ABSTRACT
Reading faces and bodies Our social interactions exist between other members of our species, so-called conspecifics. As such we need an effective system of keeping track of who is who. We need to remember what people look like and what their typical behaviors are. Facial and bodily appearances provide only superficial clues as to a person’s inner state. But given that we cannot directly observe inner states but we can observe faces and bodies, there is a strong incentive to extract whatever information we can from a face or body. We need to know whether someone is likely to cooperate or cheat. Skilled basketball players, for instance, learn to detect fake passes from body language alone (Sebanz & Shiffrar, 2009). We need to know whether someone is happy or sad, or angry and likely to use force. Faces and bodies (together with voice cues) provide an important source of such information.
