Body Language and Non-Verbal Communication

Body Language and Non-Verbal Communication

There’s a whole industry, and a lot of terrible advice, built on the promise that we can read people’s minds through their “body language”. Common tropes include things like averted eyes or a lack of eye contact meaning that someone is trying to deceive us, expansive open postures revealing confidence and warmth, closed postures signalling defensiveness or annoyance, and fidgety body movement indicating boredom or a lack of attention. Leadership courses teach it, hiring managers apply it, and a disturbing amount of psychological safety advice echoes the usual “maintain eye contact”, “mirror their body language”, and other awful suggestions to build trust.

“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”

Shakespeare, Macbeth, I.iv

Non-verbal communication is real – we convey meaning with our bodies in intentional and unintentional ways, but calling it “communication” is part of the problem. It’s more like signals, and some of those signals may be significant, some less so, and some mean something completely different to how we interpret them. Non-verbal communication is context-dependent, strongly cultural, very different for neurodiverse people, and far less useful as a diagnostic tool than popular books or LinkedIn articles would claim. And there’s a bigger problem: it’s not just that the evidence to support a lot of this body language advice is weak, it’s that the popular advice functions as a normative tool – it teaches people to confirm and perform a narrow set of usually Western, neurotypical norms, and it licenses the hiring manager or the leader to judge people who can’t or won’t adhere to those norms. The standard body language advice isn’t just unhelpful, it’s actively harmful.

The non-verbal communication myths that won’t die

Most of us have heard some version of the claim that 93% of communication is non-verbal. It’s on slides in a thousand leadership courses and all over LinkedIn. But where does it come from, and is there anything in it? In 1967, Albert Mehrabian conducted laboratory studies in which participants judged how much a speaker liked them when a single word, tone of voice and facial expression sent “contradictory” signals. The word was “maybe”, chosen because it was considered most neutral. Three speakers (all women) recorded it in three tones (positive, neutral, negative), which were paired with black-and-white photographs of three different women expressing liking, neutral and disliking expressions (Mehrabian & Ferris 1967). So the stimuli were: one word, spoken by strangers, paired with still photographs of different strangers’ faces. What they found was that when the channels (spoken and visual) conflicted, facial cues outweighed vocal cues by roughly three to two in judging whether the speaker liked the listener. That ratio is where the 55% and 38% come from. 

But it wasn’t a conversation, it wasn’t even the same person’s face and voice. The studies measured nothing about normal conversation, and Mehrabian since spent decades pointing out that his equations (7% [literal meaning] +38% [tone] +55% [facial expression]) apply only to communications of feelings and attitudes, and only when the channels conflict.

The formula isn’t even a single finding. The 7% for words comes from a separate experiment, with different stimuli and different participants (Mehrabian & Wiener 1967), and the three numbers were arithmetically bolted together afterwards into one equation. Attempts to reproduce the ratios since have produced very different numbers.

So the popular evidence for “93% of communication is non-verbal” isn’t actually evidence for that claim at all. 

The Power Posing Problem

That was the myth about reading other people’s bodies. The next one is about how we’re supposed to hold our own. In a now infamous 2010 study, Carney, Cuddy and Yap randomly assigned 42 participants to briefly adopt either expansive, “powerful” postures, or contractive “powerless” ones. The results showed that the power posers subsequently sought higher risk, and showed higher testosterone and lower cortisol, based upon a $2 gamble plus a self-report of how “powerful” they felt (Carney, Cuddy & Yap 2010). The claim was that a simple one-minute power pose boosted your power and influence. Cuddy’s 2012 TED talk became one of the most watched in history, and currently stands at over 60 million views.

Then came the takedown. Ranehill et al. ran a much larger replication in 2015 and found no effect on hormone levels and no effect on risk taking. The only thing that survived was how powerful participants said they felt, which is the single thread the theory’s defenders have pulled on ever since (Ranehill et al. 2015). After the p-curve analysis found no evidential value, Carney walked back the claims, stating publicly “I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real.” and “the evidence against the existence of power poses is undeniable.” She also alluded to what is now called “p-hacking” – selecting the results that provide the lowest p-values, to imply greater statistical significance than the whole sample would suggest.

The more damning aspect is that these poses were often pushed hardest to the people with the least power, as a substitute for having any. If the powerless can simply stand differently to gain power, then structural inequity becomes reframed as a personal failure of posture.

There’s also an echo here with that HBS eye contact paper, which concluded that leaders should use sustained eye gaze as a strategy for building psychological safety. That conclusion came from a small sample, at an elite university, in a lab, which was turned into headline generalisation followed by an enthusiastic uptake by the advice industry before any replication had a chance to refute it.

“A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on.”
Terry Pratchett, “The Truth”

Detecting Deception

In 2007, SPOT (Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques) was introduced in the US, a post-9/11 initiative loosely modelled on Israeli airport questioning techniques and developed with input from Paul Ekman of “microexpressions” infamy. Roughly $1bn was spent on the programme, with 3,000 Behaviour Detection Officers (BDOs) trained to spot “indicators” of deception and allocate their interviewee points according to the number of signs they spotted. These “signs of deception” (consider this is after an often long flight) included covering one’s mouth, blinking a lot, fidgeting, yawning, whistling, sweaty palms, which incurred one point each. “Arrogance”, a “cold penetrating stare” or “rigid posture” incurred two points each, and if an individual accumulated more than six points they would get interrogated. Points were deducted for demographics, with married couples over 55 getting two points back and women over 55 one point back. Profiling was literally built into it (Winter & Currier 2015, The Intercept), and reports suggest that 80% of those who were pulled from security lines under SPOT were minorities.

In 2013, the GAO (Government Accountability Office, the audit office of the US Congress) reviewed four meta-analyses covering over 400 studies across 60 years and found that the human ability to identify deception from behavioural indicators is the same as or slightly better than chance. TSA revised its list of indicators in response, but when the GAO audited the revised list four years later, it found no valid scientific evidence for 28 of the 36 behavioural indicators, with only 3 of 178 cited sources holding up at all. A BDO manager put it bluntly: “The SPOT program is bullshit… Complete bullshit.” This is body language ideology at state scale, and the impact of it is greatest on people whose baseline demeanour differs from Western, neurotypical expectations. Those from cultures with different norms around gaze, proximity and expressiveness, and those for whom being scrutinised by uniformed authority is already, understandably, stressful. Body language advice then is more than just corporate training room nonsense and has become an instrument of state power, whilst in organisations the same machinery operates at smaller scale in interviews where candidates are marked down for “poor eye contact” and performance reviews that record “closed body language”.

No “universal” non-verbal signals

The LinkedIn version of body language advice rests on the idea that certain expressions and postures carry the same meaning everywhere: that there is a universal human non-verbal code. It was, to be fair, the dominant scientific view for a long time. It is coming apart though. Studies comparing Western and East Asian observers show they use different strategies to decode the same faces, confusing expressions that the universal model says should be unmistakable (Jack et al. 2009, Jack et al. 2012). Research with the Himba in Namibia, the Hadza in Tanzania and Trobriand Islanders found that, without Western emotion concepts supplied by the experimenters, participants rarely produced the “universal” labels at all (Gendron, Crivelli & Barrett 2018). Behavioural ecologists instead argue that facial displays are tools for social influence, acts performed for an audience, shaped by culture, context and relationship – social tools rather than emotion readouts (Crivelli & Fridlund, 2018). I like this interpretation, because it mirrors actual ecosystems – a signal only has meaning within context – if we treat a raised eyebrow as “contempt”, we’re ignoring everything else that gives the signal its meaning.

Body language and neurodiversity

In 2017, Sasson and colleagues showed observers ten-second clips of autistic and non-autistic people. Participants’ first impressions of the autistic participants were formed quickly, were markedly less favourable across nearly every trait judged, and didn’t improve with longer exposure. But when observers were given only the conversational content, with no audio-visual cues, the bias disappeared entirely (Sasson et al. 2017). It was the neurotypical reading of body language and facial expression that catalysed the exclusion.

This is connected to what Damian Milton calls the autistic “double empathy” problem: communication misunderstanding runs in both directions, not a deficit of the autistic person. Neither autistic nor non-autistic people lack empathy, it just looks different to each (Milton 2012). Catherine Crompton demonstrated it well in her 2020 research: information passed along a chain of autistic people survived just as well as it did along a chain of non-autistic people, and only information passing along the mixed chains degraded (Crompton et al. 2020). The difficulty is at the allistic/autistic interface, not in the individual.

So when body language advice tells neurodivergent people to fix their side of the interface (make eye contact, keep your hands still, control your expression), it’s assigning the whole burden of a mutual endeavour to one (already disadvantaged) side. And that burden is high: masking and camouflaging are consistently associated with anxiety, depression, exhaustion, burnout, and elevated suicide risk in autistic adults (Cook et al. 2021). Bad advice about body language and non-verbal communication isn’t just ineffective, it’s actively harmful.

Psychological safety and body language

The mainstream literature on psychological safety and body language has absorbed the body language advice uncritically in two ways. One is that we’re encouraged to read certain gestures as signals that someone feels unsafe, such as crossed arms (but maybe they’re just cold), lack of eye contact (but maybe they’re neurodivergent or it feels culturally inappropriate for them), fidgeting (but maybe that’s how they regulate, or they’ve just had a strong coffee). This leads to misinterpretation of signals as well as a sense that we’re being surveilled rather than supported.

The other way is the converse: we’re told to adopt certain non-verbal behaviours, adopt open postures, shake hands firmly, maintain eye contact, sit still, etc. This asks those already spending the most effort to conform (neurodivergent people, people from non-dominant cultures, people without access to particular social norms) to these Western, neurotypical norms. And it’s a nasty feedback loop, because the more that people conform, the more it looks like these norms are universal when they’re not. When we tell people that psychological safety looks like sustained eye contact and an open posture, many people will oblige, because the cost of not doing so is read as different or difficult. We then observe a great deal of eye contact and open posture, which works as confirmation that this is what psychological safety looks like. We conflate compliance with inclusion.

Meanwhile, those who cannot or will not comply are deemed exceptions rather than evidence against the norm. It gets filed as a personal shortcoming rather than as a signal that the norm didn’t actually fit. And if the expected behaviours happen to be our native ones, the room will look welcoming, cooperative and entirely natural, largely because other people are working quite hard to make it look that way for us. 

What to do

We all convey things, sometimes very important things, non-verbally. It might be intentional, with a thumbs-up or a wink (both of which mean very different things in different cultures and contexts – don’t give a thumbs-up when you’re diving unless you mean to return to the surface) or unintentional, such as yawning (Morris et al. 1979).

The point is that tone, timing, movement, eye contact, posture, and facial expression do carry information, but that information is non-deterministic, local rather than universal, culturally influenced, and very dependent upon knowing the person and the context. Just like indicator species: we must read the context before the signal.

The lesson is almost embarrassingly basic: pay more attention to what people say, and less on how they say it. Treat non-verbal “communication” as weak signals: opportunities for humble inquiry rather than judgement. Agree on team norms, and make our own needs and preferences explicit, and encourage others to do the same, so we can reduce the need to “read the air”.

The magic universal non-verbal Babel fish was never real. What’s real is the often frustratingly slow process of actually getting to know people and understand them, in their own contexts, and give them space to be themselves. A monoculture is not evidence of what the land can grow.

References

Mehrabian, A., & Ferris, S. R. (1967). Inference of attitudes from nonverbal communication in two channels. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 31(3), 248-252. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0024648

Mehrabian, A., & Wiener, M. (1967). Decoding of inconsistent communications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6(1), 109-114. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0024532

Carney, D. R., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Yap, A. J. (2010). Power posing: Brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance. Psychological Science, 21(10), 1363-1368. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610383437

Ranehill, E., Dreber, A., Johannesson, M., Leiberg, S., Sul, S., & Weber, R. A. (2015). Assessing the robustness of power posing: No effect on hormones and risk tolerance in a large sample of men and women. Psychological Science, 26(5), 653-656. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614553946

Simmons, J. P., & Simonsohn, U. (2017). Power posing: P-curving the evidence. Psychological Science, 28(5), 687-693. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616658563

Carney, D. R. (2016). My position on “power poses”. https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/dana_carney/

Cesario, J., Jonas, K. J., & Carney, D. R. (2017). CRSP special issue on power poses: What was the point and what did we learn? Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, 2(1), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1080/23743603.2017.1309876

US Government Accountability Office (2013). Aviation security: TSA should limit future funding for behavior detection activities (GAO-14-159). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-14-159

US Government Accountability Office (2017). Aviation security: TSA does not have valid evidence supporting most of the revised behavioral indicators used in its behavior detection activities (GAO-17-608R). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-17-608r

Winter, J., & Currier, C. (2015). Exclusive: TSA’s secret behavior checklist to spot terrorists. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2015/03/27/revealed-tsas-closely-held-behavior-checklist-spot-terrorists/

Jack, R. E., Blais, C., Scheepers, C., Schyns, P. G., & Caldara, R. (2009). Cultural confusions show that facial expressions are not universal. Current Biology, 19(18), 1543-1548. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.07.051

Jack, R. E., Garrod, O. G. B., Yu, H., Caldara, R., & Schyns, P. G. (2012). Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal. PNAS, 109(19), 7241-7244. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1200155109

Gendron, M., Crivelli, C., & Barrett, L. F. (2018). Universality reconsidered: Diversity in making meaning of facial expressions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(4), 211-219. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417746794

Crivelli, C., & Fridlund, A. J. (2018). Facial displays are tools for social influence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(5), 388-399. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.02.006

Sasson, N. J., Faso, D. J., Nugent, J., Lovell, S., Kennedy, D. P., & Grossman, R. B. (2017). Neurotypical peers are less willing to interact with those with autism based on thin slice judgments. Scientific Reports, 7, 40700. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep40700

Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The “double empathy problem”. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883-887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008

Crompton, C. J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C. V., Flynn, E. G., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020). Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism, 24(7), 1704-1712. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320919286

Cook, J., Hull, L., Crane, L., & Mandy, W. (2021). Camouflaging in autism: A systematic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 89, 102080. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2021.102080

Vrij, A., Hartwig, M., & Granhag, P. A. (2019). Reading lies: Nonverbal communication and deception. Annual Review of Psychology, 70, 295-317. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-103135

Morris, D., Collett, P., Marsh, P., & O’Shaughnessy, M. (1979). Gestures: Their origins and distribution. Jonathan Cape.

Pelrine, J. 2026. #102 – Body Language: https://ckarchive.com/b/4zuvhehpd0kn3a6ovveola69zn9l9a5hl386z