About Honest Signals

Human communication contains much information that is not verbalized; facial expressions, gestures, speech patterns, and even things like fast cars and fancy clothes are all signals of who we are (or who we want to be). In order to draw accurate inferences from these signals however, it is necessary to identify which are “honest” — the ones that arise unconsciously, or that are otherwise uncontrolled. If we watch a conversation between two people and carefully measure the timing, energy, and variability of the interaction, we can find several examples:

• Influence is the amount of influence each person has on another in a social interaction. Influence is measured by the extent to which one person causes the other person’s pattern of speaking to match their own pattern.
• Mimicry is the reflexive copying of one person by another during a conversation, resulting in an unconscious, back-and-forth trading of smiles, interjections, and head nodding during a conversation.
• Activity. Increased activity levels normally indicate interest and excitement, as seen in the connection between activity level and excitement in children, or when male orangutans shake branches to impress potential mates.
• Consistency. When there are many different thoughts or emotions going on in your mind at the same time, speech and even movements become jerky, unevenly accented and paced. Consistency in emphasis and timing is a signal of mental focus, while greater variability may signal an openness to influence from others.

Each of these signals has its roots in our brain structure and biology and as such can provide reliable information regarding our behavioral tendencies. The influence measure, for instance, provides an assessment of our brains’ attention and orienting systems. Mimicry is thought to be due to cortical mirror neurons, a distributed brain structure that seems to be unique to primates and is especially prominent in humans. Activity level is related to the state of the autonomic nervous system, an extremely old (in the evolutionary sense) neural structure. Consistency seems to be a measure of the integration within our brain’s action sequence control system, which begins with cortical motor signals that propagate through the cerebellum and basal ganglia.

Cogito Health’s capabilities build off a decade of experimental and theoretical research at MIT into subtle signals and their uses. For further information, please email us at info@cogitohealth.com or consider reading our co-founder’s book Honest Signals.