Anybody who wishes to answer this question must exercise caution so as not to be trapped in the web of arguments more than what they can chew. Some people actually opine that men are bad readers of body language while a research by Sokolov et al (2011) shows that there areas in which men do better than their female counterparts when it comes to body language reading. Before delving into the argument of men and women’s ability of reading body language, let me enumerate reasons why people read body language wrongly. Some of them are:
Ignoring context: Crossed arms don’t mean as much if the room is cold or the chair they’re sitting in doesn’t have armrests. Everything has to pass the common sense test given the environment. When you neglect the environment, you’re bound to miss the intended message (Barker, 2018).
Not in search for clusters: One of the biggest errors people make is looking for one single tell. That’s great in movies about poker players but in real life it’s a consistent grouping of actions (sweating, touching the face, and stuttering together) that is really going to tell you something. The key is to look for more than one pointer referring to your suspicions (Barker, 2018).
Inability to get a baseline: If someone is always jumpy, jumpiness doesn’t tell you anything. If someone is always jumpy and they suddenly stop moving, something must intuitively move in you (Barker, 2018).
Neglecting biases: If you already like or dislike the person it’s going to affect your judgment. And if people compliment you, are similar to you, are attractive … these can all sway you, unconsciously. I know you don’t fall for those tricks. Well, the biggest bias of all is thinking you’re unbiased (Barker, 2018).
Having laid this solid foundation, let’s get to business of the article. A recent article by Coreen Farris et al. with title “Perceptual Mechanisms That Characterize Gender Differences in Decoding Women’s Sexual Intent” and published through the University of Indiana and Yale says that, “Clueless Guys Can’t Read Women.” The study says that men not only mistake friendly nonverbal language as sexual cues, but also mistake sexual nonverbal language as friendly cues. It seems from her study that men just can’t read body language; they can’t read nonverbal communication by women (Philip, 2013).
The study had an initial group of both males and females rate images based on four categories (called affect groupings): friendly, sexually interested, sad, or rejecting. From that sample they chose an additional set of 80 men and 80 women to rate the final images into affect groupings once again. A photo was kept if the majority of men and women categorized the picture into the same affect group. Thus, for the study’s purpose, it follows that an average of men and women decided on this subset of photos based on their affect groupings, and then on further ratings, men when compared to women rated the images into the wrong affect group. Is this the best way to conduct this study? Does the conclusion of the study not mean that the affect groupings were poorly constructed from the beginning since men where included at the outset and are poor at rating affect? Does the study not have a very significant flaw? (Philip, 2013).
To improve the study women could be asked to display postures they felt best conveyed the affect groupings. If a woman is asked to do a sexually interested posture, by definition whatever posture she comes up with is an accurate depiction of sexual interest for them. Because it is a posture she created naturally, it’s also a posture that could occur in a natural setting. The same can be done for all other affect groups. Then women and men could rate these photographs to see who is better at rating affect groupings based on the definition set by the female presenting the initial posture. A second method could include a panel of experienced readers of nonverbal language. Why include the poorer rater from the outset when it’s not necessary? (Philip, 2013). From the foregoing, we can reliably conclude that she took her study out of context.
Sokolov and his colleagues conducted a study under the title, “Gender Affects Body Language Reading” in 2011. The outcome of the study indicates that gender affects accuracy rather than speed of body language reading. The gender effect, however, is modulated by the emotional content of actions. Females tend to excel in recognition accuracy of angry knocking, whereas males over-perform in recognition of happy actions. Furthermore, females clearly surpass males in recognition of emotionally neutral knocking. The lack of gender differences in error rate suggests that gender effects in recognition accuracy are not caused by gender-related bias (Sokolov et al., 2011).
As against known convention, in the present study by the scholars, males over-perform in recognition of emotionally positive happy actions. These data agree with findings showing that men appear to exhibit stronger brain activation in response to positive pictures (depicting landscapes, sport activities, families, and erotic scenes) than women as carried out by Wrase et al (2003) and Gasbarri et al (2007). Presumably, this indicates that males are better tuned to subtle expressions of happiness in faces and actions. This might hold true, at least, for a population of young men with a high social status and educational level as those participated in the present study. The prominent outcome of the study is that females had a clear advantage in recognition of neutral knocking. This suggests that women are better tuned to the lack of emotional content in body actions (Sokolov et al., 2011).
However, the nature of gender effects in body language reading has not been known. One possibility is that gender differences have neurobiological sources and brain mechanisms underpinning body language reading are sex-specific. The social cognition network, commonly referred to as the social brain, primarily involves the parieto-temporal junction, temporal cortices including the fusiform face area and the STS, orbitofrontal cortices, the amygdala and the left lateral cerebellum. The right STS is a cornerstone for processing of meaningful body motion (Sokolov et al., 2011).
References
Barker, E (2018). 4 Secrets to Reading Body Language Like An Expert. Retrieved from https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/how-to-read-body-language
Philip, C (2013). Men Are Too Stupid To Understand The Word “No” And Can’t Read Body Language. Retrieved from http://bodylanguageproject.com/articles/men_dont_understand_no-htm/
Sokolov, A.A et al., (2011). Gender Affects Body Language Reading. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3111255/
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