The role of body motion in judgments of politicians

People often judge others by their appearance and their nonverbal behavior. This has far-reaching consequences. One is that the public arena is a stage for pleasant faces and gifted self-presenters. They win elections and form public opinion. Influential politicians, therefore, do more than reciting a brilliantly written speech; they also seem to display the `right` behavior. In a previous project I investigated one aspect of such behaviors by turning the body movements of politicians into animated stick figures. By applying novel methods I found observers to be able to relate variations in body motion to different personality traits. In order to underpin the signal value of the patterns detected a broader empirical basis is needed. For this reason I will conduct rating experiments in which different stimuli of political speeches (e.g., original movies, movies without speech, stick-figures etc.) will be presented. By comparing the ratings it will be possible then to estimate the relative role of each condition and how inconsistent behavior (e.g., voice not in accordance with body motion) influences impression formation. Apart from that data will also provide insights into the interplay of voting behavior, personality ratings, gender and gender stereotypes. Further, if body motion proves to be such a strong signal as some studies indicate, voting behavior and perceived personality could be predicted by the analysis of motion behavior. In a second project I intend to manipulate the stick figures` behavior in a way so that they present certain motion cues in a very characteristic manner. On the one hand this will be additional support for results already obtained, on the other hand it will tell us how stable and dominant some signals are. In contrast to other studies I will not instruct actors to display different communication styles. The stimuli will be politicians making speeches in their `natural environment`. For this reason the ecological validity should be high. Moreover, the methodology applied will yield highly reproducible results allowing predictions based on mathematical methods. There is already a great deal of research on how nonverbal cues influence people`s decisions. We will extend these approaches to the analysis of body motion and its relationship to other communication channels. Results will provide an empirical basis for the sometimes unfounded assumptions about nonverbal communication and they also might be of importance for research on body motion, social cognition, computer science, leadership qualities, politics and personality.

People do judge a book by its cover and other people by their looks, their voices, how often they smile, how they move and other superficialities. This makes the public arena a stage for pleasant faces and gifted self-presenters. Politicians who give speeches or participate in debates are not only judged by what they say but also how they say it and which behaviours they show. To give an answer to the question how information from these different communication channels affect peoples impressions of speakers, we selected short video clips of politicians giving a speech and created different types of stimuli (e.g., speech content only, voice only, stick-figure animations representing the speakers body motion). Our main research focus was on how certain cues of body motion (e.g., expansiveness of motion, its speed etc.) are related to peoples social judgements and how body motion is linked to information from other communication channels. Although analyses revealed a strong impact of the politicians voices, people appear to make use of different types of cues when forming an overall impression. The speakers appearance, how they speak, speech content and variations in body motion affect impression formation. Body motion played a strong role when people judged speakers on traits (e.g., dominance, friendliness) that are important in first encounters and assumed to belong to basic social categories. For these traits we also found a coupling between voice and body motion supporting previous research on the synchronization of gesture with the flow of speech. Also, body motion cues that guide quick social judgements seem to be simple and conspicuous. For instance, people associated expansive and many up and down movements of the arms with high dominance, low friendliness and low trustworthiness. Moreover, they seem to perceive patterns of angularity and roundedness (or smoothness) in a moving body. The simplicity of the motion cues we identified as carriers of information might partly explain how people form impressions so fast. First impressions may be based on simple building blocks that connect information from different modalities (e.g., smooth voice and smooth motion) and that may be interpreted in a similar manner across many cultures. To sum up, in line with previous research we show that people perceive social qualities in a variety of nonverbal and verbal cues, that nonverbal displays are part of how self-presenters and their audiences interact (e.g., stick-figure animations classified as dominant receive more applause and are mostly males from the opposition) and that information of social relevance is ascribed to simple motion patterns. In addition to this, we extended the methodical repertoire of measuring behaviour and make a strong point for using computer-aided methods to investigate human behaviour and human nonverbal communication.