Ok, so that’s a bit of clickbait, but there is something in this. One established way of analysing body language is in terms of high and low status. Rather like animals, humans are territorial and will show you their relationship to their territory and to others through body high and low status body language. High status behaviours involve being relaxed, still (especially a still head), not speaking too fast and maintaining eye contact. Movements are natural, but deliberate, in the sense they are not out of a person’s control. Ticks, uncontrolled movements, giggles and hesitations in speech and the body lower status because it gives the impression of insecurity, of lack of domination and control of one’s body, mind (controlling anxiety especially is high status) and personal space. Donald Trump clearly demonstrates extremely high status behaviours – he is so comfortable in his space that he relishes his words and is not afraid of repeating phrases. However, apart from his own supporters, it is well known that he is not inclusive, but highly divisive – it’s a kind a negative high status, or at least highly selective.
But this article is about Karmala Harris’ body language, so let’s get to her. Taking just one random speech in her campaign (link is below), you can see a kind of mixed bag: she displays a number of high status features, such as taking her time, maintaining eye contact and not having too many uncontrolled movements. She nods frequently to reinforce a point she has made and she is highly and deliberately inclusive, both in the content of her speech and in the way she smiles openly at everyone around her, except in more serious and heated moments. However, her pace is so slow at the start in particular, she is not very still and her pauses are not entirely natural, so it feels like she is not dominating her material, but the other way round. She becomes stiller and more fluent later in the speech and then forces an emotional climax (unnecessarily). She would have done better to start at this more fluent and animated place while keeping her feet still and to sound and look less willing to please.
At one point early on she breaks off from her speech and tells people to sit down in what sounds like a caring way, but she lets out an uncontrolled and apologetic laugh for doing so, a low-status giveaway that she is not comfortable telling people what to do. She later laughs at her own ironic comment about it “being a typical election year”, implying she is not confident the audience will get her irony, but also unwittingly implying she finds the whole process overwhelming, not one she can easily handle. When people chant “USA !USA!” at one point she smiles at them and tilts her head to one side. Tilting your head is a low status gesture, revealing your (in animal terms) vulnerable neck and showing you are not a threat. Low status is not necessarily bad, as it puts people at ease by lowering your “threat” level (think of dogs rolling on their backs to be sniffed at). Would smiling inclusively but keeping her head straight have helped her more? Most probably. These are unconscious details but it is hard-wired in us both to do them and to respond to them in an instinctive way. Overall there are many more examples of high than low status in this speech, but the point here is to show she slipped in a few lower-status signals which seemed to indicate she was not always in control of a desire to please others, or at least a discomfort in not pleasing. She probably would have made a reasonable enough president, but how much did her style let her down?
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