This also speaks to the Clever Hans phenomenon. Clever Hans was a horse in the 19th Century that had the uncanny ability to stamp out using his hooves the correct sum of two numbers people would ask him to add. Oskar Pfungst eventually figured out that the horse had simply paid attention to nonverbal cues of people when he answered correctly or wrongly. Once the horse realized from the reactions of those around him that he had arrived at the right number, he committed that to memory and was able to repeat this action several times afterward. The phenomenon of “Clever Hans”, in terms of human beings, means that as we are primates act in a similar fashion, collecting data from the nonverbal cues that those around us use to tell us what is and isn't socially acceptable. We are primates and as such, we are therefore highly susceptible to nonverbal cues.
