The Chinese technology company Watrix claims that their software can identify a person from footage of them walking, with accuracy of up to 94%. If an individual’s movements can be so distinctive, then it is not unreasonable to think that groups might share a few in common, and that this might be noticeable to outsiders.

There is already evidence that we read more from body posture than we realize. In a 2012 study, people who were shown photographs of tennis players taken immediately after an important point were much better at knowing whether the player had won or lost from images of their bodies than of their faces. When losing faces were placed on winning bodies, or vice versa, it was the bodies that overwhelmingly guided people’s judgements. A later version of the study produced the same findings, along with the fact that Hong Kong college students did better overall when the athletes were East Asian, which again suggests that we are better at spotting those postural accents that we are most familiar with because we see them in the people around us.

We learn far more from the body position of tennis players after they have played a point than from their faces (Credit: Alamy)