A couple sits together at a distant table across the restaurant, talking. They are complete strangers, and the din completely drowns out their conversation.
But if prevailing nonverbal communication theory holds true, that alone speaks volumes about the two. In fact, visual cues such as posture and mannerisms can paint a more accurate picture of the relationship than the conversation itself. UCLA communications studies assistant professor Kerri Johnson said body language is a remarkably good indicator of myriad variables, including confidence and overall satisfaction.
“(In one experiment,) subjects were shown 10-second snippets of professors giving a lecture,” she said. “They had never taken the course, and the audio was removed so no one could hear what’s being said. But just from this clip, they could predict end-of-term evaluations for that professor (with great accuracy.)”
Outside of a laboratory, perhaps nowhere is body language as much a science as at the poker table. Players rely on a series of tells, or common habits that may tip off another player’s hand, to gauge their own relative strength.
Matt Dodge, co-founder of UCLA’s unofficial Texas Hold ’em club, says poker is often just a race to pick up on cues and give off false ones.
“New players tend to be easier to read,” Dodge said. “Leaning forward in their seat, maybe hands covering their cards, could mean they have a strong hand. But some people lean back to seem weak. That’s poker: If you’re strong, you want to act weak.”
Though much of the course of action remains unknown, researchers have been able to flesh out a surprising consistency in detection and expression of bodily cues.
In conjunction with colleagues at Texas A&M and New York University, Johnson recently published research suggesting that casual observers can judge people’s sexual orientations by the way they walk, even when reduced to a wire diagram of simple body movements.
“When you’re talking about basic perceptions like gender and sexual orientation, the decision is made very, very quickly,” Johnson said. “But in instances where you’re unsure, that can be very disconcerting. Once you can’t assign a social category, you don’t know how to interact with them nor apply a whole cascade of behavior (based on that initial decision).”
Dodge agrees that there seems to be a predictability, a common denominator, in most human behavior.
“If you sit down at a casino, you don’t know anything about the other players,” he said. “They could have been playing for 30 years, or they’re sitting down for the first time. But even then, you can tell when someone is confident when they’re betting, and it’s really, really obvious.”
Johnson says that there are certain aspects of bodily cues that remain out of conscious control.
“Even for something as simple as walking, we still don’t know (how much of it is involuntary),” she said. “For sure, there’s a degree of volitional choice in how you walk, but that doesn’t remove some fundamental differences.”
For some, the physical response can even surpass the mind’s attempt to control. Second-year undeclared student Ben Yu is intimately familiar with these involuntary reactions.
“There’s this really annoying girl I know whom I can’t look at without wincing,” he said. “Once I look over, I get murderous and my hands start shivering, and I have to look away.”
However, Johnson warns that the predictive power of body language can be overstated.
“There are a lot of books out that speculate what nonverbal cues mean, and deconstruct what the “˜hidden message’ is, but that’s not how we do the research at all,” she said.
Though it may be a very powerful tool, Dodge also says that players’ behavior is not entirely predictable, and requires a long period of observation to use as an advantage.
Even then, only occasionally do players exhibit blatant giveaways.
“There are betting tells and physical ones,” he said. “People try not to rely on physical tells because they just take so long to establish.”
Which, of course, is why it remains a card game.