The Bias of Thinking You Can Nonverbally Decode

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Prince William was recently caught flipping the bird at onlookers in a much-publicized photo. A journalist wrote, “You can even see a look of smug confidence in his face too.” Oh wait, that was a profile shot. From a more direct angle, Prince William was holding up three fingers, one for each of his children. That’s sweet. Never mind (Loftus, 2018).

Or check out this online tutorial for Japanese sign language. There’s this young woman repeatedly giving us the finger. Oh wait, that’s the sign for “younger brother” (YouTube, 2012).

Individuals with hearing impairments have even been attacked on the street when their everyday sign language was mistaken for gang signs. A young, black athlete posing for a newspaper photo was suspended from his high-school basketball team when his three-point sign was mistaken for a gang sign (Stalder, 2018).

On the presidential level, George H. W. Bush once accidentally insulted Australia in a nonverbal way. President Bush meant to make the peace sign as he was visiting there, but when you cross country lines, nonverbal communication can go haywire. Somehow the sign was facing the “wrong” direction, which means something obscene in Australia — the newspapers “misread” peace as something nasty (Axtel, 1997).

In the infamous case of the nonsmiling Michelle Obama in a photo from Nelson Mandela’s memorial service, the first lady was falsely accused of anger and even jealousy as President Obama smiled while sitting next to a female dignitary. The photographer went public to correct the record. He said, “Photos can lie” (Kim, 2013).

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This is a small sample of cases. But the list of decoding failures is endless, especially when looking at snapshots. My message for now is simple. Don’t trust your nonverbal decoder ring.

Nodding the head means “no” in some cultures. Crossed arms can have multiple meanings. Eye contact or its absence can mean different things in different contexts. Police officers sometimes think people are reaching for guns when they’re not.

Even reading emotions from faces is harder than most of us think. Those six so-called universal emotions are not as universally recognizable as we thought. Part of the problem was that most of the early research was based on posed photographs. When researchers switched to spontaneous expressions, facial-decoding accuracy rates, which were arguably never that high, dropped even further. Participants in the early research were also usually asked to pick the correct emotion from a short list of possibilities. It turns out that accuracy rates also drop when researchers switch from multiple-choice to open-ended format (Russell et al., 2003).

The statistics in emotion research can be complicated, but how universal can emotion recognition be when we need multiple-choice to boost our scores?

Thinking you can detect deception from nonverbal cues also turns out to be largely a myth. Most people (including experts) are no better than 50-50 in detecting lies, despite their beliefs to the contrary (Bond & DePaulo, 2006).

Watching the TV show Lie to Me, which provided some expert-based rules of thumb about detecting deception, actually led viewers to become even worse at detecting deception (Levine et al., 2010).

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Maybe if there were more on the line personally, we would be more accurate. Are we any good at detecting flirting? Not really. In a study on flirting, only about 27 percent of participants correctly judged when they were being flirted with — men scored a little higher than women (Wenzl, 2014).

Let me pause in my examples to acknowledge that sometimes our nonverbal decoding is accurate. I don’t mean to cherry-pick. Some gestures are clear, within a culture or context. Sometimes police officers read potential suspects correctly. We do have some ability to read emotions from faces, though less than most of us think.

And let me acknowledge that some of us are more accurate than others in nonverbal decoding. But beware the "above-average effect": Most of us think we’re better than average when really only about half of us can be.

Despite these acknowledgments, popular press advice on how to read body language and other nonverbal cues generally oversells it. It would be nice to think there are some general decoding rules that always work. Sorry to burst that bubble: There are few such rules.

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What is generally true is that we have way too much confidence in our ability to decode. It is all too easy to think we can read someone when we can’t, and we’re usually too quick to take offense and to criticize.

My suggestion is try to avoid making any interpersonal judgments based on nonverbals alone. Try not to think you can know what somebody is thinking or feeling just from looking at them. Look at the context too. And if possible, use your verbals, and listen and talk to the individual.

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According to Nicholas Epley, author of Mindwise, “reading people’s expressions can give you a little information, but you get so much more just by talking to them. The mind comes through the mouth” (Tierney, 2014).