The Pseudoscience of Body Language Explained

The other day, my lovely girlfriend and I sat down to watch the new Netflix documentary about Chris Watts, American Murder. As we watched, I felt extremely frustrated about something that’s been bothering me for a long time. What Chris Watts did was terrible, and I’m glad he’s spending the rest of his life in prison. Each of us can think of 100,000 different ways Chris Watts could have left his marriage without murdering his wife and two children. But the acts of Chris Watts isn’t what I’m here to talk about today because many people have already done that. What’s frustrated me for months now is the promotion of the pseudoscience of body-language reading that’s exploded since the charges were brought against Chris Watts.

Much like the bad science around polygraph tests, the pseudoscience around body language has even less evidence. With the millions of views that body language videos get, I’m sure many people will try to argue that body-language reading works, but I ask that you wait until the end to see if your opinion has changed.

As a skeptic, I’ve been annoyed that channels like Derek Van Schaik receive hundreds of thousands to millions of views using this pseudoscience, and now YouTube is promoting a new “body language expert” Believing Bruce. For a long time, I figured it wasn’t a big deal if people believed these so-called body language experts, but now I’ve realized that there are real-life consequences to people not understanding that body language is a pseudoscience.

The Derek Van Schaik body language video about Chris Watts has over 31 million views, and it’s monetized, so he’s made a pretty penny off this video. But him profiting off of this pseudoscience isn’t the main issue. What troubled me was when I found out that Human Resources personnel are being shown this video as a form of training.

My friend’s relative is the regional HR manager for a huge company. For obvious reasons, I’m not going to disclose the company name, but I promise that you know of this company. This company has over 10s of thousands of employees across the country, and HR is responsible for investigating accusations of sexual harassment, racism, and other situations in order to keep the workplace safe and prevent massive lawsuits. These are very serious matters, and entire HR…