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lederhosenSome episodes from my life:
1. The Polygraph
Back in my PhD days, I volunteered for other PhD students who needed experimental subjects. One of these involved a polygraph (though I'm not sure if 'poly' is really the right prefix, since the only thing it measured was skin conductivity, but I digress).
The way the experiment worked: I was wired up and sat in front of a computer screen. The screen would display some combination of coloured squares, and then, after a pause, I might (or might not) get an electric shock. I was told that there was a relationship between the pattern displayed and whether I was going to get a shock, but I wasn't told WHAT that relationship was - I had to figure it out by observation.
In the pause between seeing the pattern and getting/not getting the shock, I had to turn a dial to show what I expected: 0 if I was absolutely certain that I was NOT about to get a shock, 100 if I was certain that I WAS about to get a shock, and intermediate values if I wasn't sure.
Meanwhile, the 'polygraph' measured my skin conductivity; apparently this is correlated with mental state.
So we started. At first I had no idea what the rules were, so I set the dial to 50%; after a few trials I started figuring it out, so I had more 0s and 100s with some 25s, 50s, and 75s in between.
Afterwards we looked at my results. From talking to the experimenter, I found out that he expected conductivity would be highest when the dial was at 100% - people expecting to get a shock would be more excited, right?
My results didn't fit into this at all. While the data wasn't a neat curve (RL data rarely is), the general trend was that conductivity was highest when I had the dial around 50%. My interpretation is that I wasn't really excited about the shock in itself - it was painful but not excruciatingly so. What interested me was solving a puzzle, figuring out the rules relating the pattern to the shocks. With that motivation, the "50%" patterns are the most interesting, because they're the ones that mean I'm about to learn something new. ("Two black squares means a shock, two red squares is no shock, but one black and one red? Is this going to be an AND or an OR condition?")
2. Bad News
One afternoon a few weeks ago I got some really bad news: a friend had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was upset, I decided there was no point in trying to finish the day at work, so I emailed my supervisor and left early. Rey was in town, catching up with a friend who we hadn't seen for a long time, and I met up with them for afternoon tea.
Almost the first thing the friend said to me: "You're looking so calm and centered, L." Because when I've had a bad shock, I'm quite likely to go pale and quiet; maybe it LOOKS calm, but I can assure you, it's not.
3. The Friend
(For those who know the person involved: this is NOT an invitation to drama.)
Somebody once told me: "I didn't think you liked me - I always got the impression you found me annoying." I'm not sure what that was based on - I didn't ask at the time and it's too late now - but it was a very long way from the truth. This was somebody I liked very much, and who (I thought) knew me very well.
Long afterwards, after five years of very close friendship, we had a catastrophic argument. (That doesn't really feel like an adequate summary; suffice it to say that things went very messily wrong between us.) A few weeks later, we came into contact at a friend's place; I very much wanted to approach her and hug, as friends do, but I wasn't sure how I was supposed to handle things. I knew she was angry at me, I didn't know whether she would welcome an advance, so I stood there feeling indecisive, insecure, and generally miserable, trying to read her expression, before I finally convinced myself that I should at least try.
So I walked up, offered a hug, and was rebuffed. Afterwards, she said something along the lines of "you really expected me to welcome that after you'd stood there so long giving me that poisonous look?"
This was somebody who, by then, should have known me better than ANYBODY, excepting only my wife. But she'd misread me very badly (or possibly been influenced by a third party's reading of my body language), and the consequences were pretty damn painful; the friendship may already have been irreparable at that point, but at the least it rubbed salt into the wound.
4. The Teacher
In junior school, I was very much the "teacher's pet" type: nerdy, not many friends, and fascinated with anybody who could teach me stuff. I really liked my fifth grade teacher (as I liked almost all of them), and I didn't realise for a long time that he didn't particularly like me.
He told my parents that he was exasperated with me because I wouldn't make eye contact. Never mind that I was probably the most conscientious student in the class (give or takemiddle_marker!) or that I hung off his every word; because I didn't look him in the eye, he felt I was... disrespectful? Unfriendly? I'm not sure exactly how he read it, but one of those things.
Eye contact is not something that's ever felt natural to me. Because of this incident and others like it, I have tried to make a habit of looking people in the eye when talking to them; I'll certainly do it in job interviews and other situations where I need to conform to expectations about how 'normal people' behave.
But if I'm having a long conversation with you, and I'm interested in the conversation, I probably won't be looking you in the eye much of the time. That is not a sign of disrespect, far from it - more likely it means I'm interested enough in what we're discussing and comfortable enough in your company that I can let go of my learned behaviours and concentrate on the interaction.
So, yeah. I have plenty of evidence to persuade me that if there is a "BBC Standard" for non-verbal communication, it's not the version I speak, and I have a history of being misread (sometimes with very distressing results) by people who attempt to interpret those cues. The incident with the polygraph has confirmed my deep-seated suspicion of them; I don't deny that they measure SOMETHING, but interpreting that 'something' is a tricky business.
(I'm not maligning all psychologists, BTW - I have met some really lovely ones who were good at their job. What they have in common is that they pay attention to what people were actually saying with their words, and don't over-interpret non-verbal cues.)
So I get uncomfortable when I see 'profilers' on TV who are able to interpret people's motivation from tiny behavioural cues. I suspect that if I ever ran into one of these people, I'd be at risk of being misinterpreted by an 'expert' with enough clout to convince others of their interpretation.
And then, after reading Malcolm Gladwell's article on criminal profilers, I realise that it's not just me: these people are quacks, about as credible as palm-readers and water-dowsers.
1. The Polygraph
Back in my PhD days, I volunteered for other PhD students who needed experimental subjects. One of these involved a polygraph (though I'm not sure if 'poly' is really the right prefix, since the only thing it measured was skin conductivity, but I digress).
The way the experiment worked: I was wired up and sat in front of a computer screen. The screen would display some combination of coloured squares, and then, after a pause, I might (or might not) get an electric shock. I was told that there was a relationship between the pattern displayed and whether I was going to get a shock, but I wasn't told WHAT that relationship was - I had to figure it out by observation.
In the pause between seeing the pattern and getting/not getting the shock, I had to turn a dial to show what I expected: 0 if I was absolutely certain that I was NOT about to get a shock, 100 if I was certain that I WAS about to get a shock, and intermediate values if I wasn't sure.
Meanwhile, the 'polygraph' measured my skin conductivity; apparently this is correlated with mental state.
So we started. At first I had no idea what the rules were, so I set the dial to 50%; after a few trials I started figuring it out, so I had more 0s and 100s with some 25s, 50s, and 75s in between.
Afterwards we looked at my results. From talking to the experimenter, I found out that he expected conductivity would be highest when the dial was at 100% - people expecting to get a shock would be more excited, right?
My results didn't fit into this at all. While the data wasn't a neat curve (RL data rarely is), the general trend was that conductivity was highest when I had the dial around 50%. My interpretation is that I wasn't really excited about the shock in itself - it was painful but not excruciatingly so. What interested me was solving a puzzle, figuring out the rules relating the pattern to the shocks. With that motivation, the "50%" patterns are the most interesting, because they're the ones that mean I'm about to learn something new. ("Two black squares means a shock, two red squares is no shock, but one black and one red? Is this going to be an AND or an OR condition?")
2. Bad News
One afternoon a few weeks ago I got some really bad news: a friend had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was upset, I decided there was no point in trying to finish the day at work, so I emailed my supervisor and left early. Rey was in town, catching up with a friend who we hadn't seen for a long time, and I met up with them for afternoon tea.
Almost the first thing the friend said to me: "You're looking so calm and centered, L." Because when I've had a bad shock, I'm quite likely to go pale and quiet; maybe it LOOKS calm, but I can assure you, it's not.
3. The Friend
(For those who know the person involved: this is NOT an invitation to drama.)
Somebody once told me: "I didn't think you liked me - I always got the impression you found me annoying." I'm not sure what that was based on - I didn't ask at the time and it's too late now - but it was a very long way from the truth. This was somebody I liked very much, and who (I thought) knew me very well.
Long afterwards, after five years of very close friendship, we had a catastrophic argument. (That doesn't really feel like an adequate summary; suffice it to say that things went very messily wrong between us.) A few weeks later, we came into contact at a friend's place; I very much wanted to approach her and hug, as friends do, but I wasn't sure how I was supposed to handle things. I knew she was angry at me, I didn't know whether she would welcome an advance, so I stood there feeling indecisive, insecure, and generally miserable, trying to read her expression, before I finally convinced myself that I should at least try.
So I walked up, offered a hug, and was rebuffed. Afterwards, she said something along the lines of "you really expected me to welcome that after you'd stood there so long giving me that poisonous look?"
This was somebody who, by then, should have known me better than ANYBODY, excepting only my wife. But she'd misread me very badly (or possibly been influenced by a third party's reading of my body language), and the consequences were pretty damn painful; the friendship may already have been irreparable at that point, but at the least it rubbed salt into the wound.
4. The Teacher
In junior school, I was very much the "teacher's pet" type: nerdy, not many friends, and fascinated with anybody who could teach me stuff. I really liked my fifth grade teacher (as I liked almost all of them), and I didn't realise for a long time that he didn't particularly like me.
He told my parents that he was exasperated with me because I wouldn't make eye contact. Never mind that I was probably the most conscientious student in the class (give or take
middle_marker!) or that I hung off his every word; because I didn't look him in the eye, he felt I was... disrespectful? Unfriendly? I'm not sure exactly how he read it, but one of those things.Eye contact is not something that's ever felt natural to me. Because of this incident and others like it, I have tried to make a habit of looking people in the eye when talking to them; I'll certainly do it in job interviews and other situations where I need to conform to expectations about how 'normal people' behave.
But if I'm having a long conversation with you, and I'm interested in the conversation, I probably won't be looking you in the eye much of the time. That is not a sign of disrespect, far from it - more likely it means I'm interested enough in what we're discussing and comfortable enough in your company that I can let go of my learned behaviours and concentrate on the interaction.
So, yeah. I have plenty of evidence to persuade me that if there is a "BBC Standard" for non-verbal communication, it's not the version I speak, and I have a history of being misread (sometimes with very distressing results) by people who attempt to interpret those cues. The incident with the polygraph has confirmed my deep-seated suspicion of them; I don't deny that they measure SOMETHING, but interpreting that 'something' is a tricky business.
(I'm not maligning all psychologists, BTW - I have met some really lovely ones who were good at their job. What they have in common is that they pay attention to what people were actually saying with their words, and don't over-interpret non-verbal cues.)
So I get uncomfortable when I see 'profilers' on TV who are able to interpret people's motivation from tiny behavioural cues. I suspect that if I ever ran into one of these people, I'd be at risk of being misinterpreted by an 'expert' with enough clout to convince others of their interpretation.
And then, after reading Malcolm Gladwell's article on criminal profilers, I realise that it's not just me: these people are quacks, about as credible as palm-readers and water-dowsers.
