Attitudes may be contagious via non-verbal signals

This has important implications for negotiating and mediation.

“A new Northwestern University study examined whether people can acquire attitudes toward other individuals from the nonverbal signals that are directed toward them.”

“The researchers found that after people watched a brief silent video of individuals interacting, they acquired attitudes toward the individuals in the video based on the nonverbal signals that were displayed toward them.”

in an interesting twist, “people often attributed their attitudes to the behavior of the recipients of nonverbal signals.”

“People were quicker to pair the individual who received positive nonverbal signals with good things, than the individual who received negative nonverbal signals. . . . This was especially interesting because most of the participants did not think that the nonverbal signals that were displayed toward the individuals in the videos influenced their attitudes.”

The entire article can be found here.