Allan Pease - Body Language | Page 2

contain any of
the magic formulae promised by some of the books in the bookstores. Its purpose is to
make the reader more aware of his own nonve rbal cues and signals and to demonstrate
how people communicate with each other using this medium.
This book isolates and examines each component of body language and gesture,
though few gestures are made in isolation from others; I have at the same time tried to
avoid oversimplifying. Non-verbal communi cation is, however, a complex process
involving people, words, tone of voice and body movements.
There will always be those who throw up their hands in horror and claim that the
study of body language is just another mean s by which scientific knowledge can be
used to exploit or dominate others by read ing their secrets or thoughts. This book seeks
to give the reader greater insight into comm unication with his fellow humans, so that he
may have a deeper understa nding of other people and, therefore, of himself.
Understanding how something works makes living with it easier, whereas lack of
understanding and ignorance prom ote fear and superstition and make us more critical
of others. A birdwatcher does not study birds so that he can shoot them down and keep
them as trophies. In the same way, the acquisition of knowledge and skills in
non-verbal communication serves to make every encounter with another person an
exciting experience.

This book was originally intended as a working manual for sales people, sales
managers and executives and, in the ten years that it has taken to research and compile,
it has been expanded in such a way that any pe rson, regardless of his or her vocation or
position in life, can use it to obtain a better understanding of life’s most complex event
– a face-to-face encounter with another person.
ALLAN PEASE

One
A Framework for Understanding
As we approach the end of the twentieth century, we are witnessing the emergence
of a new kind of social scien tist-the non-verbalist. Just as the birdwatcher delights in
watching birds and their behaviour, so th e non-verbalist delights in watching the
non-verbal cues and signals of human beings. He watches them at social functions, at
beaches, on television, at the office or anywhere that people interact. He is a student of
behaviour who wants to learn about the actions of his fellow humans so that he may
ultimately learn more about himself and how he can improve his relationships with
others.
It seems almost incredible that, over the million or more years of man’s evolution,
the non-verbal aspects of communication have been actively studied on any scale only
since the 1960s and that th e public has become aware of their existence only since
Julius Fast published a book about body la nguage in 1970. This was a summary of the
work done by behavioural scientists on nonverbal communication up until that time,
and even today, most people are still ignor ant of the existence of body language, let
alone its importance in their lives.
Charlie Chaplin and many other silent movi e actors were the pioneers of non-verbal
communication skills; they were the only means of communication available on the
screen. Each actor was classed as good or bad by the extent to which he could use
gestures and other body signals to comm unicate effectively. When talking films
became popular and less emphasis was placed on the non-verbal aspects of acting,
many silent movie actors faded into obscu rity and those with good verbal skills
prevailed.
As far as the technical study of body langua ge goes, perhaps the most influential
pre-twentieth-century work was Charles Darw in’s The Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals published in 1872. This spawne d the modern studies of facial expres-
sions and body language and many of Darwin’s ideas and observations have since been
validated by modern researchers around the world. Since that time, researchers have
noted and recorded almost one million nonverb al cues and signals. Albert Mehrabian
found that the total impact of a message is about 7 per cent verbal (words only) and 38
per cent vocal (including tone of voice, inflection and other sounds) and 55 per cent
non-verbal. Professor Birdwhistell made so me similar estimates of the amount of
non-verbal communication that takes place amongst humans. He estimated that the
average person actually speaks wo rds for a total of about ten or eleven minutes a day
and that the average sentence takes only a bout 2.5 seconds. Like Mehrabian, he found
that the verbal component of a face-to-face conversation is less than 35 per cent and that
over 65 per cent of