Body language

Body language is a broad term for several forms of communication between two or more people using body movements instead of sounds or other media. In turn, it is one category of paralanguage, which describes all forms of human communication that are not language. Paralanguage including body language has been extensively studied in social psychology.

The subject can be divided into at least two major groups: voluntary and involuntary body language.

The first kind, perhaps less commonly discussed because it seems unproblematic, refers to movement, gestures and poses intentionally made by the subject: moving hands, mimating actions, and generally making movements with full or partial intention of making them. It can apply to many types of soundless communication, for example, formalized gestures in matches.

The second kind is often what one means when talking about body language: involuntary movements that may give observers a clue about what one is really thinking or feeling. The ability of spotting the movements is itself subconscious, at least for non-trained people.

The relation of body language to animal communication has often been discussed. Human paralanguage may represent a continuation of forms of communication that our non-linguistic ancestors already used, or it may be that it has been changed by co-existing with language. Some species of animals are especially adept at detecting human body language, both voluntary and involuntary: this is the basis of the Clever Hans effect (a source of artefact in comparative psychology), and was also the reason for trying to teach the chimpanzee Washoe American Sign Language rather than speech - and perhaps the reason why the Washoe project was more successful than some previous efforts to teach apes human languages.

It is widely believed that involuntary body language is the most accurate way into a person's subconcious. In principle, if people don't realize what they are doing or why they are doing it, it should be possible for a trained observer to understand more of what they are thinking or feeling than they intend - or even more than they realise themselves. Interrogators, customs examiners, and others who have to seek information that people do not necessarily want to give have always relied on explicit or implicit hypotheses about body language. However, this is a field that is fraught with risk of error, and it has also been plagued with plausible but superficial or just plain erroneous popular psychology: just because someone has their legs crossed toward you, it doesn't mean that they want to have sex with you; it could just mean that they are comfortable with you, but it could also be how they always sit regardless of where you are. Furthermore, it is not possible to tell reliably whether body language has been emitted voluntarily or involuntarily, so to rely too heavily on it is to run the risk of being bluffed.

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