 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Welcome to another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, and with me today in Think Tech Series is RB Kelly, body language boss. Welcome back, RB. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, Ethan. Good to have you again. I've had RB on several times before, and she's hosted her own Think Tech Series here. So we're going to just jump right on into this. Everyone knows RB's amazing credentials and background. She reads body language, teaches other people how to read body language, and a while ago we were having an email conversation, and she mentioned, hey, elections are coming up. Do people really know what their candidates are saying and how much they mean it? And I thought this, she actually said this would be an interesting topic. And it is because, right, these candidates get up and they say anything, whatever they want to say, whatever they think will sell, right? Yeah, they do. Some of them, well, let's not get too detailed, but some of them are, let's say, less than fully truthful about what they're selling, right, what their words are, right? So can we use the techniques that you teach to help discern which ones may be believable and which ones we should take with a proverbial grain of salt? Well, absolutely, because candidates, they say things that they think you'll like, but may not necessarily be true. And so you've heard this, like, campaign promises, they're just empty promises, they're to get someone in office. But the tricky part is what we really need to look at is not always the candidate, often what we really need to look at is ourselves, because, all right, so I'm wearing big chunky glasses, right? And you are too. The perceptions you have, the biases you have, and the nonverbal training that is implanted in your brain from birth, all of that influences the way you see people. And say these glasses are, like, colored pink, what I'm seeing through my perception isn't necessarily what's going on in the real world. And so your biases, your interpretations of someone's verbal or nonverbal behavior, and your assumptions about their motives and about their character are all things that are probably unique to you and may not actually reflect what that person is saying, feeling, or intending. Right. There is, that is, you judge people's trustworthiness, for instance, very much on, sort of, how much they're like you in a lot of ways, right? When you meet someone in, say, this was a business meeting and I was meeting you for the first time, I would judge you mostly for you and for what I'm actually seeing of you with my eyes. But if we come into a meeting and say, I'm a Democrat, and say, I hear that you're a Republican, my own biases and how I feel about Republicans in general, or Democrats in general, are going to color and add just another layer of, another layer of confusion on top of you. So suddenly, I'm not seeing Ethan the person, I'm seeing Ethan the Republican. And that's a completely different thing. Right, right. I wouldn't recognize. Yeah. So I think politics, people get, people get stuck in politics because they look at the little letter after the name, instead of the actual person. And so the very first thing you want to look at when you're judging someone is, am I judging them because of the party they're attached to? And if the answer is yes, you've got blinkers on, you've got blinders on, and you're not seeing them clearly. Can you set that stuff aside? Can you or neutralize it? Well, it depends. I know some, I have, I've been very blessed that I have friends who are very, very right-wing and friends who are very, very left-wing. And so I get to hear both sides of the story about how this person is saying, oh yeah, the other side has gone crazy. And this person is saying, oh, the other side has gone crazy. And so if you're that's, if you are so entrenched in your point of view where if you see someone as of the opposite party, you immediately discount them as a decent human being, you're going to have a really hard time judging anyone accurately. But if you're willing to consider the notion that, hey, just because we are in different parties, maybe there's something of value in this human being, if you can at least do that, then you'll be much more likely to be able to see them clearly. Right, right. The movie about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and it talked about how she and Scalia, who had radically different views on everything, put their great friends. They would travel together, they would go to opera together, and yet they would disagree strongly on these issues, but they understood that shouldn't be getting away with friendship. I don't know. That was, I thought, actually a real model for people to- How people should be. Yeah, exactly. Rather than, yes, exactly, just dismissing somebody if you're no longer fit to be considered as a human being because you belong to this group or that group. That level of bias is certainly disturbing. Yes, it is. And unfortunately, it seems to me that it's growing in our culture. It is growing. Absolutely. That's something I've noticed. But the second thing that you want to look at is as soon as you see someone, like as soon as you see my face come on screen or Ethan's face come on screen, you will, in the back of your mind, you will come up with almost like a halo of words about this person. You'll assume their intelligence. You'll assume their age. You'll assume their gender. You'll assume bits of their character and their personality. You'll assume where they fit into the social structure. And so, if you can notice what you're assuming about them, then you have the chance to challenge it. Right. And you will make these assumptions remarkably fast. And if you can make them like a tenth of a second, they can actually have made a bunch of judgments and do make a bunch of judgments about faces. Remarkably quick. Yes, I've done that. Or they just little reflash these pictures on for fractions of a second. And people are happy to write all kinds of things about who these people are. And it's not, and there is definite patterns in what people write, which suggests people are actually coming up with the same thing. One interesting, really interesting study, studied, it had a group of students judge a professor. And so, they had two different groups. They had one group of students who judged this professor after seeing them lecture for a fraction of a second. Literally, a fraction of a second. And then they filled out the end of term evaluation forms. The other group had actually taken the teacher's class and then filled out the end of your evaluation forms. And then they compared the evaluation forms and they were extremely similar. Which suggests you could get to know someone in a fraction of a second just as well as you'd know them after talking and watching them for months. Right. I mean, this again, it speaks the value of, you know, people always say I make a good first impression because people will do a snap judgment and oftentimes it's a pretty spot on, you know? Yeah. Not always. Not always. And that's where we get into trouble. Right. So, for example, one interesting, actually a couple different interesting studies found that looking back at past elections, you could predict, you could guess which one would win with about 70% accuracy by showing the faces of the candidates to a group of children and asking them to choose the best captain for their boat. And so there are certain things we look for in the faces of leaders. For example, competence. Competence on a face, often you have slightly lowered, slightly more masculine eyebrows, you have a slightly square jaw, and a kind of a hard set face. And this appearance of competence doesn't actually mean you're competent or know what you're doing, but the look of competence is tied very widely to the idea of competence. So we know there's a schema there. We also know it doesn't actually correlate with real world competence. So there's that assumption people make that isn't necessarily so. Right. It's very significant because that's one that is relatively sort of pan cultural, right? Virtually all cultures around the world would make those same set of judgments as people's competence. Yes, they do. Whether you're a Middle Easterner or African or whatever. And they judge lots of things like that. So they will judge aggression, they will judge trustworthiness. So for example, highly dominant, aggressive faces tend to be the faces that have very, very masculine characteristics. So thick brows, low set, smaller eyes, square jaws, and kind of a frowny face. Whereas highly trustworthy faces tend to be highly feminine. So higher eyebrows, softer, larger eyes, soft smile, and softer jaw. Which is very interesting to see because women aren't necessarily more trustworthy than men. Men aren't necessarily more dominant than women. There are always exceptions, but we make assumptions just based on the faces we see. And then it gets to sort of, we live out our beliefs in some sense, right? We do. And we sort of force the world to conform to them in a hot sense. It's also really interesting to see what people look for and the people they're electing. So when people are, say we're in a time of change and we're looking for a leader who will bring us to a new era. Then people tend to prefer to vote for younger looking faces. Which explains why President Barack Obama's change campaign was so powerful. Because he was young. He was seemingly inexperienced, but he was tying that to change. Which always works well together. Now if a really, really older candidate said, let's have change, that would be less believable. Right, Bernie Sanders. Exactly. And so people look for older candidates with gray hair wrinkled features. When they are looking for stability in changing times. When they're looking for someone to help them hold the line of tradition and keep things stable. People look for masculine, really masculine faces like Trump's when they're wanting to go to war. Which he kind of said he would go to war with Washington. And so he tied that campaign promise really well to his face. But we look for feminine features when we are wanting to broker new peace. Find more cooperation. Make more alliances. Well, I mean it makes sense that rarely is the women who take us to war, right? Which happens. What's even more interesting is that these features, so masculine features for going to war, feminine features for finding new peace. But it actually didn't matter if the candidate was male or female. It could be a female with masculine features who would win to take us to war. Or a male with feminine features who would win to find more peace. Which I thought was very intriguing. Interesting, interesting. So, but again, to sort of get back to my initial question. Candidates make these hollow promises, but they know to some extent they're hollow promises, right? They may never intend to keep them. They may know that it's completely infeasible that they're not going to be able to keep them. They're not going to have the money. They're not going to have the political backing, whatever. But they'll say them, these people are basically lying. They fundamentally, many of them know it, right? Isn't that going to show up somewhere in their presentation? Sometimes. Now, the more you have the chance to practice and rehearse a lie, the more natural it feels, the less cues you give away. So if you were to, let's say, you were to pick the current governor and you were to spring on him this allegation, did you have sex with that woman? If he had prepared, he had his story straight. He knew the facts, whether he was telling the truth or not. The mere fact of preparing would make any lie he told seem more truthful. But if he's coming off the cuff, he's not prepared for your question. He's not prepared. He doesn't have his story straight. It's going to be much harder for him to tell the truth. And so his nervousness and his deception will sneak out, not only in his body language, in his facial expressions, in his hand gestures, but also in his word choice, in his tense choice. And it's one of my favorite things to watch politics to see when they're lying. Indeed, Noah, you must be having a field day these days. It is so interesting to see the drama. Both sides are just throwing crap at each other. I'm ready for them both to grow up and get to work for the American people. Yeah, it does seem that's what we really need. It seems sort of remarkable that just relatively a few years ago, the Republicans and Democrats would work well together. They would find common ground. They would compromise shocking terms. Don't say that word. And now, right, it's sort of if the Democrats pose up, the Republicans say it's a terrible idea and vice versa. And they accuse one another of being obstructionist when they're both being obstructionist to each other. And you talked about how you can judge that trustworthiness. And the problem is they don't trust each other. And so they are spending all this time dragging down the other candidates and being dragged down in return, that now they're just rolling around in the mud and the whole American people can see it. Yeah. I wonder if we will ever sort of get sick enough of it. I'll return to dignity and decency. Let's hope for that. I don't know. I don't know. I don't have a lot of faith about that. So it's interesting what you were saying about who wins the election. You say children can actually accurately sort of post facto predict that. So when are people doing that kind of thing currently? The head of elections now get panels of kids. I think they should. I think that would be so cool to see. Because it's one thing to say to look back in hindsight and like carefully select. And you always wonder how accurate those studies are just because I'm suspicious of everybody and everything. So I think it would be really, really cool to do some predictions and just see how they pan out, see if it works. Fascinating stuff. We're going to dig more deeply into this when we come back. Right now we're going to take a one minute break. I'm going to end this here with me in the ThinkTech studios today. I'm your host Ethan Allen and likeable science. We'll be right back. Hey, Stan the Energyman here on ThinkTech Hawaii. And they won't let me do political commentary. So I'm stuck doing energy stuff, but I really like energy stuff. So I'm going to keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan the Energyman at lunchtime, at noon on my lunch hour. We're going to talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place, just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here. So we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan the Energyman. Aloha. Hello. My name is Stephanie Mock and I'm one of three hosts of ThinkTech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pamai Weigert. And we talked to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talked to farmers, chefs, restaurateurs, and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on a Thursdays at 4 p.m. and we hope we'll see you next time. You're back here on likeable science here on ThinkTech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen with me today and the ThinkTech series is RB Kelly, body language boss. RB has been a regular contributor to the show here and we've got her on talking politics now and because politics is great, right? I mean people are saying all kinds of stuff and that may or may not be true, right? And people want or don't want to believe it. And a lot of it as we were talking earlier has to do with what stuff is within us, right? Whether we identify with that candidate or their platform or their party or whether we dismiss them out of hand or whether we are willing to compromise. And a lot of it's very personal, right? I mean we grew up with individual biases as to who, for instance, the people who we grew up with when we were infants we learned to trust faces that are like those people and we don't trust faces that are very different. Right, so it's very tricky, right? When we live in an increasingly diverse country so there's more and more new faces around. And that's something that was studied and one group found that you are, and this is kind of taboo to talk about it, but let's be honest, you are more likely to vote for someone who is your skin color. And so that is something that we do, we ought to be aware about. So if you are looking at candidates and one of them is not your skin color, just know you are more likely to discount them because they look new and unfamiliar and that's a little scary for your brain. And so if you just know that, that okay, I hear these four candidates, one of them is a different color, one of them is a different gender, I'm going to automatically be slightly discounting towards those just because of my own biases. And therefore you might want to listen a little more carefully. Listen a little more carefully. And try to sort of say oh, that's what they're saying makes sense actually. Yeah. Is it reasonable? And one thing I thought was crazy, that countered that was if the candidate who was a different color had chubby cheeks and a more trustworthy face, they were that, that's almost handicap of being a different color from the person they wanted them to vote for them, that handicap was lessened. So if you are going to run in politics in a group where you are of a different demographic, if you have chubby cheeks, it's going to go better for you. Because you seem more trustworthy and therefore they're more okay to let you into the group. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Probably having to do with that's almost a more childlike face. Yeah. So you're safer. Yeah. It's less threatening. It's not an aggressive face. Yeah. Exactly. And then I thought it was interesting if we were to look at the 2016 election, the presidential candidate in the Republican Party. I loved Carly Fiorina. But whether that was because I actually loved her as a candidate or because I loved the idea of this strong techno-prisoners woman who was willing to stand up there and tell the truth and I adored her as a candidate. But she had that flash in the pan where most of your viewers won't even remember her. Right. And so there is that bias where if you see someone who sparks something in you, it's often very unique for you. Mm-hmm. So for example, if you were looking at a couple of candidates and one of them looked like your father and you had a fabulous relationship with your father, you would be slightly biased towards that candidate. Yeah. I recall actually, back in the 1980 election, dating me when the Republicans had seven different candidates going for her. And one of them, John Anderson, was just this very straight shooter. People would ask him a question. He'd answer the question. He didn't seem not to have a particular position that he was trying to, or a message that he was trying to get out. He was very straightforward. He was very honest and I thought it was so refreshing. Yeah. And so I thought, this guy's great. I might almost vote for him even though I'm not a Republican at all. But of course, yeah, flash in the pan, as you say, he didn't make it at all. So do you suppose that the counter is true if you are, if you have an untrustworthy face, do you have any future all in politics? Well, well, what is interesting is highly dominant faces look different from highly trustworthy faces. And we have currently elected a very dominant face in the White House. Whereas he was up against a more trustworthy face in Hillary Clinton. But they played that really, really well in emphasizing that Hillary Clinton was untrustworthy and emphasizing, oh, she's a liar, etc. Because her face showed the trustworthiness and like, I'm going to take care of the country, the feminine, nurturing, finding peace. So the whole message was to counteract that. Whereas, what they tried to do against Donald Trump was say he was too aggressive, too dominant, and that just didn't work as well. Right, right. Yeah, but certainly trustworthiness has proven itself to be a little lacking there. I think, I think it's really important to remember in politics no matter who says something, they're probably not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I just assume, no matter who it is, whatever they're saying, it's partly true and it's partly not true. And so with Trump and the presidency, one thing that's been really interesting is that there's this total divide where on one side Trump is this like angel who's come to like clear out all the corruption and on the other side Trump is this horrible monster who has come to, and like, there's no middle ground. And so that makes it really hard for me to believe either side. Right. But unfortunately, that's also been spread beyond Trump himself. It's spread the same thing Barack Obama, same thing. I have, I can't think of a politician in my conscious lifetime that I've actually thought, wow, that person is super trustworthy and I'd like to hire them, other than Carly Fiorina. That is the only one I can remember. So, there's a condemnation of the past politics. Yeah, it's, I feel somehow things have gone downhill and that's considering how it's the Richard Nixon stuff that's saying something, I guess. But, so, if we want to overcome these biases that we ourselves may bring and other things you can do other than just sort of a general awareness, are there active measures you can take to help yourself break them down? Well, there are active measures but I don't think your viewers are going to like them. So, the one, there are two different ways you can handle this. The one is to get a bunch of training on how you judge faces, become super, super aware of your own biases and learn to just overcome that, which would cost you thousands of dollars and take a lot of time. Or, you could actually do research on your candidates, learn about their voting histories, learn about their character, make up your own mind. And that would take less money but more time. So, those are your options. Yeah, interesting, interesting. That sort of straightforward factual approach is a good one. But, you know, it's on these days because in science, what we're finding, scientists are still actually trusted more than most other groups in the country, certainly more than politicians. But, to convince people of your position on a scientific issue, what used to be considered was all you need to do is, yes, provide them with the facts or your voting record. Here is, you know, this theory, this fact, this concept, boom, boom, boom. And, that was assumed to be good enough. And now, what we found, it isn't. You can provide people with all the information you were saying about, that your own biases, you have to understand the frame that that person is sort of putting on the story. You know, how they're looking at that issue, whether it be climate change or genetically modified food or whatever it may be, right? And, until you can sort of get into their head and understand their viewpoint and then talk about the issue bearing that in mind. From their point of view. Yes, from their point of view. Right? And so, I guess it is, there is a parallel there with politics, right? You want to be able ideally to do that. As we polarize things, that becomes harder and harder. More and more possible. Yeah, if you're just a little bit apart, you know, on just a few issues, you can sort of do that. Well, I agree with this person on X, Y, and Z. So, right, so why can't I? But, yeah, let's talk about this other issue that we don't agree on. And it's been really interesting for me. I feel like I'm kind of caught in the middle, because my father is incredibly conservative. But, Jay, what I would consider incredibly liberal. But, my father doesn't think he's incredibly conservative, and Jay doesn't think he's incredibly liberal. But, I'm sitting here in the middle like, you're way over there, you're way over there. And I'm just like hiding out in the middle like, I can see both of your points of view, but each of them thinks the other person is crazy. Yeah, it is interesting how we adopt this sort of relativistic thing, you know. Yeah, none of us want to consider ourselves out on the fringe, you know, either for in trouble or in general, except probably a few crazy people who enjoy that. But, But a lot of people are they're trapped in an echo chamber. Right. Because, I mean, it's no longer considered polite to talk about politics. But I think if you can't talk about politics, you probably can't talk about anything worth talking about. Because you've got to be able to recognize both sides of the argument. You've got to be able to test your facts and your arguments against each other. Instead of having the media talk about this side and a different media talk about that side, let's put them together. Let's let them compete and see which ideas which ideas work. Yeah, actual, actual ideas. Again, I come back to what I said earlier about the 1980 Republican debates. These candidates will be asked questions and they would just get up and make a statement. That had maybe nothing to do with the question because it was a statement they wanted to make and they wanted a point they wanted to get the giant scoreboard off to this side. They were like, ding, minus one point. And you could just keep score, like high schoolers in debate classes could do a better job than the politicians and the media running these debates. Right. Maybe we should have, you know what they do in Toastmaster, the odd counters, the odd bills, you know, ding, you do an umber and you get ding and you rapidly stop using those. And as soon as they go over time, you shut the mic off. Like really? Yeah. We should start a debate. My other pet theory about politics, of course, is that all politics, particularly international politics, we much better conducted in hot tubs in the nude. I think the world would run much more smoothly, you know, if you had to be sitting in hot steaming water, you know, face to face to somebody, you know, with no clothes on, you really, how are you, how are you going to hide from that? I heard another one where you had like sticks. So if they couldn't explain their idea by drawing it in the sand, it wasn't going to work. So there were no chairs, they'd learned to have really fast, really to the point meetings to get stuff handled. I like it, I like it. That's a good one, except they might hit each other with sticks. Start surviving with the fittest. Yes, that wouldn't be, that wouldn't go well. Well, this is great, this is wonderful to learn about the political appearances as it were and the appearances of politicians and so, so much of it is filtered through our own lenses that we bring to it and how we have to be aware of that, of our own biases in order to make any sort of rational judgment on them. I think that was eye-opening to me and I suspect eye-opening to our viewers here. I thank you so much for being here. This was a great, a great conversation. I enjoyed it immensely as I always enjoyed talking to you. Thank you, Ethan. It's always a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here, Arby. Arby Kelly was here with me today. Thanks for joining me. You're on Think Tech Hawaii. I hope you'll join us for likeable science again next week. Until then.