Professor Michael Argyle (1925-2002)
Back in 2002, a 77-year-old man died following a swimming accident that he never recovered from. His name is, was, John Argyle, though he was known by his middle name, Michael. He was born near the Goose Fair roundabout at the bottom of Sherwood Rise, just about as Nottingham-a-location as you can find. I recently visited the home he was born in and where he grew up. Michael’s not a member of my family and I never met him, but he is a hero of mine and, for my money, one of the all-time top ten experts on nonverbal communication. You could even say that he dedicated his life to helping people be the best they can be.
Michael’s father George, a schoolmaster, and his mother Phyllis, both died when he was just eleven years of age. It was around this time that he moved to ‘big school’, Nottingham Boys High, and became worried about a fellow pupil. This friend of his suffered from shyness and a poor ability to interact with others. Michael believed that his friend could be helped if only he could learn and develop “social skills”. This was when his interest in psychology began, an interest that would lead him to become the most respected social psychologist in the land, and a pioneer of the use of social skills training in England.
After leaving the Boys’ High School Argyle went to the University of Cambridge, initially reading mathematics before the Second World War changed his plans. Taking a Royal Air Force science course, Michael served in the RAF, training as a navigator, then working as a fireman during the Blitz, after which he completed his course, obtaining a first class honours degree in experimental psychology in 1950. As an undergraduate, he married Sonia Kemp, a Girton classics student and the daughter of Marshall Dennis Kemp of Nottingham, and they had four children.
After a further two years as a research student in Cambridge, Michael became the first lecturer in social psychology at the University of Oxford in 1952, and he stayed there until his retirement in 1992 when he became Emeritus Professor at Oxford Brookes University.
Attracting academic visitors from around the globe, Michael’s research into nonverbal communication opened a whole new line of inquiry, transforming our understanding of interpersonal communication. His great skill was his ability to present complicated research in easily read prose. He was also a visiting professor in North America, Europe and Africa, and a Fellow of the Centre for Advanced in the Behavioural Science at Stanford.
At the height of his powers, Michael’s day were highly structured. He’d cycle to work for a day’s lecturing, researching and supervising before playtime with his children and then an evening of writing and socialising. It was this structure that allowed him to write 44 books, 170 articles and much more.
The Psychology of Interpersonal Behaviour (1967, Penguin) became the best-selling psychology paperback (exceeding 500,000 sales) which, together with Bodily Communication (1975, Methuen) and Social Psychology of Religion (a citation classic), established Michael Argyle as a leading authority on social psychology and the subject of nonverbal behaviour. He successfully put forward the hypothesis that spoken language is normally used for communicating information whereas nonverbal codes are typically used to express attitudes. He also established that there are many nonverbal aspects of behaviour (such as gaze, posture, proximity, facial expressions) that are more important than the words used when communicating with others. Of the two channels (verbal and nonverbal) Argyle suggested that nonverbal communication was 12.5x more powerful than the actual words spoken (in terms of conveying attitudes).
There has been criticism of Michael’s separating of the channels’ purpose and importance (most recently by the respected body language expert Geoffrey Beattie) but he acknowledged their interconnectedness. Michael also showed how nonverbal signals can substitute for one another under certain conditions, such as the reduction in eye contact/gaze when proximity decreases. His 1965 paper Eye Contact, Distance and Affiliation is widely cited as an example of the equilibrium model of relationships in which people set out to establish a certain degree of friendliness or coolness towards each other. He was an expert in how people utilise various nonverbal signals as well as speech, and understood that if levels of intimacy are breached in one channel another compromises.
With his the memories of his boyhood friend an influence, Michael continued to conduct research that was useful to everyday life, especially the promotion of SST (social skills teaching/training) as he found that individuals differ in their capacity to make use of the various channels of communication. His research produced guides and evidence for the use of SST for out-patient neurotics, disturbed adolescents, depressives, the lonely or isolated, all of whom, he found, smiled, gestured and looked less. Michael thought that an improvement in a patient’s social skills would help their condition (in minor cases). He also delivered SST for teachers, doctors, nurses, air hostesses, businesspeople, and even politicians. His nonverbal studies and training programmes would also help people understand cultural display rules, helping to avoid misunderstanding and ultimately reduce racial prejudice. Social skills, for Michael, could be learned just like other skills, such as motor skills. Whilst some people are better at reading body language than others, these are skills that can, and should, be learned.
Believing the psychology of happiness to be under-researched - psychologists were spending more time researching depression - Michael also decided to focus on the most positive aspects of human existence, asking what makes us happy, the subject of his 1987 book The Psychology of Happiness. His findings revealed that happiness is promoted by interpersonal relationships, and by sex, eating, exercise, music, and success, but not so much by wealth. He also wrote that happiness did not increase by removing causes of unhappiness, rather it required engaging in shared activities. Michael’s own allotted space in his daily schedule for family and friends time, as well as writing, reading, research and teaching, was evidence that he practiced what he preached.
Michael later concluded that a happy marriage was the biggest single source of happiness, with dance and religion (for its mingling with the like-minded as much as anything else) on the good list. Contentment, however, was best achieved through a fulfilling job pitched at a realistic level, together with the pursuance of an all-absorbing hobby, ‘serious leisure’ such as reading, music, travel or art (or even housework), as long as you can become absorbed in it, as he described in The Social Psychology of Leisure. Watching television didn’t promote happiness but Argyle found that people who watched soap operas were (on average) happier than the rest of the population (most of this research was conducted before EastEnders hit our screens).
Much of his work has been of scientific and practical importance, and he created training programmes for the workplace and everyday life. One of his programmes provided social skills training for psychiatric patients unable to cope with interpersonal relationships. And it all started with an idea from his Nottingham schooldays, when he thought that social skills were not only important but that they can be learned.
Michael was awarded honorary doctorates from several universities, including Oxford (1979), Adelaide (1982), and Brussels (1982), as well as many other awards.; leaving behind many theories on the human condition that have made a positive impact on people’s lives. Michael’s first wife Sonia died in 1999 after a long illness. At the end of 2000 he married Gillian Thompson and regained his joy of living until his death.
One of the 20th Century’s best-known and most respected social psychologists, (John) Michael Argyle was a pioneer of experimental study his work will always be remembered for helping to establish the concepts of ‘body language’ and ‘social skills’. His books were both popular and scholarly, helped to define the scope of social psychology and its acceptance in academic circles.
