The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,29

at our interaction in slices of a fraction of a second, you would have seen something quite different. You would have seen the two of us engaging in what can only be described as an elaborate and precise dance.

The pioneer of this kind of analysis—of what is called the study of cultural microrhythms—is a man named William Condon. In one of his most famous research projects in the 1960s he attempted to decode a four and a half second segment of film, in which a woman says to a man and a child, over dinner: “You all should come around every night. We never have had a dinnertime like this in months.” Condon broke the film into individual frames, each representing about 1/45th of a second. Then he watched—and watched. As he describes it:

To carefully study the organization and sequence of this, the approach must be naturalistic or ethological. You just sit and look and look and look for thousands of hours until the order in the material begins to emerge. It’s like sculpturing....Continued study reveals further order. When I was looking at this film over and over again, I had an erroneous view of the universe that communication takes place between people. Somehow this was the model. You send the message, somebody sends the message back. The messages go here and there and everywhere. But something was funny about this.

Condon spent a year and a half on that short segment of film, until, finally, in his peripheral vision, he saw what he had always sensed was there: “the wife turning her head exactly as the husband’s hands came up.” From there he picked up other micromovements, other patterns that occurred over and over again, until he realized that in addition to talking and listening, the three people around the table were also engaging in what he termed “interactional synchrony.” Their conversation had a rhythmic physical dimension. Each person would, within the space of one or two or three 1/45th of a second frames, move a shoulder or cheek or an eyebrow or a hand, sustain that movement, stop it, change direction, and start again. And what’s more, those movements were perfectly in time to each person’s own words—emphasizing and underlining and elaborating on the process of articulation—so that the speaker was, in effect, dancing to his or her own speech. At the same time the other people around the table were dancing along as well, moving their faces and shoulders and hands and bodies to the same rhythm. It’s not that everyone was moving the same way, any more than people dancing to a song all dance the same way. It’s that the timing of stops and starts of each person’s micromovements—the jump and shifts of body and face—were perfectly in harmony.

Subsequent research has revealed that it isn’t just gesture that is harmonized, but also conversational rhythm. When two people talk, their volume and pitch fall into balance. What linguists call speech rate—the number of speech sounds per second—equalizes. So does what is known as latency, the period of time that lapses between the moment one speaker stops talking and the moment the other speaker begins. Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground. We all do it, all the time. Babies as young as one or two days old synchronize their head, elbow, shoulder, hip, and foot movements with the speech patterns of adults. Synchrony has even been found in the interactions of humans and apes. It’s part of the way we are hardwired.

When Tom Gau and I sat across from each other in his office, then, we almost immediately fell into physical and conversational harmony. We were dancing. Even before he attempted to persuade me with his words, he had forged a bond with me with his movements and his speech. So what made my encounter with him different, so much more compelling than the conversational encounters I have every day? It isn’t that Gau was deliberately trying to harmonize himself with me. Some books on salesmanship recommend that persuaders try to mirror the posture or talking styles of their clients in order to establish rapport. But that’s been shown not to work. It makes people more uncomfortable, not less. It’s too obviously phony.

What we are talking about is a kind of super reflex, a fundamental physiological ability of which we are barely aware. And like all specialized human traits, some people have much more