The Book of Tells (Peter Collett)[unlocked]

GREETING TELLS
remember, and the fourth is that they're so anxious that
they can't file the information away. The people who are
best at remembering names are highly motivated. Many
use a mnemonic to help them. The British Prime Minister
Benjamin Disraeli is reputed to have had a remarkable
memory for names, but it wasn't infallible. Asked what he
did when he couldn't remember someone's name, he confessed
that he always resorted to the same strategy - he'd
turn to the person and say, 'How is the old complaint?'
Disraeli claimed that it always worked.
Parting Tells
Memory is governed by 'primacy' and 'recency' - the
things we remember best are those that we heard first or
heard last. It's the same with social encounters. What
shapes our opinions more than anything else is
what happens when we first meet someone, and what
happens when we leave that person. That's why we invest
so much effort in greeting and parting rituals - we instinctively
know that the way we appear to others depends
on how we say hello and goodbye.
In some respects parting rituals are rather similar to
greeting rituals. Like greeting rituals, they are concerned
with transition. 12 They also have a rather similar, but
reversed, temporal structure to greetings - while greetings
consist of a 'recognition phase', an 'approach phase' and
a 'meeting phase', partings are made up of a 'separation
phase', a 'withdrawal phase' and a 'farewell phase'.
Imagine that two young people, a man and a woman,
are having a drink in a bar after work. At some point the
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