Opinion: On body language

by Claire Robinson

Valid questions were asked on Sunday morning’s Mediawatch about the role of television in political impression formation, and the focus of the punditry (me included) on the presentational style of the National and Labour party leaders in the first televised leaders debate on TV One. The issue: whether the focus on presentation masks attention to the ‘real’ issues, as illustrated by Jeremy Rose’s question to the Listener’s Toby Manhire about the quality of blog coverage of the campaign:

“And let’s look at that analysis because there’s a lot of almost sporting analogies and a lot less experts with kind of insight and analysis of what’s going on. Is that your view? Do you think the mainstream tends to be using pundits who talk about body language and that kind of stuff over experts who have in-depth knowledge of say the economy, or whatever the issue might be that’s being talked about?”

It is true that politics has become increasingly personalised since the introduction of television and other mass media changes, including greater newspaper competition, tabloidisation and the popularity of newer digitised forms of social networking. These have enabled the news media to give greater coverage and scrutiny to the appearance, behaviour, private lives and narratives of political leaders and leadership candidates.

Many observers worry that this phenomenon, labeled as the ‘personalisation of politics’, has become more important than ever before, to the point of taking precedence over principle, policy and the rational deliberation of objective information, in determining the outcome of democratic elections.

What makes the issue of presentation and appearance so challenging for many is that the mediated images people receive of leaders are not ‘political’ but are instead social. Take a glance at any newspaper or television coverage of leaders in a campaign. You will see lots of images of leaders socially interacting with others: be it with a child, a partner, voters, other politicians, celebrities, officials, journalists, interviewers, photographers, competitors, an audience, party members, colleagues, or protestors.

Rather than panic about this being evidence of the dumbing down of politics, it pays to look deeper into what sort of information audiences receive when they are watching these social images, which is information about political leadership.

Judgments about political leadership can and do make a difference to electoral outcomes. New Zealand election studies have found the impact of leadership on election outcomes is between 1-5%. While it is minimal compared to policy and party predisposition, in a close election (which many of our MMP elections have been) this can be the difference between winning and losing. And evidence from overseas research suggests that the impact of leadership on election outcomes is getting more important.

Of course the question then is, how can audiences form accurate leadership perceptions out of images that relate to appearance, kissing babies, walking around shopping malls and pointing fingers in debates. Isn’t leadership meant to be about trustworthiness, credibility, competence and integrity?

The reality is that political leadership today is as much about relating to voters as it is about making decisions, developing policy, articulating vision, managing teams of people and holding political parties together. And it is through tele-mediated images of leaders relating to others that people form leadership perceptions.

As social beings humans are able to intuit leadership traits out of nonverbal behaviours in social interaction settings. Even at a tele-mediated distance audiences process these images instinctively using the perceptual tools they are equipped with as social beings. They relate their understandings of the rules and conventions of social interaction with the character traits they expect effective leaders to possess, and then use this as the basis for developing a judgment about a political leader

Humans are instinctively primed to look for caring body language. We look for this in images communicating a leader’s ability to relate to ‘real’ people. We judge this through observation of their comfort in relating to others at close social distance (hand shakes, pats on the shoulder, smiles, body stance, listening). We use this to assess whether a leader is friend or foe. These assessments translate into judgments of caring, likability, trustworthiness and effective leadership, compassion and benevolence in a leader.

In political debates audiences are instinctively looking to see whether their preferred candidate can be trusted to competently protect against threat to themselves and others. They look for nonverbal signs of how leaders respond to threat from a competitor and how challengers threaten the leader. Audiences read nonverbal signs (such as vocal fluency and tone, hand gestures, eye contact, stance, nervous tics, tight or relaxed mouth, frowns, choice of clothing, interruptions and use of humour) for who is best able to handle a complex and stressful social situation. Presentation of a confident self in relation to competition has been found to directly influence assessments of credibility, strength, competence, character, composure and sociability.

All too often commentators and political analysts look at single leader image events and treat them as a symptom of a wider pathology affecting political culture. Yet such image events are rarely sustained, and peoples’ deeper impression of political leadership is not formed over a single incident, or even a few. To be properly appreciated the expression and impression of leadership needs to be considered as something that builds over time and is experienced in a wide variety of situations, not simply in election campaigns.

Expressions and impressions of a relationship enacted between leader and others are going to become more, not less, important as time and technology march on. With further technological changes in large format, high-definition, 3D and eventually holographic in-home media display systems, relationships that are currently perceived at a tele-mediated distance will soon be perceived through immersion in an experience that realistically and intimately mimics an embodied relationship between political leaders and individual citizens.

This will not enthuse observers who think there is too much emphasis on personality politics already in the media. But the potential for new technologies to further lessen the physical distance between leader and others is far reaching.

Associate Professor Claire Robinson is the Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor of the College of Creative Arts. First published on spinprofessor.tumblr.com