Last Wednesday, Columbia’s Psychology Department held a colloquium featuring Dr. Dana Carney, who gave a presentation on the nuances of nonverbal behavior and communication.

On Wednesday, Dr. Dana Carney from the University of California, Berkeley joined Columbia Psychology Department’s colloquium series to give a guest lecture entitled “The Impact of Ordinary, Everyday Nonverbal Behaviors–Research and Theory.”

Dr. Carney studies social behavior, specifically the behavioral expression of prejudice, political affiliation, generosity, power, and status. Her work explores what we do with our expressions and body language to communicate biases and status, among other ideas. 

Her talk focused on her recent research exploring nonverbal behavior and response in relation to detecting racial bias and deception. It also introduced the idea of nonverbal communication being rooted in theory, a concept that went largely unexplored prior to her research. 

Dr. Carney began her presentation with the story of the mathematical horse Clever Hans. Clever could answer math problems asked by his owner in front of a group of people by tapping his foot a certain number of times. However, when asked these questions in private, he was unable to provide the correct answer. The reality was, Clever Hans wasn’t exceptionally good at math but at reading nonverbal cues; he would notice how the people around him smiled or held their breath as he approached the correct answer and would stop tapping his foot. 

Dr. Carney continued with another example: teachers being told how their students would perform. She cited a study that showed how students performed better if their teachers were told that those students were particularly smart or high-achieving, and vice versa.

These examples that Dr. Carney described exemplified the importance and effectiveness of nonverbal communication. These examples also gave rise to the popularity of double-blind placebo control experiments—experiments in which neither the subject nor the experimenter knows which trial includes the placebo. Since nonverbal cues can so effectively influence the behavior of others, double-blind studies try to minimize those unconscious influences. 

She then continued to outline her own research, which explored four major areas: racial bias, deception, status, and attraction, with a large focus on racial bias.

In the experiments studying racial bias, Dr. Carney sought whether nonverbal expression was automatic, or could be corrected to display a specific belief. The experiment featured subliminal and supraliminal trials, in which there was no social pressure or high social pressure to behave a certain way, respectively. Photos of white and black individuals were displayed and the action potential of the participant, or their tendency to smile, was measured. 

The study concluded that in the subliminal trials, participants smiled more toward white individuals and less toward black individuals. That gap was smaller in the supraliminal trials, suggesting that with high social pressure to behave a certain way, automatic reactions can be corrected and changed. The data suggested that bias can be revealed through nonverbal behavior and can also be controlled when the subject has the motivation and opportunity to do so. 

Dr. Carney also emphasized that historically, similar behavioral labs typically had only white participants. Evidence regarding how people of other racial or social groups reacted to similar tests is limited, and therefore this will be a focus of her future research. 

The second portion of the presentation focused on detecting deception, another branch of Dr. Carney’s research. The premise for this work was that detecting a lie or deceit is often critical to safety and survival, yet people are generally inaccurate at recognizing these things. 

Her experiments concluded that when asked indirectly, participants have increased accuracy at detecting deception than when they are conscious of their decision or under pressure. Dr. Carney explained that people are often hesitant to call someone a liar due to the social demand of being polite. When that social demand is taken away, however, accuracy increases.

Further, Dr. Carney said that participants can be trained to “trust their gut,” or be in tune with unconscious physical responses to deception. Participants who learned how to do this saw a 2% to 5% improvement in their ability to detect liars. She noted that while this is not a large change, it is significant because of how uncommon it is to see this metric move at all.The data and patterns from Dr. Carney’s findings suggest that frameworks and hypotheses could be developed to drive future research.

Nonverbal behaviors affect every interaction we have, whether it be a formal discussion, casual conversation, or passing comment. Ideas can be conveyed and responded to without ever saying a word. Nonverbal communication plays a large role in our relationships with each other and as Dr. Carney emphasized toward the end of her talk, we must understand our nonverbal behaviors in order to better understand each other.

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