Subtle communication and how it shapes our world

I have had a tacit awareness of the fact that subtle (and frequently not even consciously noticeable) elements of one's body language, tone of voice, or mannerisms have a profound effect on the manner in which persons perceive you and react to you. I first became aware of this when I was training student ministers for the Methodist Church of Southern Africa. The students had to preach 'trial sermons' in front of a group of their peers. No matter how well researched and carefully delivered the message, some students simply could not illicit an appropriately proportionate response to the quality of their sermon. It was almost as if there was something about them that stopped their congregation from 'hearing' and 'accepting' the truth of their message.

Well, here's some research which gives account of just such situations.

MIT researcher Alex (Sandy) Pentland used tiny devices called "sociometers" to collect thousands of hours of data about the unconscious speech patterns that can influence the outcome of conversations. For example, the way you talk in an interview -- even if neither you or the interviewer are remotely aware of your tone -- may have a tremendous impact on what the employer thinks of you. We all know this of course, but Pentland has actually studied it scientifically. The value of the sociometers isn't in producing a verbal record of a conversation but rather quantifiable information about more subtle cues like tone and physical activity. Apparently, Pentland was able to use the data, not the words themselves, to accurately predict how a conversation about, say, a date or an investment pitch, would play out. He calls these cues "honest signals," and has just written a new book about the idea, titled Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World. From the MIT News Office:

The features he found that are highly predictive of outcomes, he says, "match the literature in biology about signaling in animals." In fact, Pentland suggests, the non-linguistic channels of communication that are measured by the sociometers may have started among our ancestors long before the evolution of language itself, forming a deeper, more primal way of understanding intentions, coordinating activities and establishing power relationships within the group.

"Half of our decision-making seems to be predicted by this unconscious channel," says Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences. "That's exactly the channel that you see in apes" as they coordinate their activities without the use of language... The data gathered from the devices can be used not only to predict the outcomes of specific interactions between people, but even the relative productivity of different teams within a company. "This information is not in the organizational charts," Pentland says. "This human side is missing from all traditional measures" of how groups of people work together.

Honest Signals (Amazon), "Tuning in to unconscious communication" (MIT)