How You Walk Drives First Impressions
Christopher Philip
Researchers have found evidence that gait, or the way we walk, leads others to form reliable, although inaccurate personality judgments about others.
Gait is a cue which is easily viewed, even at long distances, so forms an integral part of a first impression.
In the study, motion of gait was captured with the help of various subjects. Next, raters offered scores on various personality traits based on the playback. They found that subjects tended to agree with one-another on Adventurousness, Approachability, Extraversion, Neuroticism and Trustworthiness.
Next, the researchers modified the motion of the gait. They wanted to see if raters would modify their judgments of the gaits in a predictable way.
Indeed, this is exactly what they found, raters tended to accept the new gait motion and agree with one another on the traits which best explained the motion.
When the data was broken down, the researchers found that ratings were driven by cues including perceived emotion, attractiveness, and masculinity.
While the results might seem mundane, they do offer one important finding; people use nonverbal cues including gait to make judgments about other people and that when they do, they largely agree with one another (even if they are largely not founded in reality).
This offers a point of opportunity to the user of nonverbal communication as it permits those interested enough, to tailor their gait in ways that produce more desired results.
For example, one can create a desired and readily accepted impression of masculinity by simply walking with more masculine gait patterns without changing any other factor. Likewise, femininity can be created by walking with a more feminine walking style. More importantly, these conscious changes in gait are likely to accept by others at face value.
Image Credit: Moyan Brenn
Resources
Thoresen, John C.; Quoc C. Vuong and Anthony P. Atkinson. First Impressions: Gait Cues Drive Reliable Trait Judgements. Cognition. 2019. 261–271