Body Language Tutorial. Part 3 of 7 – Incongruence and Our Subconscious.

Incongruence literally means “not harmonious” per Webster’s dictionary (from incongruous). For our purposes this refers to the system of communication and the term system comprises many things… Language, content, abstraction level, tonality, etc… and last but certainly NOT least is body language. Let’s talk a bit further about how and where incongruence happens and how we vet this out…

Incongruence/congruence in body language communication happens in five major categories:

1. Contextual – The surroundings including both physical and social/cultural.
2. Historical – In reference to the person’s typical method of operation.
3. Content – The actual subject matter and verbiage they are using to convey it.
4. Speaking – This is the tone, pitch, rhythm and volume that are being used. Don’t confuse this with content… they interact, but are not the same.
5. Fundamental – This is the generally accepted, cross cultural displays of particular emotions. In other words, what “angry” looks like… Clenched fists, parsed lips, reddening of skin, furled brow… This is what most humans do when they are angry.

This incongruence/congruence is absolutely picked up by the subconscious mind of the deceit recipient. Our subconscious facilities are always on the look out for signals. Recognizing “difference” is something that has evolved into our hardwiring and is a necessary component for our survival. Take the following studies for instance….

• In a study performed in the Institute of Neurology at the University College London, subjects were shown “clips” comprised of pictures and words that flashed onto the screen for only milliseconds. Each clip was encoded with meaningful words that flashed so quickly, the participant’s conscious mind could not “see” the words. Their ability to predict outcomes based on these clips resulted in a monetary reward as an incentive. After a bit of warm up, the people were able to, with relative accuracy predict the outcomes necessary for the reward. Consciously, hey had no idea why they were picking the outcomes that they did, they generally chalked it up to “intuition”. Their subconscious was automatically working through out the process to pick up the subliminal messages.

• In another study, performed at Columbia University clips comprised of shapes and pictures shown to participants were interspersed with threatening words, such as murder or killer. Each time the words flashed, it was for only 29 milliseconds… far too quick for a human’s conscious mind to pick up and “recognize” as having been shown. The resulting activity in the amygdala was measured to check subconscious response… the result was direct and robust responses in the amygdala. This indicates that internal fear responses were happening despite any conscious knowing of why.

• In a collaborative study performed by University of Groningen and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, participants were presented with subliminal priming materials (in the form of pictures of different people flashed onto a screen). As in the other studies, the pictures flashed for only milliseconds and as such could NOT be recognized by the conscious mind. The pictures were of historical figures such as Hitler and Gandhi. The participants were then debriefed afterward and were asked questions to solicit information regarding social evaluations of themselves… For example, pictures of Hitler were subliminally shown; they were subsequently asked what kind of person they were… The results of the study were that people are AUTOMATICALLY and SUBCONSCIOUSLY directed by the nonconscious evaluations made IN COMPARISON to the primed pictures… So in comparison to Hitler… everyone was awesome. In comparison to Gandhi, it was quite a different story.

When something is presented to us during communication that our mind considers incongruent, we are sent a signal. It is up to “us”, which is our conscious mind to accept and act on the signal. Interpretation of that signal is where people sometimes run into problems.

“Well if our subconscious mind picks these cues up… how can any of us actually be lied to?”

We all come equipped with an uncannily accurate lie detection system in our subconscious perception facilities… Our eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin are constantly monitoring and processing millions and millions of bit of information every second. As I have so often spoken of before, your mind is in the constant search for pattern and predictability.

Anything that happens outside of a predicted pattern WILL be registered and you will be “notified”. Where the difficulty comes into play is in the actual notification process. Ideally there would be a little man inside of you that stands up and says “HEY, idiot! They are lying… get out of here!” As you already know though, this doesn’t happen.

Your message comes in the form of a twinge in your stomach, or a pressure in your chest. Unfortunately, it is not always as blatant as we may need… Your nonconscious faculties only have a limited number of “messages” that can be used to communicate with you and as a result they become context/content dependant and there can be much ambiguity in their actual message.

Let me give you an analogy… Imagine that you only have 100 shapes that have been cut out of cardboard that you can use to communicate with. Each shape can mean something different depending on what is going on around you… A “circle” at a social party can mean something different than a “circle” in a public bathroom.

Now imagine that the person you are communicating with is used to using colors. On top of that they can read and understand 30 – 40,000 different colors in unlimited combinations that have exponentially different meanings. They can understand the shapes you have, but the shapes are a far cry from their “native language”. The possibility for a misread is massive… This is your subconscious trying to communicate with your conscious mind.

Add to this the problems that arise from certain cognitive biases and components of our psychological immune system that push us to belief statistically and rationally untrue messages. Our conscious mind can intervene and will literally rationalize us PAST the accurate evaluation of our subconscious to push us toward ingesting what we WANT to belief.

The result? An inaccurate evaluation of the messages being fed to us and the lie or deceit has worked its magic.

So now that we have a proper understanding of where incongruence can happen and how it can result in effective deceit you have a very thorough understanding of how body language “works”. Tomorrow we will begin talking about how to actually use body language to be a more effective communicator.

As always, please visit my website The Communication Expert for more information on body language and other forms of effective communication.

The Communication Expert | David J. Parnell