Book review: Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World by Alex (Sandy) Pentland.
This book makes it clear that verbal communication is a recent evolutionary development in humans which has only replaced a modest amount of the communication that our pre-linguistic ancestors used. The fact that we are much more aware of our verbal communication than our other forms of communication shouldn’t cause us to underestimate those other forms.
A good deal of the studies mentioned in the book consist of measures of nonverbal communication in, say, speed dating can predict results about as reliably as I’d expect from analyzing the words. These could be criticized for not ruling out the possibility that the nonverbal signals were merely responses to information communicated by words. But at least one study avoids this – entrepreneurs pitching business plans to VCs showed nonverbal signals that were excellent predictors of whether the VCs would accept the business plans, before getting any verbal feedback from the VCs. Even more surprising, investments made by VCs with nonverbal information about the entrepreneurs did better than those evaluated on written-only presentations.
The sociometers used to measure these nonverbal signals have potential to be used in helping group decision making by automatically detecting the beginnings of groupthink or polarization, which should in principle allow leaders to stop those trends before they do much harm. But it’s not obvious whether many people will want to admit that analyzing the words of a conversation has as little importance as this research implies.
One of the more interesting methods of communication is for people to mimic each others body language. This is surprisingly effective at creating mutual interest and agreement.
The sociometer data can be of some value for information aggregators by helping to distinguish independent pieces of information from redundant information by detecting which people are likely to have correlated ideas and which are likely to have independent ideas.
I wish this book were mistaken, and that most of human interaction could be analyzed the way we analyze language. But it seems clear that unconscious parts of our minds contain a good deal of our intelligence.