A Faster Way to Determine Who May Be a Psychopath

When you meet someone for the first time, you can be flooded with a variety of cues, all of which engage each of your senses. What do you use as your first indicator of the type of person you’re dealing with? Is it the look on their face, the way they smell, or the feeling you get when they shake your hand? Without being conscious of it, though, chances are that there is one very obvious cue which, while you notice, you may fail to register.

Think about seeing a person you don’t know coming toward you as you wait in line to check out at the supermarket. You may womder if this is someone you’d like to exchange pleasantries with, or if it is someone you should steer clear of. After a brief moment, you decide to start a chat about the weather, a seemingly innocent topic of conversation.

Without realizing it, you were guided by the fact that this person was standing up straight, seeming to be a person who could be trusted.

What Posture Can Tell You

Reinforcing the idea that you won’t have to look too hard to read a stranger’s personality, McGill University’s Soren Wanio-Theberge and Jorge Armony (2024) posited that there are direct connections between body language and emotions. These include raising the fists (anger), moving the torso backward (fear), curving the lower back or “lordotic” posture (sexual receptiveness in female mammals), and arching the back (rats and other four-legged animals). One major set of cues that can tip you off about someone’s intention to boss you around is an open, erect, and expanded posture. Someone who is ready to give in to another person’s is more likely to slump over and may close up a bit.

You now have an entire menu of options to help you decide what someone is trying to communicate with their body. If it’s someone you know well, it’s likely you’ll be pretty good at reading them already, but when sizing up that new person, any one of these alone or in combination could be valuable, according to the McGill researchers.

There is, though, more to the story. Someone might put on one of these postures from time to time (everyone can retreat in fear), but isn’t there also a relatively stable way that people present themselves. So, could this be a tipoff to their personality traits? Wanio-Theberge and Armony suggest that it’s possible. Prior research suggests that extroverts stand one way and introverts another, and that the way others judge their personalities based on posture corresponds to the ways people rate themselves. What’s more, posture can also give away psychopathic traits. Given the Canadian research team’s interest in social dominance as a key element of personality, their research became focused on traits related to this quality.

Testing the Posture-Personality Link

The McGill research team embarked on a series of 5 studies in which they assessed both personality and posture. In four of these studies, participants submitted photos of themselves standing in a natural pose; for the other, participants came into the research lab and completed a set of physiological measurements. All in all, there were 608 young-adult participants.

The first finding to emerge early in the series was that people with more erect postures scored higher on personality traits associated with psychopathic tendencies. This finding wasn’t just a one-time fluke; a second study showed that postural ratings across time tend to be stable. In the third study, participants posed according to instructions to adopt either a dominant or submissive stance. In the submissive stance, they adopted a stooped, bent-forward posture. When instructed to appear dominant, they stood upright, with hips forward and torso leaning backward. This might remind you of the “power pose” idea, the now mostly-disregarded proposal that in order to feel powerful you need to put on this posture, but there was no indication in this study that an altered posture produced an altered state of mind.

That those who stand up straight might have psychopathic tendencies may seem in and of itself to be a stretch. However, in the fifth study of the series, the authors not only replicated their earlier findings but expanded on them. The set of traits included in the final study included psychopathy, manipulativeness (Machiavellianism and ruthless self-advancement), competitiveness, and belief in the existence of social hierarchies. In the words of the authors, this range of undesirable attributes reflects “the use of intimidation in order to improve one’s access to resources in the environment at the expense of others."

Wanting to overcome others, the authors reason, reflects the belief in these dominant individuals that “the experience of being at the bottom of the heap can be intolerable." Feedback loops could reinforce those tendencies because by standing tall and straight—an effort that takes some strength—these individuals become treated as superior by others, which only whets their desire for winning out even more.

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From Posture to Psychopathy

What if you’re the type of person who just naturally stands straight? Maybe you were fortunate enough to take dance lessons or participate in sports as a youngster, and a steady posture was one of those benefits. The issue from the standpoint of this study is that people who don’t have this dominant orientation are able to vary their posture. Those participants who scored lower on these undesirable traits adopted a wider range of stances rather than always trying to overpower others by appearing strong and tough.

As you consider using these findings in your daily life, it’s important to keep in mind the study’s limitations, both in terms of the sample (primarily female undergraduates) and the method, which was entirely correlational. There are a range of other possible influences on the posture-psychopathy link, not the least of which are cultural. Furthermore, as people get older, there is a natural loss of body mass that could make it more difficult even for the most psychopathic to use their bodies to overpower people they perceive as weak. Nevertheless, a person who seems to want to use their body to intimidate you (even if they don’t totally succeed) seems like a good person to stay away from.

To sum up, the McGill study provides a striking example of the link between body and mind, and ways you can use a person’s bodily cues to understand their mind.