Journal / The Human Layer
Behaviour, nonverbal signals and decision-making, read through the empirical literature rather than the trade-show version.
A trial made a procedure longer and more uncomfortable, and patients remembered it as better. What that means for anyone who delivers a service.
Always anchor first is half right. The two conditions where it backfires, and the documented technique that cancels the other side's anchor.
A randomised experiment trained managers in twelve behaviours and raised how charismatic colleagues rated them. The tactics, and the inverted-U nobody quotes.
Seventy years of research on seating and posture, and almost none of it in what you read. What the studies support, and the full power-posing replication record.
People agree sincerely and then do nothing. The three mechanisms that dissolve intention, and the thirty-second technique that closes part of the gap.
Video does not thin the signals. It removes them and adds artefacts that look like behaviour — latency that reads as hesitation, gaze that is lens geometry.
Copying posture increases liking — until it is noticed, at which point it does the opposite. Why deliberate mirroring fails and what holds up at minute thirty.
Gaze aversion is the most widely believed cue to deception and one of the weakest. The meta-analytic evidence, and the NLP claim that was specific enough to be tested and failed.
In text, only latency and length survive as signals. How to read both, the three ways written communication misleads you, and when to change channel.
Snap judgments are accurate about warmth and delivery, and poor about competence. What that means for interviews — and what beats the interview entirely.
Open questions followed by silence outperform every clever technique. Why leading questions contaminate the answer, and how to pause without being strange about it.
Disengagement precedes refusal and is far easier to read than deception. Four observable changes, in the order they arrive, and what to do inside that window.
The 7-38-55 rule came from two 1967 studies on single recorded words with contradictory affect. What they measured, and why the generalisation fails on arithmetic alone.
Humans detect deception at barely above chance, and training raises confidence without raising accuracy. Why gesture dictionaries fail, and what replaces them.