The Seduction Labs Blog: Women Sexual Signals Research and Detecting Lies

Jonathan over at the Seduction Labs blog has frequently interesting and well-researched posts on the subjects of communication, manipulation and body language. We will discuss the seduction and pick up community and their relevance to communication at a later post.

Jonathan is a disbeliever when it comes to body language. I came across his blog when someone linked to me at the post above. Although I mostly buy into his way of thinking, I believe he is a skeptic in nature. While his posts are indeed smart and well written, his insistence on disproving body language in absolute terms makes him biased in a fashion I find distracting from his informative posts.

One of his main tenets is that so-called body language "experts" try and portray this occupation as a science. It isn't. He further states that these experts are there to sell body language as the fad of the month (my wording). I agree on that as well.

These "experts" speak of body language as a science. From my experience, while it can be researched scientifically it is not a science. There is quite a bit behind nonverbal communication, reading it and interpreting it. Not reading too much into it by over-analyzing is where things get tricky, but that's a discussion for another time.

The philosophy of science is an interesting and complex subject, but in short, according to Newton, Hume and Popper, based on repeatable experiments you deduce a rule which best fits the facts, until it is disproved with an example with doesn't fit, and then it is replaced/supplemented with a new, more accurate one.

Body language as portrayed by these experts simply does not meet that criterion. While claiming close to absolute rules, they very comfortably jump to quote Freud when things don't add up: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".

While some nonverbal cues and signals are universal, most are situation and person dependent. One must establish a baseline for a person and then use body language as an extra sense, adding taste and efficiency to communication rather than replacing it.

While I agree with the sentiment behind Freud's very astute quote, it is being abused.
Once you encounter a situation a rule does not cover, the rule can not be kept as-is. Ignoring the new information and using Freud as an excuse is basically asking for suspended disbelief, and we have enough of that from Hollywood.

Body language is real, but let's look at it with the right perspective:

1. People do give impressions of emotions. I rather look at it as gestures and tone, for example, rather than an aura or emphatic telepathy.

2. While not all gestures apply to everybody, people do communicate with their bodies.

3. If people did not communicate with their bodies, others still deduce about what they may be communicating based on their body language.

4. Body language does indicate, to a varying degree, our state of mind and feelings in a closed feedback loop (you smile when you are happy. You are happy when you smile).

In his post linked to above, he points to a paper "Decoding Women’s Sexual Intent" (Coreen Farris, Coreen Farris, Teresa A. Treat, Richard J. Viken, and Richard M. McFall, published April 2008 in Psychological Science). While he brings good ideas to the table, in my opinion he is misreading the paper which clearly states these signals are there, just not being interpreted well... But we can discuss that on another occasion. :)

I strongly recommend reading Jonathan's posts, but I'd really like to hear more of what he finds does work when it comes to body language.

One example which he shared, is on the difficult subject of lie detection. Lie detection is very intriguing and the history behind it alone can keep me alert for hours. In this post Jonathan doesn't cover much of how the methods he sees as inferior work and fail, but he does mention an interesting pscyhological alternative: Reality monitoring theory.

Among others, he bases himself on A. Vrij (Aldert Vrij, but he is an academic). This is very telling as to the quality of the research and his posts.

Pinky.