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Bodylytics Lab · Research Programme

Nonverbal Communication Is Everywhere. The Data Isn’t.

Nonverbal communication decides sales, service, negotiations and interviews every day — yet almost everything we know about it comes from students judging posed photos in labs. Bodylytics Lab is building the missing field data, and using it to make training measurably better.The Lab exists to make every claim in a Bodylytics course defensible in front of a sceptical buyer.

The MethodExplore Courses
Status
Collecting field data
Reporting threshold
k ≥ 20, no smaller group
Claim register
Reviewed quarterly
Participation
Opt out in one click

bodylytics.coach/lab

What the Research Says

The short, honest version: what the evidence supports, where it has limits, and what is myth. Every source links to the study.

Well supported: what our courses are built on.

What that means for training. We teach how your own nonverbal behaviour shapes the way you are judged, and how to treat a shift in someone else's behaviour as a prompt for a better question, never as a verdict. Think we've got something wrong? Tell us, and we'll correct it in public.

A Blind Spot Hiding in Plain Sight

The classic laboratory finding is humbling: people detect deception at barely better than chance, while feeling confident they’re good at it. How that plays out in a hotel lobby, on a shop floor, or across a negotiation table — with professionals, in real time, under pressure — has hardly been studied at all. Three gaps keep the field blind:

● Students in labs ● Frontline professionals

Wrong People

Most published studies test university students. Police officers, judges and psychologists have been tested too, and do no better than students. Hotel staff, retail teams, salespeople and nurses, who read people for a living, are barely in the data at all.

LABPosed photosUntimedNo stakes
WORKLiveSplit-secondConsequences

Wrong Conditions

Posed photographs and untimed judgments, when real work means live interactions and split-second reads. Confidence is well studied and barely tracks accuracy; what is missing is speed, stakes and the setting people actually work in.

Day 0Day 30Day 90

● One-shot studies — Measured over months

No Follow-Through

Training studies show modest, real gains, mostly measured once and in the lab. How long those gains last at work, and how fast they fade without practice, is largely unmeasured.

Why We’re Doing This

Awareness. Workplaces run on folklore — crossed arms, “liars look left”, gut feel. Publishing real numbers on what professionals actually see, miss and believe raises the level of the whole conversation about nonverbal skills at work.

Better training. Every finding flows straight back into our courses, live sessions and materials. If the data shows a myth persisting in hospitality, our hospitality content confronts it head-on. If a skill decays after 90 days, our follow-up practice targets exactly that window.

The research isn't a side project — it's the feedback loop that keeps the training honest and current.

Field data collectedFindingspublishedCourses updatedSkills measuredagain

The Claim Register

Every claim taught in a Bodylytics course goes through the register: what the evidence says, the verdict, and what happened to it in the curriculum. Claims that fail are removed — and we say so.

Extract · named sources · reviewed quarterly

Showing 6 of 6 claims

Averted gaze indicates deceptionNot supportedDePaulo et al. 2003 (158 cues, meta-analysis); Global Deception Research Team 2006 (belief found in 75 countries)Taught as a myth to correct
Comparing behaviour with a person’s baseline improves accuracyWith limitsCaso, Palena, Vrij et al. 2019; Palena et al. 2018. Small-talk baselines do not help; comparable-truth baselines give modest, mixed gainsCore method, taught as protection against misreading individual differences
Spotting micro-expressions catches liesNot supportedBond & DePaulo 2006 (54% vs 50% chance); Jordan et al. 2019 (training no better than a placebo course)Expression drills reframed as description practice, Oct 2026
Cameras on in every meeting is best practiceNot supportedShockley et al. 2021, four-week field experiment: camera-on days raised fatigue and lowered voiceCamera-optional meeting design taught in Reading the Room Remotely
Video interviews are judged like face-to-face onesNot supportedBlacksmith et al. 2016 meta-analysis: technology-mediated interviews rated lower; Basch et al. 2021Taught: keep every candidate in the same interview mode
A fixed share of meaning is non-verbalRejectedTwo narrow 1967 studies of single words and tone; no single channel dominates across situations (Ekman et al. 1980)Banned brand-wide

What We Study

Every course, assessment and live training uses established measurement paradigms — emotion recognition, rapid-judgment accuracy, balanced truth/lie base rates — so results are comparable with the published literature. What the lab can’t produce is our population: frontline professionals answering in a work context, with response-time precision and follow-up over months.

01How reading accuracy compares across industries, roles and experience levels.
02How confident professionals are versus how often they’re right.
03Which debunked body-language myths persist in which workplaces.
04Whether experience makes people faster, more accurate — or just faster and wrong.
05Which skills improve fastest with training, and how long the gains last.
First papers are in preparation — findings publish once the dataset clears our minimum-group thresholds. Ask to be told when the first one lands.

How the Data Is Collected

Three sources feed the programme — always reported separately — and everything passes through one anonymization barrier before it can be analysed or published.

Free quiz takers

Anonymous answers and response times. No account, name, email or IP — a random identifier ties one attempt together, nothing more. Industry optional, self-declared.

Academy learners

Quiz and assessment responses — correctness, confidence, response time, cues relied on — plus an optional questionnaire recorded in bands, never free text. Opting out takes one click and never affects scores, certificates or pricing.

Team-training delegates

Before-and-after benchmarks. Employers see group aggregates only — never an individual delegate’s score — and every delegate is told exactly that before the first question. People answer honestly when the result can’t follow them into a performance review.

One-way

Anonymization barrier

Names, emails and account IDs are replaced by a salted one-way hash that cannot be reversed. The salt exists only inside the research database. Opted-out users are excluded entirely.

Output

Published aggregates

Aggregates only, never any group smaller than 20 participants (k ≥ 20 suppression) — reported openly as industry field data, not population-representative research.

How Our Tests Are Built

A score is only worth what the test behind it can defend. Every BodyLytics assessment is built and maintained under six measurement rules:

01

One skill per question

Each item tests a single, nameable judgment — no double-barreled questions, no trick wording, and wrong answers that are plausible rather than jokes.

02

Graded on the server

Answers are scored centrally, so a score can’t be manufactured — which is what makes the dataset, and every certificate built on it, worth anything.

03

Parallel before/after forms

The post-training test uses different questions of matched difficulty, so improvement measures skill — not memory of the first test. Per-answer feedback is withheld between sittings.

04

Enough questions to mean something

Every skill dimension is measured by multiple items per sitting — a subscale built on one or two questions is noise wearing a number.

05

Speed and confidence measured

Response times screen out click-throughs; self-rated confidence is compared against measured accuracy — the gap between the two is one of the most consistent findings in the deception literature.

06

Versioned, piloted, pruned

Live questions are never silently edited — changes create a new version, so results stay comparable. New banks are piloted first, and item statistics retire questions that fail to discriminate.

The Rules We Publish Under

No Invented Statistics

The famous claim that “93% of communication is nonverbal” is a misreading of two narrow 1967 studies — you will not find it in our materials, marketing or findings. If we cite a number, it comes from our own dataset or a named, checkable source.

No Numbers Before the Sample Earns Them

Percentile comparisons stay hidden until enough real results exist to make them honest. No group smaller than 20 people is ever reported. We’d rather show you nothing than a number we can’t stand behind.

Selection Bias, Disclosed

People who take a body-language test are not a random sample of humanity, and we never pretend otherwise. Every publication states who the sample is, how they got there, and what that means for reading the result.

Corrections, in Public

If an error is found in something we published, we correct the publication itself and say what changed and why — not quietly swap the page. Challenges to our methodology get answered, not deleted.

What We Never Share

Transparency has edges, and it’s only fair to say where ours are — and why.

Individual results

Your score belongs to you. Employers, clients and publications only ever see aggregates that clear the k ≥ 20 rule.

Identities

Research analysis runs on one-way pseudonyms. There is no “de-anonymize” button, by design.

Question banks & answer keys

A published test is a dead test — the same reason standardised assessments everywhere keep their items confidential. We publish how tests are built, not the questions.

Client-identifiable results

A client’s benchmark outcomes are theirs; they appear in research only inside industry-level aggregates, never attributably, unless the client asks to be named.

What This Research Is — and Isn’t

BodyLytics is a commercial training company doing field research, not a university department. We don't claim institutional ethics-board approval, and we don't dress industry data up as academic peer review. Instead, the entire method is published on this page — collection, anonymization, thresholds, test construction, and the limits of our sample — so anyone, including academics and journalists, can scrutinise the work on its merits. Bona fide researchers who want aggregate data are welcome to ask; requests are considered case by case, under the same anonymization rules.

Security note: rate limits and integrity checks protect the assessments against automated abuse. We don't publish their exact mechanics, for the obvious reason.

Taking Part

Academy members can manage participation — and fill in the optional questionnaire — any time from the Research tab in Account Settings. Questions about the programme, methodology, or press enquiries:

Get in TouchManage Participation

First publications planned once the dataset clears our minimum-group thresholds.

The BodyLanguage IQ App Is Coming

Practise reads, track your accuracy and keep skills sharp between sessions. Store listings open when the app ships.

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