Media Mindfulness

We’ve come in peace. Take us to your leader…

Newsweek has an interesting piece on Bush’s body language on his recent trip to Latin America. This relates to a new category I’m adding called “cognition.” I’m increasingly interested in how the mind receives and processes information. This is an area that is consistently ignored in mainstream media literacy practices. I think the following interview with a body language expert Peter Andersen (The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Body Language) demonstrates why cognition is so important for “reading” people, and images of them in the media.

Bush’s Body Language in Latin America - Newsweek: World News - MSNBC.com:

NEWSWEEK: Why are images so key to how we regard world leaders?
Peter Andersen: Pictures transcend culture and literacy levels. You don’t have to read all of a 2,000-word newsmagazine cover story to get something from it. That image on the cover, it has irrefutable and intrinsic meaning. You can have an opposing article, but there’s no way to refute a photo. It is what it is and it resonates deeply within us for that reason. Images even affect different parts of the brain than language does. The structures that process face are in a part of the brain that’s very intuition and quick judgment. It has a logic of its own and it’s extraordinarily powerful.

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Can the average person analyze body language accurately, or do you have to be an expert?
You can’t read a person like a book, but most people are really good at a process called “thin-slicing.” We make judgments about race, gender and age with that first look. Then there’s body language—people are really intuitive at figuring out whether that there are good vibes there or not. It doesn’t take five hours for us to do that, it can take 30 seconds. And, our research shows that those first impressions are pretty accurate. You can tell whether a person is comfortable, whether they are anxious or warm. Those judgments are made very rapidly.

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