We all would like to avoid a situation in which someone judges us as stupid based on our body language only. Here’s how to take care of your body language so that you always come across as a winner!

Check out: The Body Language Of Creative Thinkers

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Listen

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Glossary

• dumb – stupid
• laid back – relaxed
• fidgety – restless or uneasy
• gauge – measure
• lone – having no companions; solitary or single
• buck – to move or react jerkily
• jive – (here) move as if you were dancing jive

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Think about it

Answer the questions below.

• What do people traditionally think a person’s body language cannot reveal? What can be easily learnt about a person based on their body language?
• What does the latest research by Jeremy Balienson suggest?
• Describe the first study conducted by Balienson and his team. What were the findings?
• Describe the second study conducted by Balienson and his team. What did it reveal?
• How can the results of the study be meaningful for businesses and/or the future of recruitment?

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Practice makes perfect

Use the verbs in brackets in appropriate forms and tenses.

In the first study, the researchers ________ (choose) one subject as a “teacher” and primed them on several principles of a subject they ________ (know) little about: water efficiency. The teacher ________ (be) then tasked to impart what he or she ________ (learn) to another subject over a five-minute span. After, the student would take a test to show how much knowledge they ________ (absorb).

What the Stanford scientists learned was that the more exaggerated a student’s upper-body movements ________ (be) while they ________ (teach), the less likely they were to score well on the test afterwards. “For our sample and our task, students with very extreme movements with their upper body tended to learn worse than others,” Bailenson said.

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Fill in the blank spaces with the words in bold.

slow    –    gauge    –    bias    –    caution    –     hire

Although Balienson and his team ________ that their results may be subject to ________ , they do give employers new tools in which to design tests to ________ the intelligence and creativity of potential hires. If you want to ________ creative thinkers, interview them in pairs, and beware of the over-eager interviewee nodding, bucking, and jiving when you’re trying to tell him or her about your company. That guy’s probably a little ________ .

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