If the person you are touching is aware of what you are trying to do, or is not interested in your contact then this technique will not work. This is sometimes called neuro linguistic programming.
However, if the other person is aware of the mirroring activity they may be annoyed or distracted by the unnatural movement.Īnother myth about body language is that if you associate gentle touching movements with certain words you will condition a person to respond positively to what you say. This idea uses the idea of mirroring another person’s body language to create an artificial empathy between them. Men who follow seduction and pickup artists often talk about using body language to “establish rapport” with the women they are interested in. For example, if you are holding a conversation over a radio or telephone channel where you cannot see the other person, their body language will have virtually no impact on the effectiveness of the communication. However, this may only be true in a minority of situations where great ambiguity is involved. Albert Mehrabian published two studies that were responsible for the often-cited “7-38-55 rule” which says that three components of communication (verbal, tone of voice, and body language) impact the effectiveness of our personal communication by 7% (verbal), 38% (tone of voice), and 55% (body language). We could easily get through every day just by using body language if the 90% idea were realistic.ĭr. If it were indeed true that we can convey 90% of the information we want to share with others through non-verbal cues, we would not need millions of words for our spoken and written languages. One of the most widely cited and incorrect “facts” about body language is that our communication is 90% non-verbal. There are almost 7,000 different sign languages in use in the world today, but body language is virtually universal, even between species of animals. Whereas body language may be ambiguous but interpretable to most people, sign language can only be understood by people who have studied its gestures and meanings.
These are only a few of many possible interpretations of such movement, and this explains why you cannot rely on body language alone to communicate with other people or to understand what they are doing.īody language differs from sign language, which can be used for direct, meaningful communication in that body language is a natural set of movements whereas sign language is an artificial set of movements given a very specific set of meanings. He could be playing a game, illustrating how birds fly to someone else, trying to dry himself off, or in an altered state of mind where he believes he is a bird. The motions associated with the various swimming styles are very specific.īut what if you saw a man flapping his arms like a bird? Would you be able to interpret what he was doing from that motion alone? Most likely not. You would also know someone was swimming through water if you could only see their body movement in silhouette. The motion associated with driving cars and trucks is very standardized due to their design and their control systems. For example, if you could only see a person’s arms as they were steering a moving vehicle you would almost surely understand they were indeed driving. Our physical activity may reveal much about what we are doing. If reading body language were that simple and easy these games would not be very challenging. Just think of how difficult and how much fun gesture-based games like Charades can be to play. Despite what you may see on television or read on the Internet, there is no way to use body language to perfectly understand what another person is saying. What are the benefits of reading body language?īody language consists of the positions, gestures, and whole body movements we use to share how we are feeling or what we are doing. Basic position and gesturing are among the most primitive and universal forms of communication.
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