Obituary: Professor Michael Argyle

Michael Argyle, who died aged 77 on September 6th, was one of the handful of British psychologists to have gained an international reputation. He was a pioneer in the scientific study of social behaviour. His research on interviews and conversations established that nonverbal rather than verbal communication dictate the impressions people make on others. So much is the primacy of ‘‘body language’’ now taken for granted that it is easy to forget that it required Argyle s research and that of others in the 1960s to demonstrate how it works. The painstaking examination of the functions and interplay of gaze, gesture, posture, touch, proximity and facial expression was a significant part of the revolutionary growth in our scientific understanding of human communication which was at its zenith in the 1960s and involved disciplines such as philosophy and linguistics as well as psychology. Argyle and his team at the University of Oxford revealed that nonverbal communication is a complex system in which elements can be mutually supportive or antagonistic. The multi-channel nature of everyday human communication leads to potential confusion and ambiguity, but Argyle s work showed that people can automatically adjust their communication in one channel to compensate if they notice that communication via another channel is being misinterpreted. Argyle s work established that people differ in their ability to utilise the various channels of communication successfully. From this insight Argyle invented the idea of social skills, arguing that they are not very different from motor skills such as riding a bicycle. In consequence he believed that these skills could be taught and learnt through demonstration, practice and video feedback. He created a programme of training for those who were shy or suffering from minor mental disorder whose lack of social skills might increase their problems. Members of his research team applied such training to help troubled adolescents control their own anti-social behaviour and violent offenders manage their own anger. One of his doctoral students was appointed by the Royal College of General Practitioners to institute a training programme to improve doctors listening and communication skills. The social skills approach is now pervasive in modern life, for example in the training of health care professionals and the police, and in courses for those involved in selection procedures whether as interviewers or interviewees. By the late 1970s Argyle and his team were moving beyond the study of specific gestures and two-person conversations to study longer and more complex sequences of social behaviour, such as family interaction. They employed the techniques that were being so