Your Unique Walking Style Can Uncover Hidden Personality Traits

Human motion is intricate, yet we often make remarkably precise judgments about individuals based on their movements. For example, if you've seen John Travolta strut to the Bee Gees in the finale of "Saturday Night Fever," you understand that the preceding hour and 57 minutes of character development are almost unnecessary. That walk alone conveys everything.

Walking is a universal activity, but it involves a highly synchronized sequence of motions, each with its own timing and trajectory. Moreover, everyone has a unique walking style — consider John Wayne's iconic saunter or Gisele Bündchen's confident runway walk — and if you're familiar with them, you can likely recognize them by their gait, even from a distance.

For example, if your mother and sister were walking together a block ahead, you could probably distinguish between them just by their movements. You might even detect from afar that your sister is upset and your mother is preoccupied.

Research indicates that a person's gait might reveal more than just their current emotional state. Humans naturally excel at interpreting movement, and a recent study in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior introduces a method to infer an individual's overall personality from their walking style. In the study, 29 participants completed the Big Five Inventory, a widely-used personality assessment that evaluates traits like conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion. The researchers then filmed and analyzed each participant's walk on a treadmill.

"Our findings show that greater upper-to-lower body movement strongly correlates with aggression," explains Liam Satchell, a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth and co-author of the study. "Additionally, significant pelvic movement alone was linked to socially-oriented traits such as extraversion and agreeableness."

While we often judge personalities based on how people walk, this study breaks down and mathematically validates earlier findings where 'distinctive' gaits helped predict potential crimes in security footage. Satchell suggests that training security staff to recognize aggressive walking patterns could help prevent crimes before they occur.

"The study's outcomes include some intriguing revelations," Satchell notes. "The key takeaway is clear: personality traits are indeed reflected in gait. Further scientific investigation into body language could uncover more evidence that a person's behavior can be anticipated by observing how they move."

A recent study in PLOS Computational Biology introduced a model capable of predicting the likelihood of movement patterns common to all individuals, as well as those shared by people with similar personality traits or moods—such as heightened aggression or irritability. By establishing a baseline for normal movement, the researchers developed a system to detect deviations that are unique to an individual or indicative of unusual behavior.

"Automated systems analyzing human motion have demonstrated potential in detecting threats, such as identifying potential terrorists through video surveillance," explains Dr. Lars Lau Rakêt, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. "Our model integrates data from thousands of movement patterns to extract detailed insights about movement structure, enabling us to determine if an individual's actions deviate significantly from expected behavior in a specific context."

While the walking styles in the following clip aren't scientifically significant or revealing, it would be an oversight not to acknowledge the iconic Ministry of Silly Walks: