A new theory of bodily communication, or at least of an important part of bodily communication, namely the movements of the hands and arms that people make when speaking. I will argue that such movements are not part of some system of communication completely divorced from speech, as many psychologists have assumed, rather they are intimately connected with speaking and with thinking. Indeed these movements of the hands and arms reflect our thinking, like language itself but in a completely different manner. I will argue that such behaviours provide us with a glimpse of our hidden unarticulated thoughts. Movements of the hands and arms act as a window on the human mind; they make thought visible. This is a new theory in psychology, which owes much to the pioneering work of the American psychologist David McNeill, but as the Big Brother psychologist I have taken this theory and applied it to examples of behaviour from the Big Brother house for millions to see. Many seemed to like the basic idea and agreed that my interpretations of unarticulated thoughts were at least plausible, but what was the scientific value of this new theory? Where did the theory come from? How had it been tested? Were there other possible explanations for the unconscious movements of the hands and arms as people speak? In a television show you are not afforded opportunities to go into these kinds of issues. In this book I will outline the scientific case for this new theory and explain why movements of the hands and arms are a crucial and integral part of thinking and why careful scrutiny of these movements might reveal a great deal about the thinking of the individuals concerned and sometimes much more than they ever intended. As the Big Brother psychologist my focus has been on bodily communication but now I want to argue that we may not have understood a major component of it. It might seem odd, by the way, for a reasonably established academic to have a television programme prefixed to his occupation in this way, as in 'Big Brother psychologist', it sounds rather like 'Blue Peter presenter' or 'Match of the Day pundit', but given the enormous success of Big Brother, that's how I am identified outside my university. The Guardian calls me exactly that, and sometimes I am referred to in that way inside my university as well. I sometimes find that a little strange but I am getting used to it (and no doubt one day I will simply be known as the ex-Big Brother psychologist, but that's a different and perhaps an even sadder story). So I now use the title, currently without the ex, perhaps a little selfconsciously. Big Brother, after all, has been very useful in interesting the public in the micro-aspects of human behaviour, something that I have been interested in for many years, and it has provided a unique archive of material for psychologists to analyse. This archive has made a significant contribution to our thinking about language and nonverbal communication and how these two systems of communication fit together. How has this been achieved, you might ask, when all the Big Brother series provide us with are highly selected individuals performing in front of the cameras? Let us not kid ourselves here. We all know how highly selected the housemates are. We have all seen the videos that they forward with their applications in their efforts to be selected for the show. The housemates are selected to achieve balance and 'interest' with one thing apparently in common—this desperate craving for fame and maybe even fortune somewhere down the line. To critics they are merely self-publicising extraverts, who know that they are continually being watched, 'acting' in front of a battery of cameras which pick up their every movement night and day. Why should such footage be of any interest to psychologists? Because, I would argue, it shows behaviour in sufficient detail in a long enough context so that we can begin to understand the individuals and to get some hint as to why they are doing what they are doing. We can then start to interpret function and motive in their communication and thereby attempt to unravel the complexity of their behaviour operating to achieve such functions in a way that no psychology experiment that I know of has ever allowed before. Nearly all of the psychological research that has studied bodily communication in the past has been based on mere snapshots of behaviour. Small sets of individuals have been invited into a psychological laboratory, complete with one-way mirrors and hidden cameras, for short periods of time (but see the work of Albert Scheflen 1972, 1974, for a possible exception). No psychology experiment, with all of the technology necessary to record the complexity of behaviour, ever had anyone actually living in the laboratory before. But Big Brother, of course, did just that. The housemates knew that they were being watched (and sometimes they acted up to the camera, pretending to freeze so that the cameramen and women might think their equipment was faulty)—but so do all participants in research in the psychological laboratory. There are strict ethical guidelines governing what participants must be told. If you are going to record behaviour with hidden cameras you should inform the participants beforehand. Big Brother followed these ethical guidelines. There is another major advantage to this particular show for the psychologist in that through time in each series the audience become interested in the characters on the screen in front of them, interested in their behaviour and in their moods and their relationships, interested in what will happen to them. People are rarely interested in participants in psychological research in quite the same way. This makes the job of the psychologist that much easier. Abstract descriptions of behaviour—'minimal eye gaze', 'high levels of self-touching in the initial period', 'open posture developing into postural echo'—became relevant to the action rather than appearing like some irrelevant academic language that misses the point of the whole thing. Here are some examples from the third series of Big Brother. Kate, Spencer, Jonny, Adele, PJ, Jade, Tim, Alex, Alison, Lee, Sophie, Lyn and Sandy, their relationships and their behaviour were being discussed by the nation in the summer of 2002. One day we will probably look back and wonder why, but in that summer they gripped us. People would stop me in the street and ask, 'You're the Big Brother psychologist, what do you think is going on between Kate and Spencer?' I would stand there, not wishing to appear rude, rocking slightly with embarrassment, trying to say something that they had not heard before, trying to notice something for them in those layers of behaviour. I would offer up a comment and watch their reaction. 'Nah, you're wrong mate,' they would say. 'Didn't you see that look Kate gave Spencer when he chatted to Adele?' We were all psychologists now, or so it seemed. Here were lives in miniature, for all the psychologists out there to analyse. There was meaning in the action and narratives unfolding across time to be understood and the behaviour of the characters was a clue to what was going on. It was in fact more than a clue, it was a major part of the story itself. If you missed that look, that gesture or that shrug, you didn't get it at all. Every week I travelled down to Bromley-by-Bow and later to the Elstree studios in Borehamwood to sit in front of the 'quad split', with four streams of image coming at me simultaneously in a room laden with props for the various challenges. The pressure was on for me to make my observations. The fact that the monitors were all quite small made this sometimes a difficult and painstaking task. 'Have you found anything yet?' the producer would ask. 'No pressure really, but the cameraman is set up and ready' The first observation I report here is about Kate, popular from the start and, in fact, the eventual winner of Big Brother 3, but at one point her position in the house looked decidedly shaky. This was my discussion of why that might be the case. I have prefaced each extract with the short title used in the programme itself. These were dreamt up by the producers and usually made me smile.
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