Subliminal

PART II The Social Unconscious

CHAPTER 5 Reading People How we communicate without speaking … how to know who’s the boss by watching her eyes

Your amicable words mean nothing if your body seems to be saying something different.

—JAMES BORG

IN THE LATE summer of 1904, just a few months before the start of Einstein’s “miracle year,” the New York Times reported on another German scientific miracle, a horse that “can do almost everything but talk.”¹ The story, the reporter assured us, was not drawn from the imagination but was based on the observations of a commission appointed by the Prussian minister of education, as well as the observations of the reporter himself. The subject of the article was described as a stallion, later dubbed Clever Hans, who could perform arithmetic and intellectual tasks on the level of those performed in one of today’s third- grade classrooms. Since Hans was nine that would have been appropriate for his age, if not his species. In fact, rather like the average human nine-year-old, Hans had by then received four years of formal instruction, homeschooled by his owner, a Herr Wilhelm von Osten. Von Osten, who taught math at a local gymnasium— something like a high school—had a reputation for being an old crank, and also for not caring if he was viewed that way. Every day at a certain hour von Osten stood before Hans—in full view of his neighbors—and instructed the horse by employing various props and a blackboard, then rewarded him with a carrot or a piece of sugar.

Hans learned to respond to his master’s questions by stamping his right hoof. The New York Times reporter described how, on one occasion, Hans was told to stamp once for gold, twice for silver, and three times for copper, and then correctly identified coins made from those metals. He identified colored hats in an analogous manner. Using the sign language of hoof taps, he could also tell time; identify the month and the day of the week; indicate the number of 4’s in 8, 16, and 32; add 5 and 9; and even indicate the remainder when 7 was divided by 3. By the time the reporter witnessed this display, Hans had become something of a celebrity. Von Osten had been exhibiting him at gatherings throughout Germany—even at a command performance before the kaiser himself—and he never charged admission, because he was trying to convince the public of the potential for humanlike intelligence in animals. So much interest was there in the phenomenon of the high-IQ horse that a commission had been convened to assess von Osten’s claims, and it concluded that no trickery was involved in Hans’s feats. According to the statement issued by the commission, the explanation for the horse’s ability lay in the superior teaching methods employed by von Osten—methods that corresponded to those employed in Prussia’s own elementary schools. It’s not clear if the “superior teaching methods” referred to the sugar or the carrots, but according to one commission member, the director of the Prussian Natural History Museum, “Herr von Osten has succeeded in training Hans by cultivating in him a desire for delicacies.” He added, “I doubt whether the horse really takes pleasure in his studies.” Even more evidence, I suppose, of Hans’s startling humanity.

But not everyone was convinced by the commission’s conclusions. One telling indication that there might be more to Hans’s feats than an advance in equine teaching methodology was that Hans could sometimes answer von Osten’s questions even if von Osten didn’t verbalize them. That is, von Osten’s horse seemed to be able to read his mind. A psychologist named Oskar Pfungst decided to investigate. With von Osten’s encouragement, Pfungst conducted a series of experiments. He discovered that the horse could answer questions posed by people other than von Osten, but only if the questioners knew the answer, and only if they were visible to Hans during the hoof tapping.

It required a series of additional careful experiments, but Pfungst eventually found that the key to the horse’s intellectual feats lay in involuntary and unconscious cues displayed by the questioner. As soon as a problem was posed, Pfungst discovered, the questioner would involuntarily and almost imperceptibly bend forward, which prompted Hans to begin tapping. Then, as the correct answer was reached, another slight bit of body language would signal Hans to stop. It was a “tell,” as the poker crowd calls it, an unconscious change of demeanor that broadcasts a clue to a person’s state of mind. Every one of the horse’s questioners, Pfungst noted, made similar “minimal muscular movements” without being aware of doing so. Hans might not have been a racehorse, but he had the heart of a poker player.

In the end Pfungst demonstrated his theory with a flourish by playing the role of Hans and enlisting twenty- five experimental subjects to question him. None were aware of the precise purpose of the experiment, but all were aware they were being observed for clues that might give the answer away. Twenty- three of the twenty-five made such movements anyway, though all denied having done so. Von Osten, for the record, refused to accept Pfungst’s conclusions and continued to tour Germany with Hans, drawing large and enthusiastic crowds.

As anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of a fellow driver’s display of the middle finger knows, nonverbal communication is sometimes quite obvious and conscious. But then there are those times when a significant other says, “Don’t look at me like that,” and you respond, “Don’t look at you like what?,” knowing full well the nature of the feelings you were so sure you had hidden. Or you might smack your lips and proclaim that your spouse’s scallop-and-cheddar casserole is yummy but somehow still elicit the response “What, you don’t like it?” Don’t fret; if a horse can read you, why not your spouse?

Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, and those messages may reveal more than our carefully chosen words and sometimes be at odds with them. Since much, if not most, of the nonverbal signaling and reading of signals is automatic and performed outside our conscious awareness and control, through our nonverbal cues we unwittingly communicate a great deal of information about ourselves and our state of mind. The gestures we make, the position in which we hold our bodies, the expressions we wear on our faces, and the nonverbal qualities of our speech—all contribute to how others view us.

THE POWER OF nonverbal cues is particularly evident in our relationship with animals because, unless you live in a Pixar movie, nonhuman species have a limited understanding of human speech. Like Hans, though, many animals are sensitive to human gestures and body language.² One recent study, for example, found that when trained properly, a wolf can be a decent acquaintance and respond to a human’s nonverbal signals.³ Though you wouldn’t want to name a wolf Fido and leave it to play with your one-year-old, wolves are actually very social animals, and one reason they can respond to nonverbal cues from humans is that they have a rich repertoire of such signals within their own community. Wolves engage in a number of cooperative behaviors that require skill in predicting and interpreting the body language of their peers. So if you’re a wolf, you know that when a fellow wolf holds its ears erect and forward and its tail vertical, it is signaling dominance. If it pulls its ears back and narrows its eyes, it is suspicious. If it flattens its ears against its head and tucks its tail between its legs, it is fearful. Wolves haven’t been explicitly tested, but their behavior seems to imply that they are capable of at least some degree of ToM. Still, wolves are not man’s best friend. Instead it is the dog, which originated from wolves, that is best at reading human social signals. At that task, dogs appear even more skilled than our primate relatives. That finding surprised a lot of people because primates are far superior at other typical human endeavors, like problem solving and cheating.⁴ This suggests that during the process of domestication, evolution favored those dogs who developed mental adaptations allowing them to be better companions to our species⁵—and hence to avail themselves of the benefits of home and hearth.

One of the most revealing studies of human nonverbal communication was performed using an animal with which humans rarely share their homes, at least not intentionally: the rat. In that study, students in an