Key Takeaways
- Reading people involves paying attention to both verbal cues and nonverbal signals, such as body language, expressions, and tone.
- Overall patterns and context matter, so understanding someone’s typical behavior can help you interpret their responses more accurately.
- You can get better at reading people by listening actively and observing closely.
Knowing how to read people starts with paying close attention to what they say and how they say it. Noticing body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, and subtle shifts in behavior can reveal emotions and intentions that words alone might not. Be sure to look for clusters of behaviors and not single cues, focus on using active listening, and consider the context, including how cultural differences and personal biases might affect your interpretations.
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Signals That Will Help You Read People
- Body language: Notice nonverbal signals like posture, body positioning, and gestures. For example, leaning closer might indicate interest, while keeping the arms and legs crossed or leaning away might signal defensiveness.
- Tone of voice: Pay attention to how people say things and not just the content of their words. This includes volume, tone, speech rate, and intonation. Hesitation and quietness might be signs of anxiety, while speaking clearly and rapidly can signal confidence or excitement.
- Facial expressions: Observe a person’s facial movements and consider what they might indicate. Expressions can reveal whether a person is happy, sad, angry, or nervous, even minor movements known as microexpressions.
- Eye contact: The eyes convey a lot. Raised eyebrows can mean that someone’s interested, while narrow eyes can indicate suspicion. If someone’s eyes are darting around, they might be nervous or looking for potential exits, while a lot of eye contact could indicate interest or confidence.
“It’s how we make initial contact,” says Railton of the eyes. “Raising eyebrows is a sign people are interested, or even that they fancy someone, and it’s a movement that is difficult to control. Blinking is a little harder to read. It’s the change in the blinking pattern that will give clues.”
Key Elements of Reading People
“When reading people, we’re looking for basics first: facial expressions, physical stance, movement,” says Inbaal Honigman, body language expert. “Facial expressions can be happy, sad, or tense. Physical stance can be confident or nervous. Movement can be calm and deliberate or stressed and jumpy. A combination of all three can give us some initial clues about the person – but of course, there’s a lot more to it.”
Alexandra Stratyner, PhD, licensed psychologist, explains, “Body language can be a telling aspect of how a person is feeling or what they might be thinking, often revealing more than words alone.”
Create a Baseline
When reading people, remember that you’re dealing with human beings. Everyone’s different, and we all have our own patterns of behavior.
Create a baseline of people’s normal behavior—if they often fold their arms, look at the floor, scratch their head—and then look out for any deviations from their norm. If you’ve noticed that they often do one thing when they’re nervous, and they’re doing it more regularly in this conversation, what might that tell you?
Look for Body Language Consistency
“Consistent body language will display cohesion between facial expression, body posture, and movement. Excited face, excited pose, excited movements can tell you a lot when displayed all together,” says Honigman. “Inconsistent body language, such as a smile changing to a frown, or wringing hands suddenly dropping to the sides, show that the person is trying to hide how they truly feel.”
Alexandra Stratyner, PhD
While facial expressions are important emotional cues, they can be subtle, ambiguous, and influenced by factors like tiredness, discomfort, concentration, and individual and/or cultural differences.
— Alexandra Stratyner, PhD
Look at Their Posture
Dr. Stratyner describes this as a good starting point, explaining, “Someone who stands tall with their chest open and shoulders back typically appears confident and comfortable. In contrast, hunched shoulders or slouched posture can indicate insecurity, defensiveness, or exhaustion.”
Watch for Mirroring
Often, people will mirror others. We have neurons in our brain that fire when someone mirrors us or when we mirror someone else. When the person we’re talking to smiles, the smile muscles in our own faces activate, for example. So, if someone doesn’t reciprocate and mirror us, it could indicate that they don’t like us or aren’t happy with us for some reason.
Keep an Ear Out for Their Choice of Words
“The specific words a person uses can reveal how they feel or what they value. For instance, frequent use of ‘I’ might indicate self-focus or ownership of their perspective, while a lot of ‘we’ language suggests a more collective or team-oriented mindset,” says Dr. Stratyner.
Look at Their Breathing
“Breathing speeds up when we are excited and slows down when we are relaxed. People who are always excited tend to have raised shoulders too, which can be an indicator of stress or that they are an extreme extrovert,” says Railton.
How to Avoid Common Mistakes
- Look at signals as a whole: Honigman says, “The most common mistake when trying to read people or ascertain their true intentions, is focusing on a single part of their body language or facial expression, rather than reading the person as a whole.”
- Consider congruence: Expressions offer clues, but those clues are not nearly enough. Body language should match. “Many people will latch on to one clue and deduce what they believe the person to be feeling, but a cohesive body language extravaganza is needed, in order to figure someone out correctly,” adds Honigman.
- Signals can have many meanings: Nonverbal cues don’t have clear-cut definitions like words do. Gestures and expressions can have many meanings, so context is key. Match the gesture, the words, and the facial expression to read someone best. If someone yawns, they might be tired. If someone’s tapping their foot, they could be nervous. But if it isn’t paired with other typically nervous gestures, it could mean something else.
- Cultural differences exist: Dr. Stratyner adds, “While facial expressions are important emotional cues, they can be subtle, ambiguous, and influenced by factors like tiredness, discomfort, concentration, and individual and/or cultural differences,” and the same goes for gestures when it comes to cultural differences. A gesture might mean one thing in one culture, and something entirely different in another.
- Nervousness can affect interpretations: Remember, too, that someone might be nervous if they feel like they’re being interrogated or about to get into trouble, so don’t misinterpret this nervousness as something else. If someone’s displaying behaviors that could be suspicious, it might just be that they’re nervous. If they’re avoiding eye contact, it might be down to cultural norms or just shyness.
- Everyone is different: Not everyone will act the same way, either. As Dr. Stratyner says, “People have unique personality traits, cultural backgrounds, and coping mechanisms. For example, quiet or reserved people might not be anxious—they could just be introverted. Making assumptions based on your behavioral norms can lead to errors in judgment.”
Inbaal Honigman, body language expert
Practice on your nearest and dearest, people who you already know well and can sense when they’re being truthful and when they’re not.
— Inbaal Honigman, body language expert
Practical Tips for Improving Your Ability to Read People
If you’d like to get better at reading people, there are things you can easily put into practice.
- Improve your listening skills: “To better understand what someone is communicating, it’s essential to listen closely to both the content of their words and how they say them,” says Dr. Stratyner. “Important clues to someone’s true feelings, intentions, or mood may not be found within the words themselves, but in their pitch, speed, and subtle emotional expressions.”
- Look for inconsistencies: When talking to someone, keep an eye out for any inconsistencies in their body language. “Ask yourself what it is that you’re noticing, and learn from that,” says Honigman.
- Keep practicing: “Practice on your nearest and dearest, people who you already know well and can sense when they’re being truthful and when they’re not,” recommends Honigman. “The more you try, the better you become.”
Even if you aren’t necessarily practicing on people you know, it can be worth looking around you in public. If you see a group of friends, take a look at their body language. Honigman suggests keeping a journal of observations to learn as you go.
Why Reading People Is So Important
Being able to read others is essentially the ability to better understand someone through nonverbal cues, communication, and behavior. It means that you aren’t just hearing what they say, but looking at who they are through their body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions.
Some estimates suggest that how much someone is liked is influenced by:
- Facial expression – 55%
- Tone of voice accounts – 38%
- The words they use – 7%
This shows just how impactful it can be to go beyond what people are saying.
Carole Railton, FRSA, global body language expert, says, “As society is becoming more visual, with large lit-up adverts, instant video, and conference calls, body language becomes more important. This new technology speeds up our decisions about others. We make up our mind about someone in the first few seconds, changing our opinion about someone takes a lot longer. First impressions count.”
Body language begins when we are born, yet, we start losing these behavioral skills as soon as we start to speak.
