Someone is knocking at the door.
Today I’m sitting at my desk, my puppy at her little dog bed
desk working on a speech. As always, I look for the most recent scientific
research to support my points and recommendations.
In my speeches, I often ask my audience who is more accurate
at reading body language males or females. Because I know that that’s not fully
inclusive the first thing, I looked for was any research on not just males' and
females’ ability to read body language but, LGBTQ differences in ability. As I
suspected, there wasn’t any research on that. You probably know that many
research studies are just done on males because you must have so many more
subjects in your subject pool to consider gender differences. In fact, In
medical research often less than 6% of the research includes female subjects.
Overall, the research says that females are more accurate than
males at reading body language. But here is something interesting. New research
shows that women are more accurate at reading negative emotions such as anger
and men are more accurate at reading happy body language cues. And one of the
studies they were looking at displays of someone knocking on a door the men could
more accurately read the happy knocking cues and the women could more accurately
read the negative cues such as anger. And
were far more accurate at reading the neutral knocking.
And that made me think of the horrible Ralph Star Shooting Story in the news that broke my heart and continues to haunt me.
A young
man went to pick up his siblings a few blocks from his house but accidentally
went to the wrong house, and knocked on the door. The owner of the home opened
the wood door but not the glass door, saw the young man look him in the eye,
and said, “Don’t ever come back here.” and shot the teen in the head through the
glass door then shot him again once he was down. Did the man do this based on racial
profiling? How often are men’s violent responses to strangers also triggered because
they are less able to accurately read facial cues of danger so they assume someone
is dangerous when they are not?
Also shattering me is the fact that when I went to look up the story again I googled young man shot through the door at pages of other stories about other young men being shot through doors came up. I am so upset.
