Things that Yoram knows: does the way you walk betray your personality?

Ze'ev says "I have an innate ability to analyze a person's character based on the way they walk. From early childhood, I stood by the virtue of guessing the character of each person, even from a distance of hundreds of meters, what are their main and prominent character traits" and wonders if he is endowed with a unique virtue

You're probably not that special. We transmit information to the world all the time about our identity, our feelings, our status and our intentions in countless ways, only a minority of which are verbal and our minds are constantly busy deciphering and analyzing such information from others. The face is, without a doubt, the main billboard of this communication: each of the basic emotions: fear, anger, sadness, joy, disgust and surprise has a unique facial expression that every person, regardless of culture or life experience, is programmed to recognize. But not only the face gives away information: people catalog and extract information about their social environment from countless clues in body language. For example, intentions can be learned from body postures and movements: by looking at a person reaching for a coffee cup, a human observer can assess whether the goal is to drink, serve the drink to another, or remove the cup from the table. All this before the bone was moved from its place when the only source of information is the movement of the hand: the speed, the flow of the movement (the duration of the acceleration at the beginning of the movement and the "braking distance" of the palm before touching the handle) and the angles of the elbow and palm.

Each of us has a unique walk

And what about your mysterious remote sensing ability? Walking is a personal characteristic related to body structure, health and mood. Each of us has a unique gait and it is very difficult to imitate by deliberately changing the movement. The person moves on two legs, therefore the weight of the body is carried with each step once on the right leg and once on the left leg. The way in which this load is transferred from one side to the other is the "fingerprint" which is easy to identify and difficult to fake. When you see a person walking from a distance, you can learn about him not only from his walk, but also from his clothing, body structure, and even from the tone of his voice and the attitude of others towards him. To learn about the unique contribution of the walking style to the identification and recognition of features, it is necessary to separate the walking from the walking person.

The task seems impossible, but it turns out that the relative displacement of a few glowing points is enough for the brain to attribute to each point a joint in the body and interpret this displacement as the movement of the human body in space (As demonstrated in the video above this paragraph). From brain scan experiments it becomes clear that those spots of light are enough to activate the mechanisms responsible for human recognition and for predicting traits and intentions. In this way, it can be proven that not only you, a wolf, but almost every person creates in his mind a character with attributes, feelings and intentions based on pieces of information such as the length of the stride, the height of the knee lift, the movement of the hands or the roll of the foot. A detailed geometric analysis of body postures showed that a fairly accurate assessment of sadness, fear, anger or joy is derived from the tilt angles of the neck, elbow and knee and from the "phase difference", meaning the difference in the opening angle of different joints moving at the same time. In fact, our brains are so programmed to look for personality characteristics from hints of movement that even abstract geometric shapes will gain character and personality if only they move in a way that can be attributed to the characteristics of human walking. The anthropologist Markus Kupensteiner went further and presented the researchers with an image of a two-dimensional sphere moving on the computer screen in a simple wave motion (sine). It turns out that by changing the horizontal and vertical brightness, the wavelength or adding a "vibration" to the undulating movement, you can give the ball not only a "mood" but a real personality. Psychologists distinguish 5 stable fundamental traits, the combination of which builds the unique "personality" of each person ("the five big traits"): introversion (or extroversion), pleasant manners, orientation (diligence and responsibility), emotional stability (neuroticism) and mental openness. It is enough for the ball to move from the left side of the screen to the right side in short, shaky waves for us to detect "instability", and if we increase the speed and the amplitude of the sine wave (in the vertical direction) the ball will also gain extraversion. There was an agreement among the researched on how to structure the movement of the ball so that it would acquire one or another "character".

The results of the apartments are not accurate

But how accurate is that intuitive determination of personality characteristics based on the manner of movement? When you record a person's way of walking and ask observers to evaluate his character, it turns out that the results are frequent but not accurate: different observers similarly evaluated the character of the person whose movement is represented by the moving dots on the screen, but the connection between this evaluation and personality characteristics that were evaluated separately is quite weak. The only characteristic that the observers were able to estimate with a high degree of accuracy was the gender. 85% of the men were identified this way based on their gait and about 70% of the women. When the viewers were asked to estimate the age, a systematic error was discovered: the walking figures were estimated to be older than their actual age. It is possible that dancing provides more reliable information about the dancer than just walking. Musicologist Geoff Luck tested the nature of movement to music of people who underwent a personality diagnosis using a standard psychological test. According to this research, there are indeed dance styles associated with fundamental character traits: people prone to rapid mood swings danced in frantic and choppy movements. "Smooth" and rounded movements were associated with openness and pleasant manners (a general tendency for cooperation and kindness). Those who scored high in "intentionality" meaning responsibility, self-discipline and diligence tended to make wider body movements and in particular moved their head more and moved farther with their hand movements. Latin music was the genre that produced the most difference in movement according to personality characteristics.

 The manner of walking is not enough to accurately assess a complex characteristic such as character, but nevertheless important information can be extracted from it. For example, it turned out that street robbers looking for a convenient victim to attack use, even if not consciously, the analysis of the way they walk. In "serial robbers" it is possible to identify movement characteristics that suggest a low ability to fight. When videos of people walking down the street were shown to convicted robbers they correctly identified the victims. A robber in the phase of locating the "prey" is tasked with a difficult casting task: he must decide whether to add the passerby to the "robbed team" based on a brief appearance in the dark, and he relies on clues transmitted by the muscles and joints. Even a video showing movement in light points only makes it possible to identify easy victims of an attack. A comparative analysis revealed that walking with long steps in relation to height, lifting a knee, swinging an opposite hand, and smooth and springy joint movement conveys to the robber that it is worth waiting for the next candidate.

In conclusion Zeev, you are not alone. Even if we are not all aware of it, we make detailed acquaintances with people even before we have even seen their faces, we all transmit quite a lot of information at every step, but the judgment about the character should be suspended until there is an opportunity to stop and talk.

Did an interesting, intriguing, strange, delusional or funny question occur to you? sent to ysorek@gmail.com

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