 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. And welcome to another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. Likeable Science is all about how science impacts all of our lives every day and we're going to see that very, very clearly this episode because I have with me, RB Kelly. Welcome RB. Thank you. Good to be here. RB Kelly is a body language boss. And so let's just jump right into this and tell me what body language is. Well body language is part of nonverbal communication. So nonverbal communication is made up of three different areas. But nonverbal communication by itself comprises between 60 and 93 percent of all communication. That's huge. The vast majority of communication is coming through nonverbal. So nonverbal is made up of three different areas. First, there's body language. That's what you're doing with your hands, with your facial expressions. So you're taking up a lot of space, leaning in, leaning out. All of that sends different messages about where you are at any point in time. The second part of nonverbal communication is voice tone. If I was to say, hi I'm RB, it's nice to meet you, that would send a very different message from, hi I'm RB, it's nice to meet you. Or even, hi I'm RB, it's nice to meet you. All of those three things are coming through in the voice tone with a little bit of body language on top. And then the third thing for nonverbal communication is ornaments. This is basically your outside package, the colors and styles you choose to wear, haircut, makeup, jewelry, tattoos, all of that sends different messages about you. And these three things, people are constantly interpreting in order to get a feel for who you are, what matters to you, what your priorities are, and where you fit in the world. Right, those things, without them ever saying a word, they're gonna judge you on how connected they are to you and how, whether those connections are positive or negative, good, bad, indifferent. Exactly. And they'll do a lot of that without ever recognizing it, without even having a clue that they're making those judgments about you. That's what makes it so dangerous if you're not aware of what body language is and what messages you're sending or you're picking up. Because you'll look at someone and you'll just put them into a box without ever knowing them, without consciously knowing you've judged them wrong. You'll just say, oh, it's my intuition, or oh, I'm a good judge of character. You have no idea what kind of judgment you've just made or what the consequences are. And the reverse is true too, right? Everyone's judging you every second. Everyone's judging you every second. So you've got to be aware of what messages you're putting out, right? And that may vary depending on who they are to what messages they're putting out to you. They say in 30 minutes, two people can send over 800 nonverbal signals. For you and me, that's two signals every four seconds. So that's a lot going back and forth. And if you're not aware of it, that's a whole other conversation that you are just missing out on. So this is obviously a huge important area. It's a great illustration of, again, how science impacts our lives. Every day. Every moment, several times every second, right? So how did you get involved in this? It seems like such a fascinating area. Well, starting out, I didn't know anything about body language. Growing up, my mother actually thought I was slightly autistic because I had such a hard time reading people, reacting to people, connecting to people. I had such a hard time. I kind of swore off people altogether. I would just read books instead. Or if I had to go to a party, I'd sit in the corner and play with a dog. I had such a hard time connecting to people. And so my mom, looking at me, she wanted me to have friends. She wanted me to be able to find a romantic partner. She wanted me to have a good, happy life, which you can't really have if you're cut off from people and always in isolation. So she started out trying to teach me people skills. And the first thing she got me was she got me a book by one of Dale Carnegie's, I think, His Descendants. How to Win Friends and Influence People for Teenage Girls. Pink cover and everything. And that started a journey for me where I learned that people skills could be learned. And so it became my personal mission to be able to understand people. Now, like, Dale Carnegie, it was helpful, but it didn't really teach me anything I didn't know. So I started digging and digging and trying to find more. And eventually I found a book on body language in the high school library. And that was like my saving grace, but also a curse because it would tell me all this information about what you should be doing with your body language. Certain things were eye contact, certain norms for mirroring people's body language. And I didn't have the skills to recognize when I'd gone too far. So for example, there was one area in the book it talks about eye contact. And I'm sure everyone tells you make good eye contact. But no one can describe exactly what good eye contact looks like. And so in this book, I thought I'd found the answer. It said you should make as much eye contact as comfortable. Now, I didn't have the norms to know how much eye contact was too much. Yeah. So I took that as make as much eye contact as possible all the time. And oh, my goodness. I used this in high school to try and get a boyfriend. And I would look at these boys. And they would look at me. And they would look away. And I would keep looking at them, waiting for them to look back at me and see what good eye contact we had. Oh, my goodness. I suspect that sent odd messages. You can imagine that didn't end well for me. No. So you kept refining things. Kept refining things, kept refining things. Eventually I found my husband met and married him. And then after I was looking for something I really wanted to do with my life, I remembered what a difference body language had made for me. How I went from not being able to read anybody, not being able to talk to anybody, to being able to start a conversation with anyone, anywhere, anytime. And I knew that had made such a huge difference for me that there would be other people in the world who were suffering from that same kind of isolation. And so I found an organization that actually trains people in body language. Now one of the problems I'd had with the book I read was that they made claims that they didn't really back up in science. So when I found this program I was in bliss to discover that everything they taught was backed up by science. Every skill we teach we can point to a research study. We can talk about a peer-reviewed study that people have actually participated in. There are experiments we've tried to find these skills. So now everything I get to teach to people, I know it works. I've seen it work for myself and I have the science and the studies to back it up. And that is something that is really, really important to me. Yeah, well evidence-based decision making is a, you shouldn't get me started on it as far as whoodle and it happens in the world these days but it is important. And yeah, so it's really, it's just, it's great that you've taken this subtle sort of almost unconscious yet pervasive phenomenon and sort of bring it up to the surface and bring it to people's minds, tease it apart into separate teachable moments, individual components that people can think about, can spot, can learn, and then have made this, made this into a real passion, a calling for you as it were. It really has become my calling. And so what do you do with this, I mean? Well, when I first started out, this was a problem because you can use it in law enforcement, you can use it for realtors, sales, entrepreneurs, customer service, I used it with teachers, I used it with students, I could use it for anyone. So I've recently started narrowing it down. Now I mostly focus on people in sales and customer service who wants to get five-star reviews, who want to make sales feel natural instead of sleazy. And so I have really, really great results there. I also focus on helping people, young professionals, who are maybe single, maybe divorced, maybe widowed, find true love again. And it's amazing how much body language comes into play when it comes into romance because almost everything actually comes down to the nonverbal communication, which is really exciting, really fun to watch. Yeah, I mean the words we use are, while important, are relatively trivial compared to the other messages we were sending out. And people won't listen to the words you say or they will hear them wrongly. They'll put them in the wrong frame if they, yeah. Exactly, people spend so much time worrying about what to say. But the most important thing is actually how you say it. Right, yeah, how you present yourself as you're saying it has a word. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it's sort of an odd parallel. You've perhaps seen this example. It's called the importance of correct punctuation. It's a letter that's written word for word the same, just punctuated differently. And the two letters, I mean, read absolutely opposite. Absolutely opposite. Or like don't eat, grandma. Versus don't eat, grandma. Punctuation matters and so does your body language. Exactly, exactly. And it's that sort of the subtle, almost punctuation kinds of things that people don't even notice in reading, right? But are so important for the media. So important. Studies show nonverbal communication is 12 and 1 half times more powerful than verbal communication. And the way this looks, if you have someone whose words and body language don't line up, you're always going to believe the body language. I'm sure you've had a friend who says, I'm fine. Right, but you know from that posture, you know they're not. You know they're not. They're rejecting you. They're keeping your distance. They're pissed off. They're pissed off, exactly. And growing up, I was taught to be polite. I was taught to say nice things, to make sure I wasn't hurting people's feelings with my words. But I think everyone's been taught that. And so the trouble we get into is that our words are being deceitful. They're being filtered. We're not saying what we mean. But the truth is always coming out in your body language. That's interesting because we deal, a lot of my work is takes me out into the Pacific Islands. And we, in our organization, sometimes joke and refer to the Pacific Island, yes, where these very polite people who never want to say no to you will of course say yes when you're suggesting some project. Even though they know they don't have the time. They don't have the energy. They don't have the interest. They don't have the resources. So it's not going to get done. But they won't tell you that. And so wouldn't it save you so much trouble if you could look at them and be like, they're saying yes. But I can see they mean no. Right. Yeah. And there probably are actually subtle cues, even though I suspect these kind of cues vary a bit from culture to culture. There's a little bit of variation. One of the principles for nonverbal communication is that the vast majority of it is cross-cultural. It's universal. We make the same body language as babies. And these children, they make the same, whether you're in Japan, whether you're in America, we actually studied people in Papua New Guinea before it was ever exposed to Western culture. And we found the vast majority of body language is exactly the same across cultures, no matter where you come from, no matter who raised you. Right. Yeah. You can read facial expressions. Facial expressions, posture. There's a little bit of difference in eye contact norms. There's a little bit of difference in how acceptable it is to be close to someone, and a little bit of difference in hand gestures. Like, AOK is not always AOK. Yeah. Can get you into trouble. But there's this universality, and that makes perfect sense biologically, right? Yeah. We're all one species. It's in our DNA. Yes. We have to be able to judge one another very quickly and accurately from things like posture before a word was said. And I think it's so cool how this happens. Because your brain's number one priority is staying alive. And so you are here. I'm here. You're here. Because our parents and their parents and their parents stayed alive long enough to pass on their genes. So survival is encoded in our DNA, which means we have innate skills about reading danger and staying away from it. Sure. And that's where reading body language comes from. We learn how to read dangerous people and stay away from them. And that's why certain people with certain psychiatric illnesses are so dangerous. People who sort of fall outside those norms and feel no guilt, no shame. Yeah. Like Ted Bundy and others, they knew how to use nonverbal communication to be so charming and so they became incredibly dangerous. Right, right. And that's one of the things I work with with my female clients to make sure that you can read what predatory body language looks like. And another side of that is criminals can actually size up a victim within a few seconds. They know if it's going to be an easy victim or not. So I like to teach people what a good victim looks like and how not to be a good victim. Because there are just simple changes you can make with your posture, with your eye contact, and with the way you use your hands. That go from saying, I'm a good victim. Take advantage of me. Instead, you're saying, I will mess you up if you mess with me. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And again, you can't just say that to somebody. It means nothing to the guy who's planning to rob you or beat you up or whatever. But you can tell him with your body language that he is in for a world of trouble if he messes with you. Yeah, and again, so it just has these tremendous impacts. It can influence your life in a lot of ways. Good, bad, or different. It has clearly works in things like job interviews or any sort of sales pitch that you want to sell for a product or anything you're selling. But also just random encounters on the street. Why do some people open up to other people on the street? Who are these people who get people to open up? It's all amazing stuff. And we're going to dig into this more deeply and look at some specific examples when we come back. But right now, we're going to take a brief break. We're going to have one minute break. And then we'll be back here with RB Kelly, Body Language Boss. And I'm your host, Ethan Allen, here on Lifeable Science. See you in a moment. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Tink Tech, Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 PM. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 PM on Tink Tech, Hawaii. Good to see you with my gear. What are you doing? OK. Research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development. And you're doing that now? Oh, yeah. This is the starting line. Posh. This is over. You're dead. Read aloud 15 minutes, every child, every parent, every day. And you're back here on Lifeable Science. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, here on Tink Tech, Hawaii. With me today in the Tink Tech Studios is RB Kelly, body language boss. And we talked in the last segment about body language, what it was, some of the ways it works, some of the power of its impacts and influence, how it's perhaps evolved over time. And now we want to just get into some more specifics. So you were talking about being a victim or not being a victim and conveying that message without saying a word. Can you elaborate on that and show us an example? Let's dive into that. Well, one of the things that matters when someone is looking, when you're sizing up someone else. And this is the same whether it's in business, whether it's in romance, or whether it's a predator looking for a victim. We look at how much space someone is taking up. If you're looking at someone and they're taking a whole bunch of space, they are just sprawled out, taking up two or three chairs. You are going to think to yourself, that person thinks a lot of themselves, and it looks like they kind of know how to handle themselves. You might think they're cocky, arrogant, over the top, but you're not going to think they're an easy victim. On the other hand, if you're looking at someone and they're not making eye contact, they're looking down, they're taking up very little space, you're going to think, wow, that person is already a victim. And they're going to be really, really easy to take advantage of. And you see that even when you're walking, if you're using a slow, sad, kind of slumped over walk, people are going to think you're going to be an easy victim. You don't really know what you're doing. But if you're using a confident walk, confidently claiming your space, head up, chin out, you are telling people that you're not an easy victim. You're comfortable, you're confident. And there are a couple of different cues you can add, but for the most part, it all comes down to how much space you take up and the kind of eye contact you're making. Yeah, no, that's great. And it really does. It sends a message, and like you avoid a lot of trouble, because most of these people don't want to tangle with somebody who's going to give them a hard time. They don't want to deal with the tough customers. Exactly, you want the most bang for your buck. Yeah, the easy mark. You pick on the weak. Yeah, on the weak, the little ladies. Yeah. So yeah, you should run courses for little ladies. We'll also do cane fighting from then. That'll be good, that'll be good. So that's excellent. So we've talked a bit about facial expression now already. And since we're here on camera, this could be a good one. So different facial expressions, and these are, again, pretty cross-cultural, smiling the frowning and all. Yeah, there are seven universal facial expressions. OK, maybe just you open it up now. Let's go. All right, I'll take off my glasses for this so you can really see my face. One of the most important expressions to be able to recognize is a smile. Now, the smile is the one expression that you can see from 300 feet away. But the thing is, sometimes you're getting a real smile, and sometimes you're getting a fake smile. Have you ever seen someone do this where it's like, oh, I'm so happy for you? It's like their mouth is smiling, but their eyes aren't. You ever seen that? That's a fake smile. And in Western society, we use it as a mask all the time. If you have to deal with someone you don't like, if you don't want to be someplace, if you're greeting someone for the first time, you put on this smile, ding, because you're supposed to. But it's really important to be able to recognize a real smile versus a fake smile. And a real smile looks more like this. In this case, wrinkles are good. Botox actually makes my job really hard. But for the most part, you wanna look for these wrinkles because in a real smile, the cheeks actually pull up and that creates little wrinkles under the eyes and at the corners of the eyes. And you'll actually see even the very outer edges of the eyebrow and eyelid come down a little, so it kind of like squeezes the eyes a little. But that's what a real smile looks like. And most of the time, your brain can tell the difference, but sometimes there are some tricky smiles. And what happens is your brain might be able to tell the difference, but you might not believe your brain. And even I see this all the time, where you will have body language happening, you'll be interpreting body language, something will be going on, and your intuition will pick up on it, but you consciously won't. So you might think, oh, you know, I had a feeling that this guy was kind of sleazy, or oh, I had a feeling that I wasn't getting the whole truth. But you don't listen to that feeling because you're not conscious of your body language. You're not really listening to those signals being sent. And that gets people into a lot of trouble. Yeah, a whole lot of trouble. But anyway, so that's a real smile versus a fake smile. One of the other facial expressions you'll see a lot, which is a lot of fun, is disgust. Now, this is disgust. You know, you see a wrinkled nose, it might be open mouth or closed mouth, or when it's really strongest disgust, you'll even see the mouth kind of pucker up. Really gross. People do this naturally when they smell something gross, but they also do this when they're hearing or talking to or about something they don't like. So for example, if you were to be talking to someone, and you said, oh, how do you like the new person? And they were to say, oh, they're okay. Their words would be saying something, but their face is telling you that no, in fact, they do not like this. That's very interesting. Very interesting. It's a whole lot of fun. Might explain why there's, and part of why there seems to be a lot of sort of animosity in our culture in this day and age, right? There's a lot of people who are having to say things that they really don't exactly mean. We're saying things we don't mean, and we're not taking time to listen to the other side. One of the, there were two different expressions I saw almost constantly during the election last year, and that was disgust from either side to the other side, and then also contempt. Contempt now, this is the most dangerous emotion. This is disrespect, dislike, loathing, resentment, even hatred. Dr. John Gottman did a study about divorce to see if you could predict divorce, and he studied over 100 couples for over 30 years with every bit of data he could imagine. He took urine samples, hair samples, DNA samples. He interviewed them. He interviewed their families. He interviewed their employers. He got every piece of information he could, and then he followed these couples for 30 years, and at the end of this 30 years, they looked at which couples had divorced and which hadn't, and they went back to the data to try and find out how they could predict it, and they found there was one thing that signaled with 93.6% accuracy which couples would divorce, and that one thing was contempt. Right. Yeah. I recall reading about Gottman's work at UW, right? Yeah. Yeah, and how he, in later years, always claimed to be able, within a very short interview process of a couple, to be able to predict whether they were essentially going to be a successful couple or not. Or not. Remarkably within a very few moments, I recall. It's incredible. And now if you're thinking, man, I've seen that expression on my business partner's face, on my spouse's face, don't worry. The expression itself doesn't mean you're going to divorce. It's just the emotion underlying it that becomes such an issue if it's not addressed. So if you recognize this expression, go in for counseling. Get into the root of the problem. Like, you can save it. You just got to address it first. Right. No, that's wonderful. That's, I had not known that was that contempt, and it's easy to see. It's so easy to see. I actually see this a lot. I run workshops every month to teach people about body language. And often I'll have someone bring in a friend or a business partner or a spouse. And this person has never seen me present before. Never heard of body language. Doesn't know that it matters. So often they'll start off with a little smirk on their face. And I know that that's the person I have to talk to. That's the person I have to convince. Everyone else already knows. Everyone else already believes this is the person that needs the most attention from me. And by the end of the workshop, they become my biggest supporters and they are always bringing in more people to learn more. Well, that's wonderful. Yeah, it makes perfect sense, right? Yeah. Because you sort of use and demonstrate to them the power of this, right? Yeah. Exactly, wonderful. So what about hand motions? Ooh. Now this is fun. All right, so have you ever heard the phrase of talking like an Italian? Sure. And I think every culture has a different culture to pin it on like, oh, I talk like an Italian. Or no, I talk like I'm Spanish, whatever it is. Hand gestures are actually universal. And some people think that you shouldn't make any hand gestures. Like there are some schools of speaking, some schools of sales that say no, don't use any hand gestures. But we found that hand gestures are incredibly important. We actually, you've heard of TED Talks, right? Right, absolutely. We looked at why some TED Talks went viral and why some TED Talks only, even if they were on the same topic, they only had like a fraction of the views. And so we sat down for all the TED Talks that were 18 minutes between 2010 to 2011, and we coded every single body language gesture, trying to find out what the magic sauce was, what made some go viral and some just kind of flopped. And at the end, we found that the most popular TED Talks used twice as many hand gestures per minute as the least popular TED Talks. It makes sense, you know. And this is probably underlies that the phenomena that I saw while there was a wonderful study, they had people judging music, musical performances, and they had basically had these symphony orchestras playing for a live audience and they had videotaped this. And so they had some people listen to music and see nothing. Some people watched videotape and heard nothing and some people watched the videotape and heard the music. And these concerts had been rated, and then the people who saw those three conditions all rated the concerts. And people who did the best job of rating the quality of the music were the people who didn't hear the music, who simply saw the videotape. That's crazy. And yeah, the musicians all said, that's crazy, right? But what it suggests to me is they're reading the body language of the musicians and of the audience, probably. And they're understanding what it is that they're singing is this great enthusiasm that's rolled, you know. That is so cool. Yeah, but it's a perfect example of that. We actually did a, we found a study that was studying college students rating their professors. We actually took a bunch of college students and we had them, we thin-sliced. We had them look at a clip of a professor for just a couple of seconds. And then they had to rate this professor as if it was an end of year exam and they were giving this professor their ratings. Then we compared those ratings from just a few seconds of exposure to ratings from students who would actually take in this professor's course. And it's crazy. The ratings were exactly the same. And once we make this first impression about someone, because that's really what's going on here, Ethan, you're making a first impression, once you make that first impression, you're stuck with it. Yeah, exactly. No, that's amazing that literally, so it doesn't matter as a professor what you do 99% of the time, you can get in there and grab your class right away and have them think, well, you've got them for the rest of the term, right? Exactly. There was another study we did with one professor and he had two different classes on the same course. And so in one class, well, first he scripted them out so that he was teaching the exact same content using the exact same words, exact same examples, everything was the same. But in one class, he exchanged his body language. So he was using what's called power body language. And then at the end, he compared his ratings. And he thought he would be rated higher in instructor knowledge or approachability, but he'd actually been rated higher in five different areas. And one of them was textbook quality. Even the textbook was seen as better when the teacher had good body language. This is amazing, this is phenomenal. It's phenomenal, yes. This has been wonderful. Unfortunately, we are running short on time so because we could obviously go on and buy this for hours, I can tell. But I do wanna thank you very much for coming by here. I'm for sharing your wealth of knowledge here. Again, RB Kelly, Body Language Boss. You can, you're online under that. BodyLanguageBoss.com, I hope you come visit me. Yeah, yeah, all right. Well, thank you so much for being here. It's been my pleasure. Aloha.