Influence

Route  ·  12 chapters

Read the room

What nonverbal behavior can support, and where it stops. The route ends on the two most repeated claims in the popular literature, both of which fail replication.

1 Baseline First: Why Behavior Means Nothing Without a NormChapter 35, part 2  —  Nonverbal signals are deviations, not constants: an individual’s habitual rate of blinking, gesturing, foot…
2 Freeze, Flight, Fight: The Limbic Sequence Under ThreatChapter 36, part 2  —  Threat detection routes through the amygdala to brainstem circuits producing a staged response: freezing…
3 Pacifying Behaviors: The Hand That Soothes the NeckChapter 37, part 2  —  Pacifying behaviors are self-soothing motor acts — neck rubbing, ventilating the collar, leg cleansing, lip…
4 Proxemics: Edward Hall and the Invisible BubblesChapter 38, part 2  —  Hall argued that spatial distance is a communication channel governed by culture and relationship, and that…
5 The Chameleon Effect: Mimicry as an Invisible BondChapter 41, part 2  —  Perception of a behavior automatically activates its motor representation, so unconscious mimicry occurs by…
6 Five Minutes Decide the Deal: Nonverbal Dynamics in NegotiationChapter 42, part 2  —  Curhan and Pentland measured conversational dynamics — activity level, prosodic emphasis, mirroring and…
7 The Handshake: Two Seconds of Personality DataChapter 43, part 2  —  Grip strength, duration, vigour and eye contact combine into a composite that observers read as confidence,…
8 Contempt: The Micro-Sneer That Predicts CollapseChapter 46, part 2  —  Contempt is coded as a unilateral lip-corner tightening and raise, often with eye-roll, and expresses…
9 The Voice Under Pressure: Pitch, Latency and Speech RateChapter 49, part 2  —  Fundamental frequency rises under sympathetic arousal because laryngeal muscle tension increases, and…
10 The 7-38-55 Myth: What Mehrabian Actually MeasuredChapter 54, part 2  —  The original experiments tested only how listeners resolved inconsistency between a single spoken word and a…
11 Power Posing: The Rise and Fall of a Nonverbal MiracleChapter 55, part 2  —  The claimed mechanism was embodied cognition acting on the endocrine system — posture altering hormone levels…
12 The Cross-Cultural Gesture TrapChapter 58, part 2  —  Emblems — gestures with direct verbal translations, in Ekman and Friesen’s taxonomy — are culturally coded…

Start at chapter 35