Experts: Putin won nonverbal war
Carrie Keating was almost slack-jawed with amazement by the end of President Donald Trump’s news conference with Russian leader Vladimir Putin Monday. Keating has studied the nonverbal gestures of politicians for three decades, but she found the performance between the two men on the stage nothing short of incredible.
“Whoever made the arrangements, they so clearly favored Putin. You saw him do almost every dominant behavior you could stage in social science lab study,” Keating, a psychology professor who studies charisma and leadership at Colgate University.
Keating quickly ticked off more than a dozen nonverbal assertions of dominance by Putin — such as Putin’s agile hop onto the podium vs. Trump’s lumbering walk.
But the key nonverbal victory for Putin was the fact that he spoke first and spoke the longest, she said. In research conducted in her lab, she said, in groups of strangers, the person in the group who spoke first and longest almost always ended up having the most influence during subsequent problem-solving tests or exercises.
“In that way Putin was absolutely dominant. He spoke for so long at the beginning, just going on and on while everyone else including Trump had to wait on him,” Keating said.
The one instance where Putin appeared to hit pause on his alpha male behavior was during his answers to questions about Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 election. “You saw him shrug a lot and raise his eyebrows almost in a childlike way and gestured with an open palm. We call those approach gestures. They’re meant to suggest, ‘I’m not here to hurt you,’ to seem nonthreatening,” Keating said.
But then Putin’s face absolutely danced when Trump started talking about the missing servers and Hillary Clinton’s emails, she said.
In the face of Putin’s performance, Keating concluded, “maybe the one thing Trump had going for him was how tall he was ... that’s maybe the one aspect he may have won.”
There is serious research devoted to the science of nonverbal communication, including Keating’s, but academics caution that it’s often hard to draw firm conclusions from studying limited interactions.
“Whenever there’s a big meeting of leaders, you see all the body language ‘experts’ on TV with interpretations. But the reality is little of that is validated by science,” said David Matsumoto, who has studied nonverbal expressions for more than 30 years. “Yes, there’s a wealth of information in nonverbal expressions, but the problem is that there are real limits.”