How the Legs Reveal What the Mind Wants to Dolocked their ankles as soon as they sat in the dental chair to
have work done. Patients who were only having a check-up
locked their ankles 68% of the time compared to 98% who
locked ankles when the dentist administered an injection.
More people lock their ankles with
the taxman than with the dentist.Our work with law enforcement and government bodies, such
as the police, customs and the tax office, showed that most
people who were being interviewed locked their ankles at the
beginning of the interviews, but this was just as likely to be
from fear as out of guilt.
We also analysed the human resources profession and found
that most interviewees lock their ankles at some point during
an interview, indicating that they were holding back an
emotion or attitude. Nierenberg and Calero found that when
one party locked his ankles during a negotiation it often meant
that he was holding back a valuable concession. They found
that by using questioning techniques they could often encour-
age him to unlock his ankles and reveal the concession.
Asking positive questions about their feelings
can often get others to unlock their ankles.In the initial stages of studying the Ankle Lock, we found that
asking questions was reasonably successful (42%) in getting
interviewees to relax and unlock their ankles. We discovered,
however, that if an interviewer walks around to the intervie-
wee's side of the desk and sits beside him, removing the desk
as a barrier, the interviewee would often relax and unlock his
ankles and the conversation would take on an open, more per-
sonal tone.
We were advising a company on effective customer tele-
phone contact when we met a man who had the unenviable job