What Your Walking Style Reveals About Your Personality

From your ability to orgasm to your likelihood of getting Parkinson's, research finds your walk reveals your mind.

Walking Naked Men. Marey Wheel Photographs of Unidentified Model — 1884, Thomas Eakins | Public Domain

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In his bestselling book, The Philosophy of Walking, Frédéric Gros romanticizes walking as a way of shedding one's identity. Although I love this sentiment's Thoreau-like vibe, scientists would disagree. You can tell a lot about someone by the way they put one foot in front of another. 

Carefree teenage girls sashay with an alacritous hip sway that belies the insecurities hiding beneath their Lulu Lemons.

Young men march toward manhood with swollen chests, clenched buttocks, and a determined stride.

An elderly couple, hands entwined, strolls through the park in a slow, synchronized rhythm. Each whispered shuffle of their worn soles speaks of an enduring bond. 

A wise philosopher king saunters along a cobblestone street, the staccato click-click of his cane piercing the ground like an ironclad scepter. His methodical steps reveal layers of wisdom and understanding. 

Or that spazzy coworker rushes with a frantic, clipped gate, arms pumping back and forth like a broken metronome. You never know if they are trying to outrun their shadow or have to pee. 

Whether we realize it or not, we all judge people by how they move through the world. Every small step narrates a life's journey.

But while most mammals are born walking on spindly legs within hours, humans must learn to walk. That's partly because bipedal locomotion is really complicated. It's not just our legs propelling us forward. Our arms must swing in opposition to our legs to maintain balance and momentum. Our inner ear keeps that balance by sensing changes in our body's position and orientation. Meanwhile, our spine acts as a flexible rod, absorbing shock and distributing weight evenly as we move.

Walking is a marvel of engineering, neuroscience, biology, and evolution. It's probably why robots still can't walk without falling over. 

The first researcher to study human gait was German-born psychologist Werner Wolff. In 1935, Wolff filmed five men and three women walking. His participants wore identical raincoats to hide their clothing, and Wolff blurred out their faces to hide their expressions. He then showed the videos to volunteers and asked them to describe the walker's personality. Surprisingly, the volunteers came to the same conclusions about each walker’s personality.

Of course, Wolff's study was small, and his experiment lacked the sophistication of modern studies. Today, we have AI technology and fancy psychology tests to scrutinize someone's cowboy strut. 

For example, in a meta-analysis of adults aged 25 to 100, researchers tested participants for the Big Five Personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Then, they measured their walking speeds.