Body Language. Empathy & Headphones
If you fake it till you make it, and you make it, then you’re not faking it anymore (although it feels like it sometimes).
There’s a well know and well proven fact that if you “fake” a smile, i.e. grimace as if you were smiling, within a short space of time you will feel happier and your outlook will be more positive. Try it for yourself and you’ll find it difficult to be fed up or angry if you’re forcing yourself to smile.
This fit very well with Carol Dweck’s view in “mindset” that you can change the way you feel, and think, if you change the way you behave. We seem to be able to trick our minds into thinking in a certain way if we act in a certain way. Now, to most of us that seems counter-intuitive. We behave as we feel, but it’s much more subtle than that.
It turns out that we are highly impressionable to micro-signals in our body language and in the body language of others.
In his book “Tipping point” Malcolm Gladwell (one of my favourite writers. (Listen to his podcast, Revisionist History, too)) gives an example of an experiment carried out with a large number of students.
The students were asked to participate in a market research study of some new headphones. They had to wear the headphones and list to music from Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles and a short radio piece about raising tutorial fees, as the market research company wanted to find out how well the headphones performed when the listener was in motion (well that’s what they said anyway).
One group was asked to shake their head from side to side, another to nob up and down and a control group were asked to keep their heads still. Following the session, the students were given a short questionnaire about the quality of the headphones and the effect of shaking. Then at the end of the session they were asked what they thought about tutorial fees being put up. This was actually the whole point of the experiment.
The results are astonishing; The students who kept their heads still were “unmoved” by the radio piece about fees. Those who shook their heads from side to side strongly disagreed with the proposed increase in fees. And those who nodded their heads up and down found the radio piece very persuasive.
The simple act of nodding their heads up and down, albeit for a different reason, was sufficient to make them endorse the increase in fees.
It seems that these little movements of affirmation or negation affect how we think and what we think. So, it appears that non-verbal cues are just as important as verbal cues.
I have often wondered why, when you here one of those internet guru salesmen (or politicians) selling from the stage, they are constantly asking if we are OK with the information, if it’s “clear” (if you took this word out of a politicians vocabulary they wouldn’t be able to speak!). The reason is that they are trying to get our affirmation to “soften” us up for purchasing. If you’ve already nodded and confirmed, when they get to the sales pitch, you’re more likely to continue to say YES!
It matters not just what you say, but also how you say it. Simple physical and verbal cues have a profound effect on how we feel. It would appear that persuasion works in ways that are subtle and that we are hardly aware of.
One of the reasons this happens is that our brains are equipped with something called Mirror Neurons. These specialist neurons allow us to empathize with someone else. When we see a child catch their finger in a door, we winch too. Interestingly, when we observe someone else experiencing an emotion, the same areas of our brains fire up (although we may not feel their pain or pleasure) we understand their emotions because we replicate that phenomena in our own brains.
When we feel we have a connection with someone we mirror their physical behavior. We get in Sync. Our “minds” meet. Most of this is down to tiny micro-signals hat we put out all the time.
In a further study of influencers and speaker, by Joseph Capella of Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania observed that “They know when the crowds are with them, literally in synchrony with them, in movements and nods and stillness in moments of attention”.
This is something called “emotional contagion”. If I’m happy, there’s a fair chance that I will pass on my happiness to you. We (or those who are influential) literally infect other people with their emotions. Emotions are contagious. It’s completely intuitive.
But what is even more interesting is that emotions don’t just go from the inside-out. How we feel to how we behave. Rather, how we behave may influence how we feel. This means that emotions also go from outside-in. It’s counter-intuitive and yet somehow blindingly “clear” (I have no intention of becoming a politician, by the way).
