The more obnoxiously “alpha” the better, apparently…
“Males who successfully made ‘contact’ courtship initiation with females exhibited different body language in this pre-contact phase than did males who did not make contact with females,” write the Austrian-American research team in this month’s edition of the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour.
According to the researchers, the necessary traits included significantly more glancing behaviours, “space-maximisation movements”, touching of other men and less closed body movements.
I think this stuff is fascinating not simply for it’s obvious uses, but because I think we can learn a lot about the kinds of signals we’re sending in general. How should you carry yourself when you walk into a business meeting full of strangers? A room full of people waiting to hear you speak? How should you interact? It seems you can get pretty far just by taking up space in the right sort of way.
[Link via politicaltheory.info]
I’ve often wondered about such human biology factors as a female occasional lecturer in the mostly male world of tech policy. It has struck me that as primates, most of my audiences are not accustomed to orienting to females as authority figures. It has nothing to do with sexism or anything cultural, it is pure biology. Also, being young is something of a handicap (was, I’m not so young now). Anyway, the thing I found I could do was adopt compensating primate signals of authority–lots of eye contact, in particular, and some cultural signals–eyeglasses and a tweedy suit. Despite this the person I least enjoyed debating in the Beltway policy world was a chap who happened to be blessed with a tremendously deep, powerful voice. It had nothing to do with any of his arguments, which were often rather sketchy, but the power of his voice over the audience was downright hypnotic.
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I’ve often wondered about such human biology factors as a female occasional lecturer in the mostly male world of tech policy. It has struck me that as primates, most of my audiences are not accustomed to orienting to females as authority figures. It has nothing to do with sexism or anything cultural, it is pure biology. Also, being young is something of a handicap (was, I’m not so young now). Anyway, the thing I found I could do was adopt compensating primate signals of authority–lots of eye contact, in particular, and some cultural signals–eyeglasses and a tweedy suit. Despite this the person I least enjoyed debating in the Beltway policy world was a chap who happened to be blessed with a tremendously deep, powerful voice. It had nothing to do with any of his arguments, which were often rather sketchy, but the power of his voice over the audience was downright hypnotic.
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Best in the best
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