For my inquiry project this semester, I chose the question, “How well can we understand what someone is feeling and thinking through their body language and facial expressions?”
This question will explore how people communicate, mostly subconsciously, with non-verbal cues like hand gestures, eye contact , posture, and facial expressions. It will give me a chance to discover why some people act differently than others in the same situations because I think this question expands on just how accurately we are able to interpret someone’s thoughts, emotions and intentions. My inquiry project will also consider how we can misinterpret someone’s body language if we make wrong assumptions about someone’s behaviour. By the end of this project, I hope that I will be able to understand how communication is affected by body language and how much we can really learn about someone without them saying anything.
I chose this question because I am very interested in the way human’s minds work and I have been wanting to learn more about this topic for a while. I find it fascinating that you can know so much about another person just by observing what they do. I am especially interested in this part of psychology, regarding basic non-verbal cues when someone is talking to you, recognizing when someone is lying, and making assumptions about a person’s behaviour. Sometimes when we make assumptions, we are misreading people and I want to explore in this project how reliable profiling someone’s behaviour is. I am excited to learn more in the next few weeks and research more about human psychology and how we can interpret the people around us.
