Tagged: psychology

Do you believe in body language?


Sometime during high school, I came across this article in a magazine that talked about deducing personality traits from body language—for instance, it said, if while sitting your toes point inwards towards each other, then you’re likely to be an introvert. I’ve found atleast this small bit to be true in my experiences with a lot of people so far. The article mentioned a bunch of other small things which I found quite intriguing.

So one day, at IITK, I went to the library and grabbed a bunch of books on body language, deciding that its time to make myself a self-trained expert and exploit this new learned ability to predict personality from body language to enhance my social life :D Ok, that was bull shit, but yeah I did get those books.

However, the books were mostly trashy. And one day, Dr. Lilavati Krishnan saw me with one of those books and she gave a ‘I’m truly disappointed’ look to me and said that this subject was essentially dead in the academic community, having failed to establish credence. (ok, please don’t quote me on this—my memory fails often and this might not have been what she said exactly, but as far as I remember this was the general idea).

But I find it difficult to believe that its a complete waste. I mean that toe thinggy works everytime, without fail! Try it out on yourself and your friends and you’ll see for yourself. There has to be some connection between body language and personality traits! What do people think?

Its all in the seat


Have you ever wondered how when you walk into a seating place (be it an Auditorium, the Airport, a lecture hall, a seminar or any other place), you always seem to “want” to sit in some particular spot; and you’re feel disappointed when that spot has been taken by someone. Mind you, this spot might not be precise — infact, mostly its very fuzzy, and depends highly on the context (class/movie/game etc) — however, it is consistent in the sense that in more or less every lecture you’d find yourself sitting (or intending to sit) at the same place.

I have often thought about this, and its my strong belief that the choices we make for our seats (much as the choices we make for anything else) can tell a lot about our psyche and personality. More than once, I tried to embark upon an experimental evaluation of this theory, but it never worked out. The most interesting aspect of course, would be to draw some generalized conclusions, such that given a person’s seating pattern, you would be able to say something about his/her personality and psychological make up. Wouldn’t that be interesting? I’m sure the intelligence agencies already have stuff like this that they don’t make public!