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Fear of being discovered or not being believed
Face and body, the two channels of non-verbal communication: the first shows emotions; the second shows how we deal with them, how we react to them (1) (2).
Two channels that are difficult to control, which are therefore a mirror of what we really feel, and for this we must thank our limbic system, fast and essential, which escapes the control of the higher brain, just enough to leave those clues so precious for those who have decided to devote themselves to the interpretation of non-verbal language.
Emotions, therefore, before anything else. Everything starts from them and it is they, through their manifestation, that allow us to corroborate, doubt or deny what is said in words, because after all we also speak with our bodies and listen with our eyes.
However, if face and body reveal to us the onset, sometimes fleeting because repressed, and the reaction to an emotion, they tell us nothing about the why that emotion is experienced: we only know that something is happening, but not what caused it.
This window open on the what, but closed on the why, creates a potential interpretative risk for non-verbal communication, especially if one chooses the shortcut, where the what overshadows the why so much as to make us forget that the essence of what is communicated lies right there, in the deep reasons that make what is said be said.
The risk should not be underestimated, especially where this suddenly detected emotion is a single moment, a sort of fracture in what has been up to that moment and what will be afterwards, a fracture that could be just a small disturbance and not, on the contrary, a signal of a change, which could warn us about the continuation of the communication.
Imagine, for example, that during a conversation, up to that moment positive and fruitful, our interlocutor fleetingly shows, through his facial expressions, an emotion of contempt, followed by a posture that seems to confirm what was felt (breaking eye contact, crossed arms, and so on). In this case, our natural reaction might be to wonder what we said to provoke this reaction – after all, until then, everything was going well – without considering that, perhaps, our interlocutor simply recalled an unpleasant episode that had upset him, which happened before our meeting.
An even more negative and dangerous effect, resulting from relying only on the what, ignoring the why – and here I come to the title of the piece – occurs when, for any reason, our goal is to understand whether our interlocutor is lying or not (an interest that, of course, is not necessarily confined to police interrogations), where the risks of this superficiality of judgment are so well known that they have been classified as “the Othello error”, a term first used by Paul Ekman in (3) and which denotes an error based on misinterpreting the emotions felt and manifested by the person whose truthfulness we want to establish.
This error refers directly to the famous tragedy by William Shakespeare, in which Othello, deceived by Iago's plan, believes in his wife Desdemona's betrayal with Cassio and, during the confrontation with Desdemona, where she desperately denies the relationship, interprets her emotions as clear evidence of the fear of being discovered and not, on the contrary, as fear of not being believed, a fear further reinforced by the fact that Othello made her believe he had already had Cassio killed, thus eliminating for her the possibility that Cassio himself could further deny the existence of the relationship.
Othello's conviction is so strong that it makes him reject the very possibility of having misinterpreted what Desdemona was telling him – or rather, how she was saying it – which will lead him, as is well known, to kill her, realizing only afterwards, when it is too late, the mistake he made.
The problem, unfortunately, is not easy to solve, since accessing the why of an emotion means accessing the most private part of our self, a part that is both conscious and unconscious, thus difficult to investigate and not by chance investigations in this sense are generally part of the activities of psychologists and psychotherapists.
However, since we must try to do something, the only suggestion is not to stop at the first sign, but to try to investigate, as far as the context allows, for example by trying to rephrase what has just been said and that apparently gave rise to the emotion, in order to try, so to speak, to validate it, to check that it was experienced as part of the conversation and not, rather, a sort of emotional interruption with respect to it.
Another possibility is to explicitly hand control over to our interlocutor, asking a question whose sole purpose is to check whether, in the answer, a confirmation of the emotion manifested can be found; many times, in fact, it happens that the question has the power to bring back the interlocutor, making him abandon the fleeting thought that caused the emotion.
In conclusion, the strategy is always the same: to seek confirmation or denial of something that has been observed, especially when this something has significant weight, for better or for worse, on what is being said and on the objectives that, based on what is said, one hopes to achieve. In the end, it is always the age-old battle between appearance and being, where the former can be taken as a mirror of the latter only after careful observation and not, on the contrary, by elevating as proof what was only a single and faint signal.
Andrea Zinno - De Corporis Voce
Bibliographic references
All Rights Reserved - De Corporis Voce - Andrea Zinno