Reading People - A bad attitude or a bad hairday

Kinesics, the study of body language, is one of the most widely misunderstood "sciences" ever to have ridden the wave of popular culture. With the publication of Julius Fast's Body Language in 1970, people everywhere began to study the crossed legs, facial tics, and pantshitching habits of their friends and acquaintances. Like kids with secret decoder rings, they hoped that a few behavioral quirks would reveal a person's deepest feelings and motivations.

It doesn't always work that way. Fast himself cautioned that mastering body language is a formidable proposition: "A study of body language is a study of the mixture of all body movements from the very deliberate to the completely unconscious, from those that apply only in one culture to those that cut across all cultural barriers." Any system so complex isn't exactly user-friendly. But despite Fast's own warnings, reading body language became all the rage. A generation later, plenty of people still think twice before crossing their arms at a meeting. Toward the end of Body Language, Fast pinpoints one of the most troubling problems with kinesics. He discusses that always intriguing posture, crossed legs: "Can crossed legs . . . express character? Do we, in the way we hold our legs when we sit, give a clue to our inner nature? As with all body language signals, there is no simple yes-or-no answer. Crossed legs or parallel legs can be a clue to what the person is feeling, to the emotional state at the moment, but they may also mean nothing at all."

Body language often reflects just a physical condition (such as a bad back) or a temporary state of mind (like frustration), not a more permanent character trait. A person's body language may shift from moment to moment and setting to setting. So if you've only met somebody once it's risky to judge her personality by her body language. Everyone gets tense at times; that doesn't mean we're all a bunch of nervous Nellies. But if someone seems tightly wound every time you meet her, you've probably spotted a character trait—or, at the very least, a recurring theme in her life—not just a bad hair day.