Social Interaction | The Only Book On Body Language That Everybody Needs To Read

We all check out and spend some time inside our own heads – even while out in public.

It might not surprise you to know that everyone needs time alone every once in a while, or even once a day, but what might surprise you is that we actually need time to ourselves minute by minute. All day long we are bombarded with a multitude of people, from our coworkers, to our spouses, friends, to cashiers at stores and those who share our commute with us in the streets. Even with almost seemingly endless social interaction the research shows that every three seconds, on average, we ‘slip away’ to be with our own thoughts and to internalize what is happening around us. This ‘downtime’ allows our brains the time it needs to process, the information that is happening all around us.

We know someone is in downtime by their body language which includes having the head titled away or to the side, shifting the shoulders at an angle, or looking to the right or left for a fraction of a second. The eye patterns in downtime are what psychologists call ‘conjugate lateral eye movements.’ All these cues are tells that the mind has moved into processing mode and is no longer accepting new information. Other cues indicating emotional downtime include pauses in breathing, subtle chewing of the lips, or very brief eye freezes or glazing over.

Knowing about downtime can be used to our advantage so as to give people enough time to take in the new information presented rather than overwhelming them, confusing them and possibly putting them off for good. The simplest way to do this is to watch for downtime cues and then pause or slow speech accordingly. This will give the listener enough time to look away momentarily and process the information. Once we learn about someone, and their character, it will be easy to find their cues to downtime and therefore proceed at a reasonable pace for them specifically.

A second type of downtime is more extended, and happens in the absence of other people. The purpose of this downtime is to escape daily stress and pressure, and to help us recover. The need for downtime is obvious. We become stressed or over-stimulated, our thought process becomes hazy and we can’t think straight. Our faces will also become blank and expressionless, and our eyes will glaze over and be unmoving. Other times we feel under-stimulated and detached from what is going on around us, and feel that we need to get away to re-connect. During this period we begin to withdraw by avoiding eye contact, dropping our heads and shoulders, and switching off our ears. We may zone out in such a significant way that we have trouble even feeling someone if they happen to brush up against us. When downtime like this happens around other people we’re asked to ‘snap out of it’ only to reply with “Sorry, I was zoned out” or “I must have spaced out.” The most respectful thing to do when you notice someone in this state, is to leave them be, instead of interrupting them. Remember that they slipped into downtime for good reason, it’s not just to ignore you! In fact, as we saw, it has much less to do with negative reasons, than personal constructive ones. Downtime serves to relax the minds and set it back onto the right course before getting back to business.

Dr. Eric Berne, the founder of the psychological school of Transactional Analysis (abbreviated TA) coined the terms “OK” and “Not OK” to describe two essential types of people. The “OK” types are secure and confident in who they are and carry little emotional “baggage” whereas the “Not OK” types are insecure about themselves and often feel inferior. Dr. Berne also helped to define certain terms that were important in studying social interaction. When two people meet eventually one of the persons will acknowledge the presence of the other person. He called this the “transactional stimulus” where a “transaction” refers to a conversation between people. When people interact to each other, they talk or express nonverbal body communication, they issue a “transactional response”. Those that are (obsessively) interested in social dynamics often begin to think of interactions down to the unit. These definitions, however, are merely presented for interest sake, since for our purpose they aren’t terribly important.

Berne’s approach was much different from that of Freud who though perhaps too simplistically, that he could learn everything about someone just by asking them, and then listening to their response. Berne felt that therapists could learn more about people by watching their body language and facial expressions instead of words by themselves.

Eric Berne published a very popular and interesting book called Games People Play in 1964. To date it has sold over five million copies. The book describes the function and dysfunction that happens in human interactions. Without getting into too much detail, let’s look at one example of a game.

The example I wanted to bring forward makes light of how we control our interactions with people by the tone and words we choose. As a boss, if we attack an employee by taking up a controlling “parental” role we will normally elicit a childish tantrum in return. The real way to deal with adult situations is to attack them from a constructive integrity based position where we act like “adults”. Adult actions normally yield adult responses, but as we see in Berne’s book, not everyone uses the best framework to work through life. As he sees it, some people get stuck between three ego states, the “Parent”, “Child” and “Adult”. Berne outlines well over ninety games that people play, some good, but mostly bad. He defines games as social interactions that are counterproductive. Today, there are few ardent followers that use the TA approach in any rigid way, even the ego states have been scrutinized, however, the principles of the method do help us look at how we run our lives and the ways we hold ourselves back through games we play with ourselves and others. He also ran a results-based framework which was new to psychiatry at the time and says that if it’s not working for you and you aren’t getting the results you want, change it!