Study Shows Voters See Far Beyond The Expensive Suits And Practiced Language Patterns Of Politicians
Many of us have forgotten how to judge the character of another. Their words only tell half the story. For example it is good to watch television with the sound off, this allows you to see numerous nonverbal cues. Body language alone speaks volumes about someone. You can see shy people pull their bodies inward, shift their shoulders in and put their hands in their pockets. We have patterns that emerge that tell everything about ourselves. What we think of ourselves and others. Politicians in general are not immune, but they have been cultivated to hide those flaws. Lessons in culture, neural-linguistic programming, rapport and a lot more goes in to the most prominent politicians. Bill Clinton in particular was trained by two of the best in the business Kevin Hogan and Tony Robbins. They tell them never to stretch your arms past their shoulders as it makes you seem like you are lying. You end up looking like the fisherman who said I caught a fish 'this big'!
Science Daily has a great study on nonverbal communication:
As the old saying goes, "you never get a second chance to make a first impression."
When it comes to presidential candidates in nationally televised debates, though, a series of studies by a Texas Tech University professor in the College of Media and Communication are showing the nonverbal repertoires that make up a presidential candidate's communication style are important influencers of voter reaction.
Erik Bucy, a regents professor of strategic communication at Texas Tech, is a popular guest lecturer around the world for his research on nonverbal expressions in political news and presidential debates and how those televised leader displays affect public perceptions of candidates.
Over the past year, Bucy has presented the results to several national associations, spoke at a symposium on nonverbal communication and democracy in Sweden, guest lectured at UCLA and participated in an invited conference sponsored by the C-SPAN Education Foundation and Purdue University.
Some of this work, conducted in collaboration with researchers from the University of Wisconsin (UW), is summarized in a paper entitled "The Power of Television Images in a Social Media Age: Linking Biobehavioral and Computational Approaches via the Second Screen," soon to be published in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
What Bucy and his colleagues discovered is candidates' facial expressions, gestures and voice tone do as much do as much or more to drive public reaction to the debates than what the candidates actually say."This frustrates some people who study media and politics because they want the discussion to be all about the issues," Bucy said. "What we're documenting is, in fact, people respond a lot to behavior. Not everybody pays really that close of attention to elections or knows all their party's positions on the issues, but they can get a sense of the candidates' traits by observing competitive political behavior. And traits are reliable predictors of candidate support."
Let's talk about rapport for a moment, politicians want to make a deep connection with their voters. George W Bush acted like he was a real Texan and made obvious attempts at sounding like an idiot. Today we call them 'Bush-isms' but the best way to get rapport with someone is to talk like that someone and act like that someone. Because we like ourselves and we like people like us. An old school technique for getting deep rapport was called matching and mirroring. When someone changed their body language you wait three seconds and do it yourself and make it look like you both are mirror images of each other. You can breath in sync with someone, that also works well. If you are not good at this you can really piss people off. Obama has dabbled with conversational hypnosis, you can use it redefine arguments such as:
“The issue isn't (high taxes), it's about (roads and schools), and that means..”
“I agree (taxes are high) and would add the issue isn't about the revenue but how useful we are using it..”
You lead everyone away from the problem at hand toward something that you can debate properly. One of the hidden tricks of the trade that Obama overuses is future pacing. Pushing an important agenda forward and avoiding the issue altogether:
“The issue is not the misuse of the people's taxes but how we can work together to ensure the American people benefit from their hard earned money they send to Washington every year.”
We notice everything about these politicians on a subconscious level. That is not to say that voters truly understand politicians they might get an idea about one and just vote for another selected politician. We have the information available to us but we are too busy and too distracted to notice. I've gotten myself out of very bad situations based on gut reactions that came about through nonverbal communication. I'll be adding a few pictures of politicians from the previous election and I surely would love to know what were the first thoughts you had about them.
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