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Comment by Dn_Ab | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you except on the point of body language. It doesn't have to be mind reading, neuro-linguistic programming magic. Simple things like paying attention to tone and volume, position of limbs and posture, eye movement and facial expression will tell you a lot more than simple words. Even clothes and how a person uses words (length, timing and vocabulary) will be a hint. Control of this is what separates the "wooden" actors from the top actrosses. Profilers and poker players leverage this too. It draws from empathy and you basically trying to perform a statistical inference from the set of features in front of you to guess with high probability the true internal state and mood.

A lot of people have tells too, default motions you do when you are not comfortable. I am trying to unprogram mine.

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Just to clarify, my only 'point' on body language was that writing "Study body language and you'll be pretty shocked at how often peoples' spoken words contradict their telltale non-verbal cues." un-sourced is unhelpful and doesn't answer the question.

I wasn't stating that there was not scientific basis behind the study of body language; only that if you are going to claim it, I would like to see it backed up with some science.

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However if you like to discuss the specifics I think it's a very interesting topic. Certainly there are some cues that can be garnered from the study of body language, although from everything I've read the role it can play is over-stated.

Interesting choice of examples: I'm a professional poker player and the role of live 'tells' is generally assumed by non-player playing populace to be much more important than reality[1]. Everything I've read recently about criminal profiling has thrown it in to a negative light and questioned it's validity[2].

A lot of NLP has entered in to 'commonly held beliefs' or is now considered 'intuitive'. When someone is lying they look to the left to access the right hemisphere; this type of hand shake implies dominance; all that jazz. This stuff is easy to test clinically and there is just not the evidence in support[3]. As you brought up eye movement, one study sourced in the Wikipedia article shown no evidence of "a person's preferred sensory mode of thinking can be revealed by observing eye movement cues"

This stuff is very easy to believe and is certainly 'intuitive'. But to my knowledge it has no scientific basis; but I'm certainly interested to read anything that shows otherwise.

1. http://www.pokerpages.com/articles/archives/negreanu30.htm

2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/15/criminal-profiling-... one article I read recently.

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming#Cr...

I agree completely.

It's very frustrating to deal with people who apply NLP or lay-CBT on a regular basis. Especially when you are trying to have a rational conversation and they are wasting time trying to "learn about sub-modalities" or apply auditory anchors to things like acceptance or rejectance.

One person I work with occasionally very clearly thinks of himself as talented in mind control by applying these things. However, from the outside it's very apparent that they have simply poisoned his perspective to make him believe he is being successful.

In short, I wish people would stop wasting time propagating pseudoscience.

I am not arguing with you since I agree. I am just saying you are going after the extreme and ignoring the much more useful and mundane aspects to non-verbal communication. All I am saying is that there are non-verbal components when two or more people are communicating and it is useful to pay attention to it. Being aware of these allow you to be sensitive to the emotional undertones, something whose usefulness should not be discounted. Basically empathizing. And I too think NLP or stuff like - if someone looks left twice while blinking their nose - is complete garbage.

I am not defending extremes like NLP or the far out profiling where you try to get in the mind of someone. By profiling - maybe I mislabelled it - I mean basic stuff that every police officer is trained to look for as indicators of nervousness or over defensiveness (indicators but not conclusive proof - a person might just be easily jarred). Certainly bluffing and reading tells are overstated but that does not mean they are useless and can't be used to a good level by expert players (as an aside making a bot that plays good poker is my hobby so I agree on the power of finding patterns in data as key and those who use holdem manager can also attest). Also by tells I mean little things that your mother or S.O. will know about you when you are thinking, nervous, excited etc.

Consider, if someone you know is yelling with an angry tone can you tell if they are pretending to be angry or are really angry with good confidence? The same sentence read differently can have a world of difference. When you see someone can you have a good idea if they are confident? Stuff like downward gaze, slouched shoulders, shaky voice are the signals I speak of, any one of which may not be useful but taken together push you firmly into a certain distribution. You control this and you can have an influence on how people perceive you. No need to seek to NLP nonsense.

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