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A new book contends unconscious social signals offer a window into intentions and allow us to accurately predict the outcome of situations. Those who understand how this works can gain a competitive advantage.
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By Ellen Pearlman
Strategic Thinker: Alex Pentland
Credentials:
Pentland is MIT's Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences as well as Director of Human Dynamics Research and a leading figure at the MIT Media Lab. He is a pioneer in the fields of organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science. In 1997, Newsweek named him one of 100 Americans likely to shape this century.
Big Idea:
Unconscious social signals (honest signals) offer a window into our intentions and allow us to accurately predict the outcomes of situations.
Book:
Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World, published by MIT Press, October 2008
Our schooling and work experiences have taught us that the content of what we say is what counts and will directly impact the outcome we receive. But now MIT Professor Alex Pentland is turning this idea upside down with his research on honest signals. He has found out that how you say things is more predictive of the outcome than what you say.
"Honest signals are the true measures of our selves and our society," says Pentland, "and offer an unmatched window into our financial, cultural, and organizational health. By understanding these subtle patterns we can better understand ourselves, and begin to create true collective intelligences."
In his new book, Honest Signals, Pentland explains that there are two channels of communication. The one we are most familiar with is language, but there is a second channel that revolves around social relations. And it is this social channel, not the spoken one, that "profoundly influences major decisions in our lives even thought we are largely unaware of it," Pentland says.
Intuitively we all use this channel-although some of us are better at it than others-quickly reading other people's intentions through their unconscious, nonlinguistic behavior. In fact, you often trust your intuition to tell you what a person really means, rather than what they are saying. For example, if you turn the sound off on your television when two politicians are debating you can get a better sense of who is in charge of the situation than you can by just listening to their words. In fact, Pentland says, analyses of debates among candidates for the U.S. presidency show that the fundamental tone of one's voice "predicts who will win the election." S.W. Gregory and T.J. Galeasher, who published research on the nonverbal communications of U.S. presidential candidates in 2002, found that the candidate who set the tone of the debate was seen as the most dominant one by voters.
In order to study this social channel of communication, Pentland used computer-signal processing tools for measuring four types of unconscious behaviors that, he says, are strongly predictive of future behavior. The tools were packaged into a wearable badge-like device that Pentland and his team called a sociometer. This allowed them to do real-time assessments of the social interactions of hundreds of people in different situations, such as negotiations, dating, selling, bluffing and the like.
The Four Types Of Honest Signals
Next: The Four Types Of Honest Signals
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