And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date.
For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts University, shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgments of the physician's niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued.
So it doesn't have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent, but do we like that person and how they interacted? Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead you to claim more value from that negotiation.
If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right?
So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are.
We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves.
We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology.
So what nonverbals am I talking about? I'm a social psychologist. I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics. I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance.
And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance? Well, this is what they are.
So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding.