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 neurodivergent 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. Joseph Pelrine says we should downgrade our confidence in it, but I’d go further – 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 

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Reading the air: high and low context communication in teams

Picture the scene: you’re in a meeting with your new team. You ask what you think is a reasonable question, and knowing glances are exchanged across the room. A couple of people suppress laughter, and the team lead moves on. It’s clear that you’ve said something wrong, but you have no idea what. The rest of the team are picking up on, and sharing, cues you can’t read and you are suddenly and obviously the outsider. There is an implicit communication at play, and you’re not in on it.

This dynamic can be thought of in terms of the context of the communication. The rest of the team are operating with a high level of shared context – they are reading something into your words, and implicitly communicating something back to you, but you don’t have the shared context, the shared substrate, to understand what that is. This is a concept that anthropologist Edward Hall identified through his work which began in the 1930s, exploring how different groups of people communicate in different ways with their own shared norms, including how people who have known each other for a long time often communicate more implicitly than strangers who have just met. He later came to term this ‘high and low context’ communication, a framing which Erin Meyer brought to a wider organisational audience through her book The Culture Map. The idea of high and low context communication is a framework that has a lot to offer anyone thinking about how teams actually function.

High and low context: what the framework says

In high context communication, a great deal of meaning is carried implicitly. It lives in relationship history, shared understanding, tone, non-verbal signals and what is deliberately left unsaid. The speaker may be saying one thing explicitly while something else entirely is being communicated, and the onus is on the listener to read between the lines. Japan is often cited as a key example of a high context culture; Meyer describes how someone who fails to pick up on implicit cues risks being labelled a kuuki yomenai – literally, “a person who can’t read the air.” Korea, Indonesia and Iran are also broadly high context cultures.

High context communication tends to flourish in societies with long, dense shared histories – populations who have had many centuries, sometimes even millennia, to develop layered, sophisticated codes of meaning and to become fluent in interpreting them with each other.

Low context communication works differently. Meaning is made as explicit and external as possible – it lives in the words themselves, in clear and precise instructions and in expectations that are named directly rather than gestured toward. The US is Meyer’s go-to example of a very low context culture. She explains that in the US, a country shaped by successive waves of immigration, with diverse populations bringing different languages, histories and backgrounds, people quickly learned that if you wanted your message to land, you had to make it as explicit as possible. Australia, Canada and the Netherlands sit similarly on the low context end of the spectrum.

But the framework isn’t only about national culture, it cuts across many kinds of grouping. A tight-knit friendship group who have grown up together will often have developed a highly implicit, almost private communication style that is opaque to anyone outside it. A group of students thrown together in university halls of residence for the first time will need to be much more explicit if they’re going to organise anything at all. The same applies in organisations. A small, long-established, relatively autonomous team will often communicate in a higher context style than a newly convened multidisciplinary group drawn from across different functions.

The problem with high context in diverse teams

And here is where we go beyond something that’s academically kind of interesting into something that’s really important for the way we work…

High context environments favour insiders. They require a depth of shared knowledge and reference that takes time and proximity to build. Anyone who doesn’t share that implicit frame – for instance new joiners, people from different cultural backgrounds, neurodivergent folks, people from outside the dominant professional culture – is operating with less information, greater ambiguity and a greater risk of getting things wrong. They’re having to work harder just to follow what everyone else seems to be understanding effortlessly. And they’re typically far less likely to speak up when they’re uncertain, because, as we know, uncertainty makes speaking up feel more risky.

This is where high context communication becomes an equity issue, not just a style preference. The implicit meanings, unspoken norms and in-jokes that mark the insiders all create gradients of access to conversation that track closely with who was there first, who shares the dominant cultural background and whose communication style is treated as the default.

This connects directly to how teams foster psychological safety. When norms are implicit, expectations are gestured at rather than named and people are expected to absorb the rules by osmosis, the barrier to speaking up rises sharply, especially for those newest to the group or furthest from the implicit reference frame. When we make our communication norms explicit, we widen the circle of people who can understand what kind of participation is welcome and how to make their voice heard.

Multidisciplinary teams

The challenge of communicating across contexts compounds when you bring together people not just from different cultural or social backgrounds but from different professional disciplines. A product manager, a clinician, a data scientist, a policy specialist and a sales lead have all been shaped by the norms, language and implicit assumptions of their respective fields. They each bring a professional context and assumed way of working and communicating that the others aren’t party to. Perhaps the clinician uses clinical terminology, which they assume everyone else will understand, while the policy specialist has a knowledge of the legislative landscape that underpins all that they say but is never made explicit. Perhaps the sales lead starts from the assumption that the team’s goal is purely commercial. None of them are wrong to carry their expertise, and in fact it’s the diversity of their backgrounds that could allow the work they do together to be hugely successful. But when their contextual assumptions go unexamined, misunderstandings and misalignments proliferate.

This is why taking some time to get to know one another’s ways of working, and, even more importantly, to establish some explicit, shared team norms at the outset of a multidisciplinary project matters so much. What this means in practice is a deliberate, intentional move to lower context communication – being as explicit and clear with each other as possible. All the dialogue that flows from there can be built on shared understanding.

When the stakes are highest: crisis and time pressure

The case for practising low context communication in ordinary conditions becomes even harder to ignore when you consider what happens when those conditions break down.

Under pressure, in a crisis, where decision making is time pressured but the stakes are high, we might feel as if we need to communicate more implicitly in order to go faster, but actually the time cost of ambiguity and flawed assumptions can be even higher. 

In their work on ‘Crisis-Ready Teams’ Waller and Kaplan described the characteristics of high-performing teams in terms of their early interaction patterns, and discovered that higher performing teams spent significantly more time in what they called the early structuring phase, where they clarified team member’s roles and created ground rules around communicating – what we would call the social contract. They observed:

“While other teams seemed to jump into the problem feetfirst with very little effort given to structuring activities, high performing teams seemed to approach the crisis situation knowing if all team members weren’t on the ‘same page’ from the beginning, coordination would become more problematic as things became more complex.”

What these high performing teams were effectively doing was taking the time to build shared mental models of their work environment and how they could work together. They were explicitly building shared context. What’s more, these high-performing crisis teams also spent more time in what Waller and Kaplan call the information sharing phase – where they pool the information they have individually with each other to augment each other’s understanding. And the authors are keen to emphasise that this doesn’t mean pausing and deliberating before you ‘stop the bleeding’ or take any immediate actions needed as part of the first response phase of a crisis. But it does mean that as we tackle complex and evolving crises, we need teams who can continually monitor the situation, “freely sharing information about the situation without fear of reprisal,” as Waller and Kaplan put it. In other words, the teams need psychological safety.

Making low context communication an explicit group norm in ordinary conditions is partly preparation for these times. Teams that have practised stating expectations clearly and treating explicit communication as a mark of respect rather than an insult to intelligence are much better placed to communicate effectively when clarity becomes critical.

Building the habit: low context as a team norm

In practice this means taking time to build a social contract deliberately, and discussing the value of low context communication with the team from the start, not assuming that clarity will emerge naturally, but treating it as something the group actively commits to.

A happy outcome of this, of course, is that the more we work on making expectations explicit, encouraging information sharing and getting clear about our roles, the more we are actually building a shared context. In time that can mean more of our coordination becomes implicit again, the team reading each other well without needing to spell everything out. The difference is that this is an implicit understanding the group has built, rather than one it took for granted at the start.

A note on the costs

So does this mean the real goal was never low context communication at all, only creating the shared context that lets us work implicitly again? Not quite. In most teams the conditions for that never fully stabilise. New joiners arrive, team boundaries shift and the shared reference frame that makes implicit working reliable is always partly under construction. Diversity of background, discipline and cognitive approach adds to this: the assumptions any group builds will always be more accessible to some members than others. As Meyer puts it, “Multicultural teams need low-context processes” – and we would extend that further: so do teams with diversity of any kind, whether of discipline, background, neurodiversity or anything else.

But it is worth acknowledging that low context communication is not a universal good that everyone will welcome naturally. For those accustomed to high context styles, a move toward explicitness can feel slow, or even patronising:  “You don’t need to spell it out – I get it!”. 

There is a risk that imposing low context communication without acknowledging this discomfort lands as a power move in its own right, as if the explicit style were simply better, rather than better suited to working with team members who come from different contexts and have different histories. As Meyer describes, we might need to be really honest and upfront about why we’re communicating like this, saying things like:

I’ll put what we discussed and agreed in writing, not because we don’t trust each other but because then we have a clear agreement we can refer back to and catch any misunderstandings or confusions. 

We can apply the principles of low context communication even to the process of moving to lower context approaches!

What a team is really developing is the capacity to move between the two styles deliberately: to grow enough shared context that it can work implicitly where that genuinely serves the group, while maintaining the discipline to switch to something more explicit whenever the situation demands it (which it often will). The way in is an honest conversation about how we communicate, and that conversation is itself an act of low context communication. We start by naming what we’re doing and why.

Further Reading

Contracting and Recontracting

Ambiguity, Predictability and Psychological Safety

Déformation professionnelle

The Calculus of Voice

The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

Crisis-Ready Teams by Mary J. Waller and Seth A. KaplanUnderstanding High- vs. Low-Context Cultures by Pablo Lamino and John Diaz

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