According to a new study, your body language gives away your socioeconomic status (http://tinyurl.com/dyld5v).  At least, your parents’ social status:  the study was conducted among college students in California, where all good status studies seem to originate. 

Students with richer, higher-status parents engaged in more fiddling, doodling, and grooming and other such rude behavior, while lower-class students raised their eyebrows more, laughed more, and generally were more engaging. 

Wait a minute, though.  Could it be that higher-status parents don’t do as good a job at raising their kids?  Or perhaps higher-status kids eat more sugar and junk food and so are more fidgety?  Or maybe the richer kids were offended that they weren’t being paid enough for their (expensive) time?   

It’s important to remember, with small-bore studies like this one (100 students were briefly interviewed) carried out on college campuses, the applicability to the rest of us may be limited.  This is not like say, good medical science, with control groups and double blind studies of huge numbers of people.  There are often too many possible explanations for the behavior that is studied. 

Instead of leaping to conclusions, then, it’s a good idea to wait for what the scientific world calls meta-studies.  These are studies of studies; they group many similar small research projects in one giant database with an eye to checking the overall reliability of the findings. 

In this way, the famous study by Albert Mehrabian from the 1970s, which sought to determine how people decoded the emotional attitudes of others, has been affirmed by meta-studies.  The study, you’ll recall, found that when we try to figure out what the speaker’s attitude is toward what he or she is saying, we look to the visual cues 55% of the time, the tone of voice 38 % of the time, and the content only 7 % of the time.  The study has been misunderstood ever since, as indicating that “it doesn’t matter what you say, but how you look” which was not the point at all. 

The point, again, was that people use primarily visual cues, and secondarily audio cues, to determine how a speaker feels about the words he/she is uttering.  That’s important to know, but it’s not the same thing as the message itself.  Mehrabian assumed that the message was getting through; the question was, what was the speaker’s attitude toward the message. 

The meta-studies confirm that we get our emotional subtext from visual cues about 2/3 of the time, from auditory cues about 1/3 of the time, and from content hardly at all. 

That insight you can take to the body language bank.  But let’s wait on the relative rudeness of rich and poor.  The data is insufficient for a real conclusion.