If you saw a man walk into a bar with a John Wayne swagger, you might assume that he’s a confident, tough kind of guy. Or perhaps you’d have less polite thoughts. Either way, you probably wouldn’t be able to help yourself from jumping to conclusions about his personality based on his gait. Psychologists have been studying these assumptions for well over three quarters of a century, and their findings suggest that most of us do tend to make very similar interpretations of other people’s personalities based on their walking style. After watching that wannabe cowboy walk into the bar, the likelihood is that you and I would agree about the kind of personality he has. But how accurate are these assumptions? And what other kinds of characteristics can we read from someone’s gait? Chillingly, the best person to ask may be a psychopath. |
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Let’s look first at the research into gait and personality. One of the earliest investigations was published in 1935 by German-born psychologist Werner Wolff. He filmed five men and three women without them knowing, as they took part in a ring-throwing task while wearing overalls (to conceal other personality give-aways).
Later, the participants watched back the films, which had been edited to hide their heads, and they made interpretations of each other’s personalities based purely on their gaits.
The study features some quaint details - the sound of the recording reel had to be camouflaged with a ticking metronome, for instance. More importantly, Wolff found that his participants readily formed impressions of each other based on their gaits, and that there was often a lot of agreement in their judgments. For example, consider some of the descriptions given independently by the participants for “Subject 45”:
“Pretentious, with no foundation for it.”
“Somebody who wants to gain attention at any price.”
“Conscious and intentional vanity, eager to be admired.”
“Inwardly insecure, tries to appear secure to others.”
“Dull, somewhat subaltern, insecure.”
It seems amazing that the participants formed such similar impressions for this subject and others. Of course, with such a small sample and the possibility that the participants were picking up on other cues besides gait, there are problems with this early research (the participants also knew each other, although they were poor at recognising who was who from the videos).