Book Look: Honest Signals: I don't read much non-fiction, but this one was fascinating, if a little dry.
This is a scholarly, yet accessible, book about the genesis and continuance of social signaling -- speech inflections, eye contact, body language in general -- and how it can be used to predict all sorts of things from bluffing at the poker table to anticipating success and failure in a business setting. These signals are unconscious, and as such they are referred to as "honest" in that you can't even fool yourself into not betraying the truth. (At least, it is extremely difficult to do so.) Honest Signals is concerned primarily with how much this unconscious behavior affects our social interactions and how much can be predicted from it.
The folks behind Honest Signals developed a device called a sociometer that is worn like a badge and provides telemetric information about signaling behavior. Using this they were able to find strong and predictable correlations between the signals and human behavior in many sorts of social situations. In fact, they track this signaling back through primates and other species of animals to reveal how it can inform some very complex behaviors. If there is a shortcoming to the book, it's that they don't go into detail about what the signals actually are and how to spot them. I'm glad to know there is a way to spot bluffers at the poker table or determine the roles being played in a group setting, but tell me what it is!!
This topic is part of what is turning out to be the game changing scientific story of our lifetime: discovering how much of what we do and think and feel is biologically based, and thus, the result of evolutionary pressures. This is a huge change from when I was younger and we took as gospel the notion that a human being pretty much started as a blank slate and developed traits as a result of cultural influence and Freudian psychology and heroic free will. Just the other day I was having a conversation with some friends who mentioned that their experience raising children had caused them to see behavioral development as vastly more nature than nurture. The times they are a changin'.
If you have an abiding interest in this subject, Honest Signals is a probably worth the read. But don't expect to come out of it with much practical knowledge. If your interest is more casual, you can get what you need from a google search on the topic for an overview
