There is a silent game played on every pilgrimage in the world. You arrive tired at the hostel, sit down, and while unlacing your boots you watch the others. The one who sets the table for everyone without being asked. The woman who keeps her pack between herself and the strangers like a small defensive wall. The guy who laughs too loud and keeps glancing toward the door. Then there is the one who wants to strike up a conversation at all costs, oblivious to your exhaustion. Within minutes, without a single word exchanged, you have formed an opinion of the people around you. The question is: how much can you trust that opinion, especially when those people come from forty different countries?
The answer that circulates in communication courses — the one that says the body “never lies” and that 93% of a message is nonverbal — is an urban legend. That figure comes from two studies by Albert Mehrabian in the 1960s, conducted on isolated words spoken with conflicting tones, and Mehrabian himself spent decades begging people not to generalize from them. The body communicates an enormous amount, but in a way that is more ambiguous, more cultural, and more context-dependent than received wisdom suggests. Understanding the person walking beside you is possible. It requires knowing, however, what in body language travels across borders — and what does not.
The illusion of the universal face
For half a century we believed, following Paul Ekman, that six basic emotions existed with corresponding facial expressions recognizable in any culture. In studies from the 1970s, members of the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, with no prior contact with the West, identified sadness in the correct photographs 81% of the time (Ekman and Friesen, 1971). It seemed like definitive proof of a shared biological alphabet.
Over the last fifteen years that certainty has cracked. When researchers stopped using forced choice — presenting participants with a list of labels to select from — and allowed people to describe freely what they saw, the results shifted. The Himba of Namibia, the Hadza of Tanzania, the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea do not spontaneously associate the canonical expressions with the emotions the model predicted (Gendron, Crivelli, and Barrett, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2018; Crivelli et al., 2017). A face that reads as fear in Europe may signal a threat directed at the other person among the Trobriand. The consensus today is more measured: a universal foundation exists, but it interacts with cultural learning that substantially reshapes both meaning and the rules governing expression.
Walking alone or with others? Two very different ways to feel better
Those rules of use are the key. Ekman and Friesen themselves had already noticed that Japanese and American subjects showed the same expressions in response to a disgusting film when alone, but that Japanese participants masked them in the presence of an authority figure. They called these display rules. The same smile can signal joy, embarrassment, submission, or polite courtesy depending on the country in which it is produced. And while you sit in the hostel trying to decode a face, that face is following a script you have never read.
A practical corollary, for anyone who believes they can unmask liars through microexpressions: major scientific reviews, including one from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, have found no reliable evidence that microexpression analysis identifies deception. False positives are abundant, and cultural differences make everything worse.
What actually does travel
If the face is unreliable, some things cross borders more successfully. The first is space. The anthropologist Edward Hall, in the 1960s, described proxemics: the distance we maintain from others is governed by precise cultural grammars. Some cultures are “contact cultures,” where physical proximity and touch are natural; others are “non-contact cultures,” where the same closeness reads as aggressive. That Mediterranean pilgrim talking to you twenty centimeters from your face is not being intrusive — he is simply speaking his language. The Scandinavian woman who steps back is not being cold — she is maintaining hers. The misunderstanding arises when we mistake a spatial convention for a character trait.
The second thing that travels is synchrony. When two people, even from very different cultures, begin to mirror each other — moving and breathing in rhythm — a real and measurable affinity emerges: motor coordination increases empathy, trust, and cooperation (Wiltermuth and Heath, 2009; Valdesolo and DeSteno, 2011). It is a more honest signal than a smile, because it is hard to fake. Watching who, within a group, eventually falls into sync with the others — and who always remains slightly off-beat — tells you more than a thousand expressions.
The third is the speed of first judgment. Social psychologist Nalini Ambady showed that from just a few seconds of observation — what she called thin slices — we form personality assessments that are surprisingly consistent with those of people who have known the same individual for a long time (Ambady and Rosenthal, Psychological Bulletin, 1992). The problem is that consistent does not mean correct: first impressions are fast and stable, but they can be systematically wrong, especially across cultures, precisely because we are applying our own rules to signals governed by someone else’s.
The subtle art of not concluding
Taken together, the evidence points toward a method that is almost the opposite of “reading people like an open book.” The person walking beside you is better understood by suspending conclusions. You observe posture not to file it away as “closed” or “open,” but to notice whether it changes when someone new arrives. You pay attention to the distance a person chooses, remembering that it is a language, not a verdict. You register who falls into sync with the group and who does not. You hold the first judgment lightly — however vivid it feels, it is a hypothesis, not a diagnosis.
The pilgrimage is the ideal laboratory for this kind of training, because it strips people of their everyday markers — job, status, clothing — and places them all inside the same physical effort. But precisely because it mixes people from forty cultures, it demands an interpretive humility that ordinary life usually lets us avoid.
One question remains, relevant to anyone who travels, works, or loves across borders. If the body does not speak the same language everywhere, then understanding another person is not a matter of decoding a key we already possess — it means accepting that we do not have one. And perhaps the person we read best, along the road, is not the one whose thoughts we manage to guess, but the one beside whom we stop, for a stretch, wanting to guess at all.
Sources: P. Ekman and W. Friesen, “Constants Across Cultures in the Face and Emotion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1971; M. Gendron, C. Crivelli, and L. F. Barrett, “Universality Reconsidered: Diversity in Making Meaning of Facial Expressions,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2018; C. Crivelli et al., “Recognizing Spontaneous Facial Expressions of Emotion in a Small-Scale Society of Papua New Guinea,” Emotion, 2017; E. T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension, 1966; S. Wiltermuth and C. Heath, “Synchrony and Cooperation,” Psychological Science, 2009; N. Ambady and R. Rosenthal, “Thin Slices of Expressive Behavior as Predictors of Interpersonal Consequences,” Psychological Bulletin, 1992.
