14 DAY TRIAL // Countless studies so far have attempted to prove how one can tell when a person is lying, when they’re interested in something or someone else, or when they are trying only to appear so. It could very well be that all of them were looking in the wrong place, Professor Geoffrey Beattie, Head of School and Dean of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester, says on the heels of a new study shedding light on the “language of feet,” as the Telegraph can confirm.
Prof. Beattie spent years analyzing human behavior and a lot of time looking into research on how people can give themselves away by feet movement. The idea behind the most recent study, commissioned by shoemaker Jeffery West is that, while it can become extremely easy to control one’s facial expression, smiles, eyes and hand movement, most of the time we’re not even aware what we’re doing with our feet.
And this is precisely why they can tell our interlocutor plenty of things about us, including whether we’re attracted to them, interested in what they’re saying or even lying to them. For instance, the survey reveals, if a woman is attracted to her male interlocutor, her foot will move away from the rest of her body. Oppositely, if her legs are crossed or her feet are tucked away under her body, she’s not interested in the man she’s speaking to. Men, on the other hand, do not make this kind of distinction as far as “feet language” goes, the survey also shows.
“Firstly, attraction - and how people behave when they laugh. If you are meeting someone for the first time, laughter is not necessarily a good thing. What psychologists argue with laughter is that there are ambiguous signals – some psychologists think it is a whole series of signals which determine whether the laughter is a good thing. People can be laughing at you, or with you. If a woman’s feet move when she laughs, it is one of the most powerful signals that she likes you. If they are crossing the feet, or crossing the legs – not good. I know that’s true generally speaking but during laughter, it is more so,” Beattie says of the research.
Looking at the movement of the feet can also be very helpful when trying to figure out whether someone is lying. “With lying, people always get the signals systematically wrong. Everyone looks at the eyes and the face, but people are very good at inhibiting what they are doing, when actually the most reliable indication of lying is the suppression of foot movement. It’s quite weird, most people think that people move more when they lie because they are nervous. Most people look for the wrong signals in the wrong places,” Beattie explains.
However, there are certain people to whom these general guidelines don’t apply, such as alpha men and women (who tend to have complete control over their body) and arrogant people, the findings also indicate.