Leaning back, angling away, and withdrawing your posture signals disengagement and makes people feel rejected. These body language cues kill trust and connection, guaranteeing communication fails and relationships suffer.
If you wanted someone to have a painful life, what posture, body language, and cues would you make sure they did?
The first thing would be all the disengagement cues. So what I would not wish upon someone, but if they did this, they would have a very difficult life communicating. They would have a very difficult life connecting and being happy, which is first, people who really lean back in their chairs, who angle their face and body away. You'll even see people sometimes they'll answer questions in disengagement body language. They'll be like, I don't know, I guess I would say this. And they're literally leaning their face back, their head back, their body back. It is very hard for you to see me as someone you want to connect to when I'm answering that way.
I know, I felt like you hated me in that moment.
Exactly. It's sort of a soft cue of social rejection. If you make a bad first impression, you're doing these disengagement cues. It is actually a punishment to the other person. Yes, it is a punishment for you because you are being seen as not trustworthy, not competent. But the research is really interesting on this. When they bring people into their lab and they have someone at the table flashed them a cue of social rejection. When the participants saw that cue, their pupils and their field of vision increased, meaning they could then see more of their environments. They could see, is anyone else making this cue? What's my escape route? And I better go into survival mode. You would start to feel, does she not like me? She hate me? Your cognitive thinking would get slowed down because all your resources would be going towards like, can I trust her or not? These negative cues are really bad for you, but they're also bad for others.
