# Body Language & Non-Verbal Communication *Tom Geraghty ยท Interpersonal Practice, Politics, Diversity & Equity, Models & Critique, Individual & Wellbeing* A sustained argument that mainstream body language advice is not merely unevidenced but actively harmful, because it functions as a normative instrument: it teaches people to perform a narrow set of Western, neurotypical norms and licenses managers to judge those who cannot or will not comply. Non-verbal behaviour is real, but the piece argues that calling it communication is itself part of the problem; these are signals, non-deterministic, local rather than universal, culturally shaped and dependent on knowing the person and the context. The evidential demolition proceeds in three cases. The Mehrabian 55/38/7 formula, universally cited as proof that 93 per cent of communication is non-verbal, came from two separate 1967 laboratory studies in which participants judged a single word (maybe) spoken by strangers against still photographs of different strangers, with the three figures bolted together arithmetically afterwards; Mehrabian himself spent decades pointing out that the equations apply only to communications of feelings and attitudes, and only when channels conflict. Power posing, from the 2010 Carney, Cuddy and Yap study of 42 participants, failed to replicate in Ranehill et al. (2015) on hormones and risk-taking, was p-curved to no evidential value, and was publicly disavowed by its own first author; the piece notes the political sting, that the poses were pushed hardest at people with least power as a substitute for having any, reframing structural inequity as a personal failure of posture. And the TSA SPOT programme spent roughly a billion dollars training officers to score travellers on indicators such as fidgeting, yawning and a cold penetrating stare, with points deducted by demographic category, until GAO reviews found human deception detection barely better than chance and no valid evidence for 28 of 36 revised indicators. The universality thesis is treated as coming apart rather than settled: cross-cultural work (Jack et al., Gendron and colleagues with the Himba, Hadza and Trobriand Islanders) finds the supposedly universal labels largely absent without Western emotion concepts supplied by experimenters, and the behavioural-ecology reading of facial displays as tools for social influence is preferred, on the ecological grounds that a signal only has meaning in context. The neurodiversity section is the moral centre: Sasson et al. (2017) found thin-slice judgements of autistic people markedly less favourable and not improving with exposure, with the bias disappearing entirely once audio-visual cues were removed, so it was the neurotypical reading of body language that produced the exclusion; Milton's double empathy problem and Crompton et al. (2020) locate the difficulty at the interface rather than in the individual, and telling neurodivergent people to fix their side assigns the whole burden of a mutual endeavour to the already disadvantaged party, at documented cost in anxiety, exhaustion, burnout and suicide risk (Cook et al. 2021). Applied to psychological safety, the piece identifies a feedback loop in which people conform because non-conformity is read as difficult, the resulting uniformity is taken as confirmation that the norms are universal, and compliance is mistaken for inclusion, while those who cannot comply are filed as personal shortcomings rather than as evidence against the norm. The constructive close is deliberately modest: attend to what people say rather than how, treat non-verbal behaviour as weak signals inviting humble inquiry rather than judgement, agree team norms and make needs and preferences explicit to reduce the need to read the air. A monoculture is not evidence of what the land can grow. - **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/body-language-and-non-verbal-communication/ - **Read the full article on psychsafety.com:** https://psychsafety.com/body-language-and-non-verbal-communication/ - **Interactive map:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/?node=body-language ## Neighbours (17) - [Autistic Peer-to-Peer Information Transfer is Highly Effective](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/crompton-et-al-2020.md) (paper) - [Looking At Things Properly](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/a-practical-guide-to-looking-at-things-properly.md) - [On the Ontological Status of Autism: the Double Empathy Problem](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/milton-2012.md) (paper) - [Camouflaging in Autism: a Systematic Review](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/cook-et-al-2021.md) (paper) - [Facial Displays are Tools for Social Influence](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/crivelli-fridlund-2018.md) (paper) - [High & Low Context Communication](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/reading-the-air-high-and-low-context-communication-in-teams.md) - [Neurotypical Peers are Less Willing to Interact with Those with Autism Based on Thin Slice Judgments](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/sasson-et-al-2017.md) (paper) - [Not Same for Everyone](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-isnt-the-same-for-everyone.md) - [Universality Reconsidered: Diversity in Making Meaning of Facial Expressions](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/gendron-crivelli-barrett-2018.md) (paper) - [Amplifying Weak Signals](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/amplifying-weak-signals.md) - [Not Feeling Seen](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/not-feeling-seen-eye-contact-and-psychological-safety.md) - [PS & Neurodiversity](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-and-neurodiversity.md) - [Schein's Humble Inquiry](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edgar-scheins-humble-inquiry.md) - [Team Charters](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-80-team-charters.md) - [Empathy & PS](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/empathy.md) - [Eye Contact & PS](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/dont-look-me-in-the-eye-the-challenge-of-eye-contact.md) - [Personal User Manuals](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-72-personal-user-manuals.md)