First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human by Jeremy Desilva

Author:Jeremy Desilva [Desilva, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062938497
Google: 3rDvDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0062938495
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2021-04-05T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Gait Differences and What They Mean

High’st queen of state, Great Juno, comes;

I know her by her gait.

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1610–1611

My wife and I work at the same college, and I occasionally spot her striding across the campus green. I know her just from her walk, even when I’m too far away to see her face. The way each of us walks is unique and recognizable, whether it’s John Wayne’s slightly off-balance swagger, Dorothy’s skip toward Oz, Mae West’s exaggerated hip swivel, or the lope of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.

This observation is more than anecdotal.

In 1977, Wesleyan University psychologists James Cutting and Lynn Kozlowski conducted the first experiment to test whether people could identify one another by the way they walk. They recorded individuals walking and then converted their bodies into a series of small lights, similar to the motion-capture technology used in Hollywood today. That way, study participants could not pick up on cues such as hair color or body shape. The researchers found that even when people were turned into a string of lights, their friends were pretty good at spotting them.

Since then, repeated studies have confirmed that we are skilled at recognizing friends and family members solely by the way they walk. As it turns out, regions of our brains are fine-tuned to accomplish this.

In her 2017 study, for example, Carina Hahn, now a social scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland, had nineteen participants lie in an MRI and watch videos of familiar people coming toward them. A region of the brain just behind the participants’ ears (the bilateral posterior superior temporal sulcus) activated when they recognized people from their walks. When the walkers were close enough for their faces to be recognized, a different area of the participants’ brains lit up.

But the way a person walks signals more than their identity. We are skilled at detecting moods, intentions, and even personality traits from the way someone walks. Slumped shoulders and a plodding gait are recognized as sadness. A bounce in one’s step communicates happiness. A loud stomp can signify anger. Research shows that these inferences are not just a matter of intuition.

However, people aren’t 100 percent accurate in interpreting these cues, and some of us are better at it than others. A 2012 study out of Durham University in the U.K. found that we perceive others as adventurous, warm, trustworthy, neurotic, extroverted, or approachable by the way they walk, but that the walkers often don’t think of themselves that way at all. It appears that the inferences we draw this way are sometimes wrong.

But, as it turns out, some of those who are particularly good at it are psychopaths. In a 2013 study, Angela Book, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario, Canada, showed videos of undergraduates walking to forty-seven maximum-security prisoners and asked them to rank how vulnerable the walkers were on a scale of one to ten. The prisoners—especially those characterized as psychopaths—revealed in follow-up questioning that they used gait cues to identify those who were frail or otherwise vulnerable to being preyed upon.

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