 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Likeable science is all about how science is a vital, interesting, dynamic part of everyone's life. Day in and day out. It's not something that's confined to the laboratory or done just by scientists, but we all do it. We all use it. And to talk about this some today, I have RB Kelly, body language boss. Hi, Ethan. Good to be here. Good to have you again. So RB studies and teaches the use of body language and how we all watch one another, make judgments very quickly about people based on their posture, their movement, their facial expressions, all this kind of stuff. And it's a fascinating field because a lot of it is things we're not particularly aware of, right? Exactly. That's exactly right. Most of the time, we don't ever think about what we're doing with our body language or what messages we're sending, but two people in 30 minutes can send over 800 nonverbal signals. So that's one signal every two seconds. So even just the way my head just tilted towards you and I gestured my hand at you, that was a nonverbal cue. And you're nodding, like that's a nonverbal cue. And we're going back and forth with these messages. And that's so much more important than the actual words that we're saying. Right. Something like 80% of the information exchange. Between 60 to 93. Yeah. It's truly stunning. And we make some of these judgments just like in fractions of a second, a quarter of a second, a tenth of a second in some cases, right? Yes. People will judge whether somebody's trustworthy, whether they're competent, whether, yeah, whether they don't believe this person. So we can understand, right, the reason it's important to make quick judgments, absolutely. I mean, your body's number one goal in life is to stay alive. So you need to know really quick as soon as you meet someone, if they're going to be good for you or bad for you. If you meet someone who's secretly a serial killer and you don't get a creepy vibe from them, you might get into a vulnerable position where you go somewhere along with them and then you die. And so you don't pass on your genes. And so our brains have evolved through all these years. Even you and I are here because our parents and their parents and their parents survived long enough and judged safety and first impressions long enough to get us here. Right. And indeed primitive human beings encountering some other human being, particularly somebody who wasn't of their immediate group, they had to make a very balanced judgment. Is this person a threat to me? Are they potentially a friend or a mate or they sort of maybe a neutral party, you know, in some sense. Exactly. And the people who did that better were the ones who survived. Exactly. The people who did it badly. Didn't survive. Yeah. They're out of the gene pool. Okay. Let's see. You actually, your brain only pays attention to people or to things if they're either good for you or bad for you. I mean, there's so much information to take in every second. We only focus on the good or the bad. And most of the small details just we don't notice. Drift away is irrelevant. Right. But it's very important to know whether you need to, you know, fight someone, flee from them. Or go ask them for food. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Those are our critical decisions to make and you need to make them pretty quickly. Yeah. So it's understandable. So what are the features in a face so that we, how do we judge the traits? I mean, we all have two eyes and nose and mouth, couple ears, you know, some hair typically. Well, when you meet someone, the face isn't the first part of the body that you notice, but it is often the most communicative. What makes faces so special is that they well, our entire bodies do this, but our faces are especially eloquent at broadcasting our emotions. So the first impression, your face doesn't tie into it quite as much, but it's, it's a part of the whole. So the parts that your face is judged on, there's a little bit where your brain, like some studies say we judge people on their faces and we're able to pick up extroversion, competence, dominance, agreeableness, but the science on that is new and a little bit fuzzy. But for example, people who are strong typically are, that's backwards. Okay. People who have broad faces, like wide faces, are typically seen as strong. People who have narrower faces are typically seen as more introverted, especially if they're frowning, like a thin face with a frown, that's more introverted. Whereas a slightly broader face with a tiny bit of a smile is seen as more extroverted. And it's not, well, some of those traits have been seen as accurate in personality studies by like 60 to 70%. But again, it's, it's very new and it's still very incomplete on these studies. Right. And there are parts of it that are sort of a universal, people will, male faces tend to be rated stronger, more dominant, more competent, female faces, more likable and agreeable. But as to trustworthiness, that I gather, it turns out it depends on sort of what ethnic group you're from and how much like your own face that is, that is. That's kind of true. We tend to like people and trust people who look like us because like we trust ourselves, like we trust our family usually. We know the people who look like us. We think we have a better idea of what they are and what they're about, which makes us trust them more. Right. So this group from Princeton did a study using Israelis and Japanese and photographically morphing faces to make them more Israeli like or more Japanese like. And of course they found basically that the Japanese like the more trusted the Japanese faces more and more as they became more and more Japanese, vice versa. And yet even though they would judge the attractiveness of faces, actually were somewhere in the middle usually, they weren't strictly of their own group. But the trustworthiness was very much a, a, a who they are. Right. So we're saying some of these judgments then are probably actually somewhat sound, right? Some of them are. In fact, they started studying political politicians and those who were more likely to win an election. And they studied this with adults and children. And they took the faces of the two people who were running and they asked for the children, they asked them, who would you want to be the captain of your boat? And for the adults, they just asked them who would be a better president or who would be a better leader. But they found between 60 to 70% of the time, the, the faces that we're seeing as better leaders or better captains of boats for the kids actually won the election. Which suggests that, that first impression, we're actually judging people a lot more on what they look like and less on what their actual, you know, policies are. Right. And it turned out actually the kids did just as well as the adults. So this really sort of says, why are we bothering with elections? Let's just make this a beauty contest to be done with. Exactly, right. And it wasn't necessarily a beauty contest because sometimes like women, if you're too pretty, you're seen as like less competent, which is why I usually wear glasses because that tricks people into thinking I'm more intelligent. Or I wear heels and clothes that are designed to make me look taller because that tricks people into thinking I am more of an authority. So it's all about knowing what you've got and where you want to be and how you can get there. Right. And based on our email exchanges from earlier, I was looking up and yes, the vast majority of times in the U.S. presidential election, the taller candidate has indeed won, you know. Yeah. Which is why heels, heels are a great invention. There are a few exceptions. Yeah, a couple exceptions. But it's, it's, it is surprising how apparently influential these factors, it should be trivial, right? Who cares whether your, your leader is six-one or six feet, you know? I mean, that's a trivial difference. And we've heard so many times not to judge a book by its cover that it's not okay to do that. But over and over and over again, that's what we do. Right. And actually, I mean, it's funny because my wife is producing a book right now and she writes the cover is very important, not a book. The cover is going to determine a lot whether people pick it up, whether they take, give it a second look, whether they open it up. Yeah. So, you know, you actually, you actually do judge a book by its cover and that's why yes, it is important to, that you look good when you go out to an interview or whatever, meeting somebody the first time, right? And we're not saying that's the way it should be. We're just saying that's the way it is. Right, exactly. And it has very subtle influences too. That is, when you simply talking on the phone, if you, if you smile, you sound different. If you stand up, you sound different. If you stride around confidently, again, you sound different on the phone, which all of which would seem trivial. Yeah. Or how can that be? Right. But, but it's absolutely true. Right. Yeah. Well, it's, it's, it's pretty amazing. So let's take a look at some faces. You comment, there are something like eight basic expressions, right? Because these are seven universal expressions because these are what people really actually are judging, right? And these are what people are pretty good at. So why don't we run through these if we've got a set of photos. So this here, this is fake happiness. And if we switch between this one and the next one a couple of times, you can see the difference between fake happiness and real happiness. You see the crinkles in the eyes? That's the difference between fake and real happiness. So you're, you're sort of lifting your cheeks a little more, your eyes are actually squinted a little bit. Exactly. What actually happens is your cheek muscles flex and that presses your cheeks up and so it kind of squishes your eyes. In this case, wrinkles are good. People who get Botox can't really make these friend signals anymore and so they look like they're giving people fake smiles. Interesting. So downside to Botox. Downside to Botox, yes. Okay. All right. So we got, we got fake happiness. We got real happiness. This is surprise. Now this is a genuine, I didn't know, expression. When you see someone give this expression, that's a good sign. Either something they've heard is interesting or you've, you've absolutely surprised them. Eyes wide open, wide open jaw drops. This is the longest of the facial expressions. Okay. Oh, this is sadness. Now sadness, okay. You can see my brows are uneven. That's because sadness is hard to fake. This is fake sadness and it's pretty close, but usually you'll see the brows will be symmetrical. But you've got wrinkles on the forehead, the corners of the mouth turned down and the outer corners of the eye actually dropped down a little. You get like saggy, kind of tired eyes. That's what sadness looks like. This is contempt. Now I think we mentioned this on the last show. This is one of the most dangerous emotions. And what are the hallmarks of contempt here? I can see that you've got, your mouth is a little asymmetrical there. A little asymmetrical. In contempt, people see it as like a half smile, so you're like kind of happy, but that's absolutely not it. What happens is a corner of the mouth tightens and that's all that is. It's not a smile at all. It could be called a smirk or even a sneer and this is a really disdainful expression. You feel it when you're superior to others, when you don't like people. Okay. And as we remember from last time, that's actually the number one predictor of divorce. Now here in front of you, this is disgust and there's open mouth disgust and closed mouth disgust. This here is open mouth. And that's when you smell something bad or you find something really awful. Somebody had just made a very weird inappropriate kind of comment. Yes. You also get disgust. If I was to ask you, hey, how do you like the new producer or the new person? And you were to be like, oh, they're fine while making disgust. That would be a huge sign to me that, no, they're not fine. You actually really dislike them. So when you ask a person a preferential based question, do you like something and you see disgust? No. No matter what they say, they don't like it. Okay. That's good to know. All right. This is anger. Now you can see my nostrils are actually slightly flared. When you see flared nostrils, that's always like an exclamation point. It's always no matter what expression you're hearing, you're seeing flared nostrils make it just stronger. But you've got the brows coming together, coming down in a tight, tight mouth. Yeah, exactly. I was going to say the mouth is really tightened up there. Now, recognizing this expression kind of saved my marriage because my husband has a tough job. So when he comes home, I want to make sure if I see this, I know to treat him gently. But if I don't see this, I know we're in the clear and I can do whatever I want. Okay. Next. This is fear. Now fear and surprise look pretty similar. But surprise, the eyebrows are rounded and the mouth is dropped. And although the eyes are widened, you don't see whites above the eye. In fear, the brows are more kind of flat and the mouth stretches sideways instead of just dropping. And the biggest clue for fear is the whites above the eyes. That's a huge indicator. And so if you were to say, oh, did you hear about the theft incident in the studio and someone gave you fear instead of surprise? If it was surprise, it would be they genuinely didn't know about that. But if it's fear, they're suddenly afraid. That's something they might have to hide. That would bring you a different line of questioning. Or perhaps they've have things stolen from them. Things stolen? It's triggered a bad memory in them, right? Exactly. You want to be really careful, but that would always give you a different kind of line of questioning about what's really going on here. So this is very intriguing that there are these, and it basically covers pretty much a spectrum of human emotions. Really does. And people are reasonably good at reading those. Now sometimes they'll infer things from those that are perhaps less likely to be true, shall we say, right? And what's tricky with these expressions, the ones in the photos that were really strong, like really blatant expressions, and they were static. Like it was just, but in real life, you usually see like just a kind of, a tiny part of that expression, and you see it really quick. And so it's flickering and mixing other expressions. Flickering, mixing, and then it's gone. And so most people are actually really bad at catching those flashes of emotion and interpreting them. That's intriguing. We are going to look more deeply into this. And then we're going to also begin to talk about how you can learn to use this, right? How you can actually begin not only just to pay attention so you'll know what others are thinking or feeling, but how to control your own expressions, right? Okay, so RB Kelly and I'm your host Ethan Allen here on Likeable Science. We'll be back in a minute, if you believe me. For every game day, a sign a designated driver. Back here on Likeable Science, I'm happy to see you. I hope it's genuine happiness. Here with RB Kelly, Body Language Boss. We're talking about facial expressions, reading facial expressions, learning to understand what they imply, and all that great stuff. We were talking before, before the break, we went through the eight basic expressions and discussed the differences and how to tell happiness from sadness, surprise, fear, etc., etc., and all these various things. But you hit it before the break that these aren't static expressions, right? People watch, people move, people's expressions change, right? And people are, it's a duet, right? You're making certain expressions, that's triggering my expressions, my expression is triggering your expressions again, right? Exactly. And part of that is how you're looking at the other person, right? You're exactly right. They've actually found, I'm sure you were all told growing up, I don't know if you were told this, Ethan, you had to make good eye contact, right? Well, the problem is people don't usually tell you exactly what good eye contact looks like. And the amount of eye contact you should be making varies from culture to culture. But what doesn't vary is specific eye patterns. Your eyes actually make patterns on people's faces based on how you feel about them. That is they're looking at different parts of the face. Looking at different parts of the face, making different patterns on their faces for different emotions, different situations. And that's really cool. And so the way this ties into emotions, we'll get to that in a second. But the very first eye gaze is called the power gaze. If you ever had a parent or a stern teacher give you the look, that's the power gaze. The power gaze is where your gaze focuses between the eyes and the forehead. And you just kind of drill into these areas on someone's face. So you look at them and you just go eye, eye, forehead. That's all you look at on their face. And then the social gaze, the social gaze is what you use for friends, partners, equals. I use this at networking events and it actually, people immediately relax when I use this gaze at them. And the social gaze is eye, eye, mouth. And the reason the social gaze looks and feels different from the power gaze is because in the social gaze, you're looking at the whole face. And emotions happen across the entire face. So happiness is in the eyes and the mouth. Sadness is in the eyes and the mouth. And so the social gaze, looking at the eyes and the mouth, sees and reacts to all of the emotions much more quickly. And the power gaze, you're ignoring the mouth. You're sort of giving a message, I don't care about how you feel. That's exactly what you're saying. It doesn't matter what the other person feels because you're the one in control. And so if we were to practice power gazing back and forth right now, it would feel really tense and really uncomfortable because you're both, you're basically like fighting for control. But I've seen it in events where we practice then the social gaze, people almost relax. I've even seen people go from like tight tense shoulders to like relaxing as soon as I start to social gaze them because it is such a nice kind of gaze. When my husband's in a snitz, don't tell him, this is my secret weapon. I'll notice he might be power gazing me, but as soon as I start social gazing him, I, I mouth, he just kind of deflates and relaxes. And it's such a helpful tool. Sure. That makes great sense. And then there's a third gaze. There is a third gaze. The third gaze is called the intimate gaze. It's where you look from someone's eyes to their mouth to their neck. And this allows you to scope out the neck and the jawline because different kinds of jaws and necks mean different kinds of hormone levels. So someone, a woman who's very high in estrogen is going to have more of a round soft jaw and a long soft neck. Whereas a man who's very high in testosterone is going to have more of an angular squarish kind of jaw and a thicker neck. And he's probably going to like have stubble or something that says I'm fully mature and I've got a lot of testosterone. And so if you see someone, it's normal to get the intimate gaze when you first meet someone that's really normal because they're deciding what their first impression of you is. But if you see the intimate gaze over and over and over, that's a really good sign that subconsciously someone is attracted to you. So this means you've got to be watching their eye movement rather carefully. Yes. So I'm going to look at you and I'm going to social gaze or I might look at the camera so you can see. But when I, I, I mouth, my eyes drop to the mouth. And so in the intimate gaze, they drop even further eye, eye, mouth, neck. So you can actually see that the eyes go down when they look at the mouth and the neck and that you can actually look for that. You can actually see and recognize that when someone does that to you versus in the power of gaze, they wouldn't be dropping at all. Yeah, it just drills really high into your forehead. And it's kind of a kind of a mean look. Okay. Okay. So all this being said, then there are people obviously who are better reading it, but, but let's talk about sort of the other half, the writing of this, you know, presumably, although we think of these things as being subconscious, these expressions as being subconscious. So as breathing subconscious, we all know you can hold your breath or choose to breathe fast or whatever you want, right? Absolutely. And so you, you were saying that we, you can learn to control to some extent, at least your facial expressions. You can. Now here's what's going on. The thing is, there are centers in your brain that read and code body language. And you can, you can actually build these centers. Most people, they have like average strength. Like if you don't work out, you don't go to the gym, you're going to have average muscles. But if you work out your skills at reading people's body language, you get so much better at interpreting it and using it. And you, these centers in your brain choose what body language to use for you. And most of the time that's entirely subconscious, we don't think about our heart rates. We don't think about breathing. We just breathe and we stay alive. But if you become consciously aware of the messages that you're sending with your body language, you are so much empowered because the body language is the biggest part of your first impression. It's the biggest part of your communication. But for most people, they have no idea what they're saying. But if you become in control, totally aware of the messages that you're sending with your body language, you have such an advantage in all the relationships, all the business, public speaking, talking to a friend, difficult confrontations, no matter what you're doing. If you know the messages you're sending and you choose the messages you send, you are able to basically communicate directly with someone else's subconscious mind and tell them exactly what to think of you. So it's very powerful. It is. We touched very briefly on this, when you were here last time, just about the messages you send, say, out on the street, if you, whether you are a victim type or somebody not to be messed with, right? Yeah, we did. But that's only the sort of the grossest level of it, right? Exactly. So, you know, business interaction, you might wish, for instance, to come across more powerfully, more dominantly, more competently, right? So you would, presumably then, for instance, you might use the power gaze a little more than you otherwise would. You might take up a little more space. Yeah, spread out. Right. But that's, you're right. When you know what impression you're trying to send, you're able to consciously choose how to react to this. And this is especially, it works best when you pair it with being able to read other people. So if you're coming into a business situation and you're acting tough and you're giving the power gaze and you see like fear expressions or you see people like shrinking down or turning away, that's a good sign that you might be coming on too strong. So being able to read other people's body language, you see how you're being interpreted and you're able to change, you know, re-root, try something new. Right. Because mirroring body language is a very powerful way of establishing common ground, right? If somebody else is leaning back and relaxing, you lean back and relax, you're telling them in a sense, like we're on the same page, we're feeling the same way right now and you're establishing a sort of common ground and identity with them, right? Yes. When we found, we studied best friends and we found best friends tend to mirror each other's gestures and poses within five to 10 seconds. And that's really quick. And when I first started learning body language before I was formally trained, I tried experimenting with mirroring where I was trying to get a date and there was a boy I liked and I would mirror him. And every time he leaned forward, so would I. Cross his arms, so did I. Lean back, so did I. Like right in sync. And mirroring can go very badly when it looks obvious and it went very badly. So mirroring is something that's very, very powerful, but you have to be gentle with it because if it's too obvious, you're basically shooting yourself in the foot. So it's interesting what you were saying about learning this stuff that is in the same way the recent neuroscience has shown that people, for instance, if you take out playing the violin, the representation of your fingertips in the brain are actually going to expand because you're using your fingertips in ways you have not previously done it. You're feeling on a more detailed level and literally they'll take over more space in your brain. So you're saying these centers that recognize the social cues basically are probably literally expanding in your brain when you're doing this. You can literally build muscles in your brain. That's exactly what's happening. That's intriguing. Again, our brains are pretty amazing. So people can use this a lot then obviously in a multitude of situations, right? Exactly. Any time you're ever talking to a human being, you can use these skills. And so one of the best ways to start building this awareness in your brain is to start being conscious of what you're doing with your face. I started by like sitting in front of a mirror and making expressions like, okay, this is my fake smile and I'm going to think of really funny something really funny that's going to make me laugh and oh now I've got a real smile. Oh, so this is what a real smile looks like. Oh, can I replicate that? Oh, just practicing and noticing what these things look like that gives you so much awareness. And I've also seen this in arguments where if I'm maybe I'm having a difficult discussion and it's uncomfortable and I'm getting angry. As soon as I become aware that oh, eyebrows coming together. Oh, tight mouth. Oh, I'm getting angry. I'm going to stop that. I'm going to be in control of my emotions and feel something else. You actually are able to control your emotions based on your body language. Because the feedback, basically, if you make a happy expression, you become happy, right? Yes. Yes, it's one of those sort of almost counterintuitive things that you can you can drive how you feel. It's not not how you feel drives what you do or how you look. The link between emotion and body language is so strong when you when you flick one the other lights up too. So you can you can just choose which one to flick. This is very neat. This is great stuff. And it's, I think, a nice example of likable science, right? This is science that people can use every day in their own lives, right? And make themselves more likable. Absolutely. Well, Arby, thank you so much for being here. It was a pleasure having you here again. And great stuff you're doing. I hope everything goes super well for you. Thank you, Ethan. Thank you for having me. I really had a wonderful time. And I hope you will join us next week for another episode of likable science.