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The Definitive Book of Body Language: The Hidden Meaning Behind People's Gestures and Expressions Kindle Edition
It is a scientific fact that people’s gestures give away their true intentions. Yet most of us don’t know how to read body language– and don’t realize how our own physical movements speak to others. Now the world’s foremost experts on the subject share their techniques for reading body language signals to achieve success in every area of life.
Drawing upon more than thirty years in the field, as well as cutting-edge research from evolutionary biology, psychology, and medical technologies that demonstrate what happens in the brain, the authors examine each component of body language and give you the basic vocabulary to read attitudes and emotions through behavior.
Discover:
• How palms and handshakes are used to gain control
• The most common gestures of liars
• How the legs reveal what the mind wants to do
• The most common male and female courtship gestures and signals
• The secret signals of cigarettes, glasses, and makeup
• The magic of smiles–including smiling advice for women
• How to use nonverbal cues and signals to communicate more effectively and get the reactions you want
Filled with fascinating insights, humorous observations, and simple strategies that you can apply to any situation, this intriguing book will enrich your communication with and understanding of others–as well as yourself.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBantam
- Publication dateNovember 12, 2008
- File size7246 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Understanding the Basics
Everyone knows someone who can walk into a room full of people and within minutes give an accurate description about the relationships between those people and what they are feeling. The ability to read a person's attitudes and thoughts by their behavior was the original communication system used by humans before spoken language evolved.
Before radio was invented, most communication was done in writing through books, letters, and newspapers, which meant that ugly politicians and poor speakers such as Abraham Lincoln could be successful if they persisted long enough and wrote good print copy. The radio era gave openings to people who had a good command of the spoken word, like Winston Churchill, who spoke wonderfully but may have struggled to achieve as much in today's more visual era.
Today's politicians understand that politics is about image and appearance, and most high-profile politicians now have personal body-language consultants to help them come across as being sincere, caring, and honest, especially when they're not.
It seems almost incredible that, over the thousands of years of our evolution, body language has been actively studied on any scale only since the 1960's and that most of the public has become aware of its existence only since our book Body Language was published in 1978. Yet most people believe that speech is still our main form of communication. Speech has been part of our communication repertoire only in recent times in evolutionary terms, and is mainly used to convey facts and data. Speech probably first developed between two million and five hundred thousand years ago, during which time our brain tripled its size. Before then, body language and sounds made in the throat were the main forms of conveying emotions and feelings, and that is still the case today. But because we focus on the words people speak, most of us are largely uninformed about body language, let alone its importance in our lives.
Our spoken language, however, recognizes how important body language is to our communication. Here are just a few of the phrases we use:
Get it off your chest. Keep a stiff upper lip.
Stay at arm's length. Keep your chin up.
Shoulder a burden. Face up to it.
Put your best foot forward. Kiss my butt.
Some of these phrases are hard to swallow, but you've got to give us a big hand because there are some real eye-openers here. As a rule of thumb, we can keep them coming hand over fist until you either buckle at the knees or turn your back on the whole idea. Hopefully, you'll be sufficiently touched by these phrases to lean toward the concept.
In the Beginning . . .
Silent-movie actors like Charlie Chaplin were the pioneers of body-language skills, as this was the only means of communication available on the screen. Each actor's skill was classed as good or bad by the extent to which he could use gestures and body signals to communicate to the audience. When talking films became popular and less emphasis was placed on the nonverbal aspects of acting, many silent-movie actors faded into obscurity and only those with good verbal and nonverbal skills survived.
As far as the academic study of body language goes, perhaps the most influential pre-twentieth-century work was Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, but this work tended to be read mainly by academics. However, it spawned the modern studies of facial expressions and body language, and many of Darwin's ideas and observations have since been validated by researchers around the world. Since that time, researchers have noted and recorded almost a million nonverbal cues and signals. Albert Mehrabian, a pioneer researcher of body language in the 1950's, found that the total impact of a message is about 7 percent verbal (words only) and 38 percent vocal (including tone of voice, inflection, and other sounds) and 55 percent nonverbal.
It's how you looked when you said
it, not what you actually said.
Anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell pioneered the original study of nonverbal communication–what he called "kinesics." Birdwhistell made some similar estimates of the amount of nonverbal communication that takes place between humans. He estimated that the average person actually speaks words for a total of about ten or eleven minutes a day and that the average sentence takes only about 2.5 seconds. Birdwhistell also estimated we can make and recognize around 250,000 facial expressions.
Like Mehrabian, he found that the verbal component of a face-to-face conversation is less than 35 percent and that over 65 percent of communication is done nonverbally. Our analysis of thousands of recorded sales interviews and negotiations during the 1970's and 1980's showed that, in business encounters, body language accounts for between 60 and 80 percent of the impact made around a negotiating table and that people form 60 to 80 percent of their initial opinion about a new person in less than four minutes. Studies also show that when negotiating over the telephone, the person with the stronger argument usually wins, but this is not so true when negotiating face-to-face, because overall we make our final decisions more on what we see than what we hear.
Why It's Not What You Say
Despite what it may be politically correct to believe, when we meet people for the first time we quickly make judgments about their friendliness, dominance, and potential as a sexual partner–and their eyes are not the first place we look.
Most researchers now agree that words are used primarily for conveying information, while body language is used for negotiating interpersonal attitudes and, in some cases, is used as a substitute for verbal messages. For example, a woman can give a man a "look to kill" and will convey a very clear message to him without opening her mouth.
Regardless of culture, words and movements occur together with such predictability that Birdwhistell was the first to claim that a well-trained person should be able to tell what movement a person is making by listening to their voice. Birdwhistell even learned how to tell what language a person was speaking, simply by watching their gestures.
Many people find difficulty in accepting that humans are still biologically animals. We are a species of primate–Homo sapiens–a hairless ape that has learned to walk on two limbs and has a clever, advanced brain. But like any other species, we are still dominated by biological rules that control our actions, reactions, body language, and gestures. The fascinating thing is that the human animal is rarely aware that its postures, movements, and gestures can tell one story while its voice may be telling another.
How Body Language Reveals Emotions and Thoughts
Body language is an outward reflection of a person's emotional condition. Each gesture or movement can be a valuable key to an emotion a person may be feeling at the time. For example, a man who is self-conscious about gaining weight may tug at the fold of skin under his chin; the woman who is aware of extra pounds on her thighs may smooth her dress down; the person who is feeling fearful or defensive might fold their arms or cross their legs or both; and a man talking with a large-breasted woman may consciously avoid staring at her breasts while, at the same time, unconsciously use groping gestures with his hands.
The key to reading body language is being able to understand a person's emotional condition while listening to what they are saying and noting the circumstances under which they are saying it. This allows you to separate fact from fiction and reality from fantasy. In recent times, we humans have had an obsession with the spoken word and our ability to be conversationalists. Most people, however, are remarkably unaware of body- language signals and their impact, despite the fact that we now know that most of the messages in any face-to-face conversation are revealed through body signals. For example, France's President Chirac, U.S.A.'s President Ronald Reagan, and Australia's Prime Minister Bob Hawke all used their hands to reveal the relative sizes of issues in their mind. Bob Hawke once defended pay increases for politicians by comparing their salaries to corporate executive salaries. He claimed that executive salaries had risen by a huge amount and that proposed politicians' increases were relatively smaller. Each time he mentioned politicians' incomes, he held his hands a yard apart. When he mentioned executive salaries, however, he held them only a foot apart. His hand distances revealed that he felt politicians were getting a much better deal than he was prepared to admit.
Why Women Are More Perceptive
When we say someone is "perceptive" or "intuitive" about people, we are unknowingly referring to their ability to read another person's body language and to compare these cues with verbal signals. In other words, when we say that we have a "hunch" or "gut feeling" that someone has told us a lie, we usually mean that their body language and their spoken words don't agree. This is also what speakers call "audience awareness," or relating to a group. For example, if an audience were sitting back in their seats with their chins down and arms crossed on their chest, a "perceptive" speaker would get a hunch or feeling that his delivery was not going across well. He would realize that he needed to take a different approach to gain audience involvement. Likewise, a speaker who was not "perceptive" would blunder on regardless.
Being "perceptive" means being able to spot the contradictions between someone's words and their body language.
Overall, women are far more perceptive than men, and this has given rise to what is commonly referred to as "women's intuition." Women have an innate ...
Product details
- ASIN : B000SEH9QG
- Publisher : Bantam; 1st edition (November 12, 2008)
- Publication date : November 12, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 7246 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 402 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #339,769 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #151 in Applied Psychology
- #300 in Communication & Social Skills Self-Help eBooks
- #302 in Social Psychology & Interactions
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Barbara Pease is CEO of Pease International, which produces videos, training courses and seminars for businesses and governments worldwide. She is co-author of the bestselling book Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps, which has sold ten million copies around the world.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book easy to read and well-written. They find the information informative and helpful, drawing on academic research in psychology and other social sciences. The illustrations are excellent and depict body postures clearly. Readers appreciate the humor and humorous examples. The book provides insight into what certain gestures mean and how to interpret them. However, opinions differ on whether the book is worth the price and useful, or redundant at times.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book easy to read and understand. They appreciate the light tone and lack of academic prose. The book provides an overview of reading nonverbal cues that people give and receive. It is well-structured and structured with photographs.
"...I think this book is more useful for reading people in social or personal situations because it is much easier to accurately read someone's body..." Read more
"This book gives an overview of reading nonverbal cues that people give and receive...." Read more
"...The tone is light, not bogged down in academic-style prose, and has already given me several insights and models for character behavior...." Read more
"...Topics include the basics of body language, and then move to specific elements including hand and arm movements and gestures, facial expressions,..." Read more
Customers find the book informative and helpful. They say it provides useful information that can be used after reading it. The book draws on academic research in psychology and other social sciences, providing tips on everything from how to survive giving speeches to how to read someone's true feelings. The author provides scientific explanations for why a certain type of body language occurs.
"...Sure it can help you read someone's true feelings, attract people more easily and tell when someone is lying, but it is not a surefire method and can..." Read more
"...It draws on both academic research in psychology and other social sciences as well as the authors’ lifelong careers as business consultants...." Read more
"...style prose, and has already given me several insights and models for character behavior. I consider it a good addition to my reference shelf." Read more
"...OF BODY LANGUAGE, by Allan and Barbara Pease, provides an engaging, informative, and easy-to-read exploration of how we communicate we communicate..." Read more
Customers find the illustrations in the book excellent. They mention the pictures and drawings are easy to depict, with examples of body language and real photographs of famous people.
"...Layout: The material is interesting, but the illustrations and simple descriptions make the lessons learned in this book easy to remember...." Read more
"...With clear and simple illustrations and photographs, individual elements are isolated and analyzed, and then are placed in a more holistic..." Read more
"Well written, with photographs." Read more
"...The Definitive Book of Body Language" is also full of illustrations and pictures...." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's humor and illustrations. They find it easy to read, with humorous examples and a good introduction. The book provides appropriate space and breaks in the text with humor, pictures, and examples.
"...The author also has a sense of humor and provides the right about of space and breaks in the text with humor, pictures and examples to keep it from..." Read more
"...The book is spiced with witty jokes, cartoons and anecdotes that make it an easy and enjoyable read...." Read more
"...and they make this goldmine of knowledge simple and sometimes funny!..." Read more
"...The book is well written, easy to read, and the authors have a sense of humor that will make you laugh...." Read more
Customers find the book helpful for understanding body language. They say it provides insights into what certain gestures mean, and covers common ones in different cultures. The book contains nice visuals of body language, including facial expressions. Readers are taught how to read body movements in clusters, which is quite different from a single gesture. The book is structured by body movement, and customers recommend it as a first book to read.
"...The chapter talking about women and what their facial expressions indicate is priceless and men should read it just so they know when to chance..." Read more
"...that makes complete sense." You are taught how to read body movements in clusters, which is quite different than a single gesture...." Read more
"...offer explanations for social, closed, fearful, confident, and courting gestures...." Read more
"...Last but not least, this book is new - it discussed gestures used by contemporary figures like Tony Blair, G.W.Bush, etc...." Read more
Customers have different views on the book's value. Some find it useful and worth the price, saying it helps them make better deals or reach more people. Others feel it's redundant, lacking content, and unhelpful.
"...So the book has been useful to me and worth the price...." Read more
"Book is an excellent read; definitely worth the 12 bucks it cost. It is a used condition and so the price for the book was appropriate...." Read more
"...while it can be useful, it is redundant at times, and the reader can become bored and loose interest in the subject by the middle of the book...." Read more
"...It truely will help you make better deals or reach more people. This is a must read for absolutely everyone." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the book's accuracy. Some find it helpful and true, describing it as fact-filled and legitimate. Others mention that the author contradicts himself frequently and is wrong at many points.
"I liked this book. I think 95% is very true and useful. Other body language books only talk about other people's behavior...." Read more
"Very accurate and helpful for translating the mood of a person and knowing if they are being honest." Read more
"...people more easily and tell when someone is lying, but it is not a surefire method and cannot make you successful in all types of interpersonal..." Read more
"...up my doctorate in psychology, this book has proved to be mostly accurate and insightful." Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2012Overall: This book was exactly what I was looking for. It does not go into every type of common body gesture, but definitely enough to keep you busy for a while. Immediately after I started reading this book I began to notice the behaviors in myself and my colleagues. I think this book is more useful for reading people in social or personal situations because it is much easier to accurately read someone's body language in a purer/ more natural state. For example, in a business meeting a colleague may rub their chin. The book would say that can indicate someone who is thinking/contemplating and secondary gestures should be watched to indicate what their decision may be. In a business meeting that same gesture could be a cover up for day dreaming, an attempt to please their boss or simply trying to stay awake. When I make assumptions based on the book in business settings I have been wrong because so many factors could lead to the emotion that is creating the language and most of which have nothing to do with me or the current interaction. In personal settings it is spot on and can sometimes be very entertaining. The chapter talking about women and what their facial expressions indicate is priceless and men should read it just so they know when to chance course in their behavior or conversation.
On a social front I tested out some of the attractive and open female gestures in courting or even talking with men and they certainly do work. For example showing the inner wrist is supposed to be a sign of openness and femininity and when I casually had that part facing I was treated much differently.
Layout: The material is interesting, but the illustrations and simple descriptions make the lessons learned in this book easy to remember. They also make connections to the animal kingdom or how the gesture evolved from a functional action when possible which helps me remember and feel more engaged with the material. The author also has a sense of humor and provides the right about of space and breaks in the text with humor, pictures and examples to keep it from getting too dry. This layout also follows the tell you, tell you again and tell you what they told you approach so you can even read it in public and watch for the behaviors while you are reading.
There is not a whole lot I would change about this book except the claims are much greater than anyone can possibly make. Sure it can help you read someone's true feelings, attract people more easily and tell when someone is lying, but it is not a surefire method and cannot make you successful in all types of interpersonal situations on its own. This is just a tool and should be clearly described as such.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2020This book gives an overview of reading nonverbal cues that people give and receive. Learning to interpret clusters of signals can improve social interaction in both business and personal lives.
I found this book to be extremely informative and easy to read. It draws on both academic research in psychology and other social sciences as well as the authors’ lifelong careers as business consultants. I learned a lot but not as much as I thought I did based on the scenarios illustrated at the end and the answers provided. Will have to use this book as a general reference and refer back to it in the future.
Looking at nonverbal cues has given me a different perspective for looking back on meetings (one on one and group) I’ve had at work and in social situations. Some of the info is a bit outdated - particularly the signals used when smoking at work, which has been a no-no in the US for awhile now. So the book has been useful to me and worth the price.
This book may be of interest to anyone in a role working with lots of people, decision makers, and in situations involving negotiation of some sort.
One section handles the cues given off by office furniture arrangement. I wish the authors discussed how to better arrange a cubicle which doesn’t have the luxury of space or the option to set how visible it’s occupant is, or it’s location relative to other colleagues/roles.
The next thing I need to know is how to read all these cues through videoconferencing, where there are sometimes lags or low resolution or imperfect camera angles and such!
- Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2015Whether a reader considers this a five-star book or a one-star book depends largely on what your particular needs are. This was a book written for salesmen, with the objective of teaching them how to read people and how to present themselves in order to close a sale. It is not a textbook, so if you're looking for the latest in scientific research, this book isn't it.
I'm a writer. In an attempt to add more than nodding, smiling, frowning, etc. to my fiction, I needed a book that described more subtle expressions and gestures. I'm about half-way through this book (I read resource books like this a few pages a day over a period of months) and it is exactly what I needed. The tone is light, not bogged down in academic-style prose, and has already given me several insights and models for character behavior. I consider it a good addition to my reference shelf.
Top reviews from other countries
- PHYLLISReviewed in Canada on August 4, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book to have
Contains a lot of information needed for navigating my work snd learning peoples body languages and what they mean. An eye opener!
- vitoReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 20, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Yeh, I thought that’s what you meant. You signed it😆
Great Book. Understand what they may be saying without opening their mouths.
- Steve BrookerReviewed in Australia on September 28, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
It is a great read
- soothsayerReviewed in India on January 6, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars Good book for beginners; Very basic though
The definitive book of body language by Allan and Barbara Pease is a crisp and apt book for first readers of the topic. It is a 'definitive' book meaning it clearly identifies body language cues and suggest possible interpretations for the same. It is an easy to understand book as it has illustrations and examples to elaborate most points. It aids in making positive use of body language in ones life to make for better communication and it also helps in identifying body language cues on others to help understand 'what is not said.' The book also has chapters on office power dynamics and has basic instructions on office setting and seating power plays. The book, however, is very simple for someone who is well versed with the topic.
Amazon first started in the US selling books online. Hence, prices on books are best on Amazon. I don't even bother looking for other options anymore.
Overall it is a great book, one I'd recommend to a beginner to the topic.
Book Review: 8/10
Price Value: 10/10
-soothsayer
- Sharon LimReviewed in Singapore on April 17, 2021
2.0 out of 5 stars Surprised by the condition
I was kinda shocked.. outer cover front n back corners are torn. Inner page im not sure if a page was torn or the book's glue dried n peeling off.. all corners of e inner hard cover are bent... packaging think too thin for the airmail
Sharon Lim
Reviewed in Singapore on April 17, 2021
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