.

He also lashed his pen up and down. This could, one commentator observed, “be symbolic of the executioner’s sword”. Oh, right. Someone go tell Olivia O’Leary not to bring her biro with her the next time she’s on the telly. We’ve all seen her do the Saddam Slash. But now we know it symbolizes something deeper than just. Belt up and let me speak. She’s not going to get away with it from now on.

The growing fascination with body language derives from the belief that it puts the viewer on the inside track. It sells on the illusion that instead of listening to what someone is actually saying (which is SO last century) we can bypass their words and get to the awful stuff they don’t want us to know, but which they can’t help revealing through their gestures.

Not that they’re called ‘gestures’ any more. They’re now called ‘physical tells’ and are believed to infallibly reveal deep and guilty truths.

The reality is that a number of movements, like running a finger round the inside of a collar, touching one’s hair or comforting one hand with the other have always, in the Western world, revealed anxiety. We also know that people tend to take up physical positions imitative of those they like, and to tilt themselves away from and avoid eye contact with, those they dislike or fear.

In addition, some mental illnesses tend to be accompanied by distinctive physical behaviours. Andrea Yates, a Texan fundamentalist, drowned her five children in the bath in 2001 because she believed it would prevent Satan from corrupting them. The psychiatrists who examined her after the crime noted that she had what they called ‘sewing-machine leg’, a frantic repetitive leg movement reminiscent of the pumping required to keep an old sewing machine going. This aspect of body language was a significant indicator of her abnormal state of mind.

However, the current fashion for over-interpreting body language by attributing a deep and inescapable significance to every gesture carries its own dangers.

GERRY SPENCE, the writer, lawyer and civil libertarian, has described in his autobiography how he underwent a body language course in order to improve his performance in the courtroom. (He hadn’t been doing badly before doing the course - he was the man who got Imelda Marcos found not guilty of corruption charges in the United States.) The tutors on the body language course he attended gave dire warnings about the hidden meaning of some physical ‘tells’, most notably the folded-arms gesture. The person with the folded arms, according to them, has stopped listening to you and is closed to your argument.

This is one of the most basic tenets of popular body language texts. Indeed, because it has become so well-known, nervous public speakers now terrify themselves even further by counting the number of people in the front row of an audience who have their arms folded. If the majority have their arms folded at the beginning of a talk, the body language experts would suggest, the speaker has a tough task ahead of him or her. If the majority have their arms folded at the END of a talk, the speaker has utterly failed to convince them.

Immediately after his body language course, Gerry Spence had to fight a major court case. Informed by his new expertise, he studied the jury, noting that “at the outset - a big redneck in dungarees in the back row had his arms folded. Resolutely folded”.

Spence concentrated on this man, arguing with passion on behalf of his client, determined to make the juror unlock those big arms. Over several days, Spence gave of his best. Over several days, the redneck sat, impassive, in the same position. Spence despaired.

As the jury was sent out to consider their verdict, Spence was miserably pessimistic, knowing that one holdout could sway a jury otherwise positive towards his client’s case.

When the jury came back with a positive verdict, vindicating his client, he was startled and greatly relieved.

Because it’s OK in America for lawyers to talk to jurors after a case, Spence waited until the court procedure was complete, then ran after and halted the redneck.

Had the juror, he asked, found Spence’s arguments unacceptable? No, the dungareed juror replied, Spence had ‘done good’. But, Spence explained the juror had kept his arms folded throughout. The juror nodded. Yep. He had. Spence asked the significance of the posture. The juror’s commonsense answer sums up the danger of over-interpreting body language.

“I got a big belly,” the redneck said. “And a man’s gotta put his arms someplace.”