How We Use Body Language Cues To Create Trust
Christopher Philip
Can I trust you? Can I use body language to help me decide?
Research by David DeSteno, Northeastern University believes that he can answer that question with the help of simple body language gestures.
First, subjects were brought into the lab for an in person “get to know you chat.”
Half of the participants conversed over a web-based chat using computers while the other half did so face-to-face. In the computer meeting, the subjects were not permitted to send or receive any body language cues since they appeared off-screen and therefore, the subjects would have to rate trustworthiness without the help of nonverbal communication. The other group which interacted face-to-face, on the other hand could freely exchange and view the body language of their partner.
The subjects were then separated from one another to play an economic game for real money.
In the game, the subjects were given 4 tokens worth a total of $2 to them, but a total of $4 to his partner. As part of the game, they then had to decide whether to give their partner all, none, or some of their chips.
Each could decide to give their partner no chips and hope that they would give them all of theirs and therefore walk out with the best possible outcome by cheating their partner out of all of their chips and non of their own.
However, if you were trustworthy, however, you’d exchange all of your chips, for all of their chips and thus create a best-outcome situation for each.
The results showed that the level of trustworthiness was similar in both conditions. That is, whether trustworthiness was assessed over the net, or face-to-face, the participants tended to trust each other equally and exchanged similar amounts of chips.
However, the accuracy of the assessments was significantly higher for those who interacted face-to-face.
The results showed that the participants who interacted face-to-face were picking up on cues given off by their partner when they decided on their trustworthiness and these cues helped them make better economic decisions in the game.
They found that four specific behaviours tended to predict untrustworthiness:
1) Hand touching
2) Touching your own face
3) Crossing your arms
4) Leaning away
In fact, the more a partner expressed these actions, the more they were distrusted. In the experiment, this was measured as an expectation of exchanging fewer tokens.
Also, the more a person performed these gestures, the less he or she was in fact willing to exchange.
Thus, the four trustworthiness cues were not only accurately read by observers, they were also predictive of their behaviour.
To further look into the study and dissect these cues from any other confounding cues which fell outside the researchers awareness, a robot called Nexi was employed.
In the second part of the experiment, Nexi, capable of communicating nonverbally was programmed to perform the four cues in varying frequencies while interacting with people in the same token based exchange experiment.
The results mirrored that which was found in the human-human interaction. Those who interacted with Nexi as it performed more untrustworthy cues tended to trust the robot less. Other ratings for the robot including how much the subjects liked the robot, however, was not affected.
As before, those who trusted the robot less, also exchanged fewer chips with the robot, thus supporting the findings of the first experiment.
Image Credit: Steve wilson
Resources
DeSteno, D.; Breazeal, C.; Frank, R. H.; Pizarro, D.; Baumann, J.; Dickens, L, and Lee, J. Detecting the Trustworthiness of Novel Partners in Economic Exchange. Psychological Science. 2019. 23, 1549-1556.