Behavioral researcher Vanessa Van Edwards breaks down the hidden social signals that shape every interaction, from the moment someone lays eyes on you to the way you close a conversation.
This genius formula is rooted in research from neuroscientists, social psychologists, and communication experts. Charisma is learned, not innate, and even if you consider yourself an “awkward” person, you can still hack positive reception. You’ll learn how to read a room, disarm negative cues before they derail a conversation, and deliver your ideas with the kind of quiet confidence that makes people lean in.
About the speaker: Vanessa Van Edwards is a behavioral researcher, bestselling author, and founder of Science of People. For two decades she’s turned the science of human behavior into practical tools that help people communicate with confidence. She’s taught in Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education and authored the bestselling books Captivate and Cues in 18+ languages. Her work has reached 100+ million learners through videos, courses, and keynotes at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, SXSW, and with teams at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Comcast, and more.
Timestamps
00:00:29 Chapter 1: How to make a great first impression
00:01:24 The two things everyone judges you on
00:09:13 Body language moves that build instant trust
00:17:56 Chapter 2: How to understand and read people
00:24:04 How to read negative cues before it’s too late
00:28:42 Chapter 3: How to be conversationally present
00:34:03 The body language habits that kill your listening presence
00:41:00 How to know when it’s your turn to talk
00:42:34 Chapter 4: The psychology of power and engagement
00:49:51 How to stop sounding monotone (even if you know your stuff)
00:54:14 The finishing touches that make you unforgettable
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
I’m Vanessa Van Edwards. I’m a behavioral researcher and best-selling author. My books Captivate and Cues teach people the 97 signals to be charismatic. I also teach communication at Harvard University and have online courses for smart people who want to learn social skills. Today on Big Think, I’m going to be talking about how to make a great first impression, how to create a memorable presence, and how to communicate with influence.
Chapter 1: How to Make a Great First Impression
A first impression is so important for every interaction. It’s the foundation for a good interaction. If you can nail your first impression, in those first few seconds, everything in the interaction becomes easier. On the other hand, if you make an awkward or a bad or a disengaged first impression, Everything about your connection becomes harder. Those first few seconds, you’re trying to establish two things, presence and trust. The clearer you can signal your presence as memorable and effective, the easier your interaction will be.
A big myth about first impressions is that your first impression happens the moment you start talking. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your first impression happens the moment someone first sees you. That means you only have a few seconds, sometimes less than a second, to form that foundation of trust that you need for an entire interaction.
The two things everyone judges you on
The big question is, what is presence? There’s foundational research from Dr. Susan Fisk that looks at how we connect with others. There are two essential elements for presence. First, warmth. This is your trust, your likability, your openness. But second, just as important, is your competence. That’s your effectiveness, your capability, your productivity. When we first meet someone, we’re trying to very quickly decide, how warm are you and how competent are you? Specifically, as humans, we’re trying to answer two basic questions. Can I trust you? Warmth. And can I rely on you? Competence.
People with an incredible presence, a memorable presence, are very quickly trying to answer those two questions. And for you, the faster you can answer those two questions, “you can trust me, you can rely on me,” the more memorable and effective your presence is.
When I first read this research and saw this amazing, basically a formula for presence on warmth and competence, there was one part of the research that made me take pause, and we have to mention it here. This is not your actual warmth and competence. It’s your perceived warmth and competence. Meaning, you can be the smartest, most trustworthy person in the room, but if you’re not clearly signaling that warmth and competence, people will not believe it. I think this is the most important aspect of presence. If you are showing up to your interactions authentically trustworthy, which I hope you are, and knowing your stuff, we have to clearly signal that with warmth and competence for people to believe in our presence. The goal is not to fake confidence. It’s to align your inner intention with your outer expression.
The question is, how do we read someone’s warmth and competence? It all comes down to our cues. Cues are the subtle but powerful social signals humans send to each other. There are actually four channels of cues.
First, our words. This is the channel we use the most. Yes, our words communicate our ideas, but actually the words we use also signal our warmth and competence. The second channel is our nonverbal. So our body language, our facial expressions, our gestures. These also signal trust, warmth and competence, reliability or knowledge. The third channel is voice or vocal tonality. This is our volume, our pace, our cadence. How we say our words matters just as much as what we say. And the last, the smallest channel is our ornaments. So the colors we wear, the jewelry, what’s behind us in our background, what’s on our desk, the props we’re holding in our profile photos. That also can signal warmth and competence.
I like to split cues up into two buckets, positive and negative. Positive cues stimulate connection and engagement. They are crucial to a great first impression. The second bucket, negative cues. These signal disinterest, discomfort, anxiety. They begin to create difficult or friction-filled interactions. And what most people don’t realize about cues is there’s a cycle.
In this way, we often decode cues in social settings. So we'll walk into a meeting or walk into a room and we decode the room. We read the room. We want to see what cues are being sent to us. Do people like us? Are they positive cues? Or do people not like us? Are they negative cues? And this is the second part of the cycle. After we decode a cue, we internalize it. If someone just has sent us a cue of social rejection, our body goes, "Uh-oh, I'm not safe." And it begins to do the last part of the cycle, which is encoding. That's sending social signals back.
To explain how cues work, I like to think of a study that changed the way that I think about social signals. In this study, they brought people into their lab and they had them walk into a room of actors. The actors were instructed to send the participant a cue of social rejection. A cue of social rejection is very negative. It could be an eye roll. It could be a scoff. It’s something that’s designed to make us feel like we don’t belong. What they found was when the participant saw the cue of social rejection, their own field of vision increased.
Their pupils dilated so they could see more of the environment. Why? This is the cue cycle in action. They decoded a negative cue. They internalized it, "Uh-oh, I'm not safe." And then they began to encode back nervousness and anxiety. What's critical to a first impression is showing up, encoding the right cues, sending social signals of warmth and competence, which hopefully others will internalize as, "I can rely and trust this person," and they send warmth and competence signals back to us.
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