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Toes give people away
When a person is tuned in to someone, the body angles toward that person. Adults get good at hiding it, but the toes give them away. Subconsciously, the body is attuned to that person and wants to talk to them, move toward them, or read them.
Finding the boss
That makes the most important person in a room easy to find, whether it's the boss at a work event or a celebrity at a mingle: everyone's toes point at them. Hidden crushes sometimes show up the same way, since the toes of a person with a crush follow the other person when they move.
Toes toward the exit
The exception is people who need to leave. Their toes shift toward the exit, as if the brain is asking what the escape route is and when it can get out.
Why do feet reveal what faces hide?
Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen argued that people get far more feedback about their faces than about their legs and feet, so they learn to control their faces better. They proposed that the body therefore leaks information the face holds back, an idea they called nonverbal leakage. Their paper, titled Nonverbal Leakage and Clues to Deception, appeared in 1969.
How do groups arrange their bodies?
The researcher Adam Kendon described what he called F-formations in the 1970s: when people converse, their bodies arrange around a shared space that each member faces. Newcomers who want to join tend to approach at the edge, and the group often shifts to open a gap. Kendon built the idea from film of ordinary social gatherings. Computer vision researchers later adopted F-formations as a way to detect conversing groups in video.
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