Each one of us has had the experience. We meet someone for the first time and immediately feel a resonance. We talk about how some people simply radiate, creating a presence that is hard to ignore. The nonverbal communication channel is powerful and shapes outcomes in social situations in profound ways. In recent years, Sandy Pentland's research group at the MIT Media Lab has been systematically studying this communication pathway and characterizing more precisely the impact honest signals have. Such honest signals are described by Pentland as "signals... that are either so costly to make or so difficult to suppress that they are reliable in signaling intention."
In his recent book entitled Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World, Pentland makes the distinction between conscious and unconscious signals. Conscious social signals are planned signals such as facial expressions and fashion choices that are intended to signal a particular message and therefore can be misleading in terms of intention. Pentland claims that one should focus rather on signals that are processed unconsciously, and therefore are uncontrollable, in order to identify signals that are honest in intention.
Four examples from conversational turn-taking and gesturing referenced by Pentland are
- Influence - Degree to which one person causes another person to match their own pattern of speaking
- Mimicry - Reflexive copying of one person by another during a conversation resulting in the exchange of smiles, head nods and interjections
- Activity - Increased activity levels signal interest and excitement
- Consistency - Consistency of speech and movement is a signal of mental focus, while greater variability may signal greater openness to influence
In recent years, Pentland's group has built wearable devices they call sociometers to unobtrusively measure these honest signals in a wide variety of social settings. Based on these measurements, they are able to reliably predict social outcomes in a range of scenarios.
For those developing technologies to aid communication and collaboration, this book provides a number of ideas to ponder. In future posts, I'll explore some of these ideas in more detail.
