Comment freeze-frame campfire empathy (Score 1) 219
Just last week I read an entire book by Allan and Barbara Pease. Even this book (which promises the moon in three easy lessons) says that body language is best interpreted though consistent clusters.
Here, the static eye test amounts to a form of dead reckoning.
Claiming that this equates to the general ability to read people smacks of claiming that someone who can track big game from muddy impressions and broken twigs has the cognitive drop on Charles Darwin on all matters of big game observation.
As with personality indicators, one could in all likelihood devise fifteen other masked channels (not all of which consist of static images) with roughly the same degree of outcome correlation (where the reference outcome is something like success in group settings).
I also think this study's emphasis on freeze-frame campfire empathy is unfair to male performance. If you're in the business of poking sharp sticks at snakes or lions, the perceptual ability required is not to determine the animal's emotional state (angry, aggressive, threatened, lethal) but to determine moment by moment whether the animal will shrink back or strike forward.
The Pease book is clearly aimed at people in a sales environment (in which I also include making presentations in a board room) where the ability to form extremely rapid first impressions / first-reaction impressions is critical to career success (as opposed to short-term blood retention).
Compare the "it's not your fault" scene in Good Will Hunting (pachydermous elephant in the room) with the extended marital quarrel in Before Midnight (mass stampede of the unshackled lambs).
In the later case, neither spouse is seeing anything he and she haven't seen before (they could each write a book), but their proficiency in scorched-earth integration to identify a workable point of repair is severely put to the test.