The Book of Tells (Peter Collett)[unlocked]

TELLS
attitude to the other person. It also affects how long you
get to talk and how often you get interrupted. How you
position your arms and legs when you're seated also provides
a wealth of information about your mood and
intentions, showing whether you feel dominant or
submissive, preoccupied or bored, involved or detached.
The way you smile - the facial muscles you use and how
rapidly you enlist them - shows whether you're genuinely
happy, faking it, lying or telling the truth, feeling anxious,
miserable, superior or unsure of yourself. Speech disfluencies
are also highly informative. The way you hesitate
when you're speaking, how you 'um' and 'er', provides
important clues to your mood. While the words you
choose, the phrases you select, and the way you construct
your utterances may convey an 'official message' to other
people, your linguistic choices also contain 'disguised
messages' which reveal your true intentions.
A tell needs to satisfy four conditions:
• It has to be some kind of activity - a feature of someone's
appearance, a movement of their body, or something
they say. Broadly speaking, tells fall into two categories -
'attributes', like height or weight, and 'actions', like folding
one's arms, smiling or using certain giveaway words
and phrases.
• The action needs to reveal something about the person
that's not directly observable - it has to tell us about their
background, their thoughts, their mood or their intentions.
It follows that not every action is a tell - it's only those
actions that convey information about someone that are
tells. Of course there are some actions that we don't
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