How well do you read the signals people send without words? This quiz has 15 questions: eight multiple choice and seven true-or-false. The answers come straight after, and each one explains what the research actually shows, including a few places where the popular version of body language science goes further than the evidence.
The questions are based on a quiz by Ronald E. Riggio, a professor of leadership and organizational psychology at Claremont McKenna College, published on his Psychology Today blog in 2014. We have reworded them and added context from the wider research on facial expression, deception and gaze.
Grab a pen, note your answers, and do not scroll ahead.
Part 1: Eight multiple-choice questions
1. You want to tell a genuine smile from a polite one. Where should you look?
- a. The lips
- b. The eyes
- c. The eyebrows
- d. The cheeks
2. Paul Ekman's research identified a small set of facial expressions recognized across cultures. Which of these is not on that list?
- a. Sadness
- b. Disgust
- c. Anxiety
- d. Anger
3. What is the Pygmalion effect, as studied by Robert Rosenthal?
- a. Copying someone's gestures so you come across as more convincing
- b. Using posture and movement to look more attractive
- c. Standing in a way that makes you seem more powerful
- d. Quietly signalling what you expect of someone, which then shapes how they behave
4. You suspect someone is lying. Which approach gives you the best chance of noticing?
- a. Watch their eyes, because liars avoid eye contact
- b. Watch for smiling, which gives liars away
- c. Watch their body more than their face
- d. Watch for flared nostrils
5. Two people holding a long, mutual gaze most often signals:
- a. Love
- b. Anger
- c. Submission
- d. Dominance
6. Posture is especially good at communicating:
- a. Love
- b. Disgust
- c. Dominance
- d. Attitudes
7. In conversation, which of these does not tell the other person it is their turn to speak?
- a. A pause
- b. A drop in the pitch of your voice
- c. A hand held up in mid-gesture
- d. Looking at them
8. "Immediacy" behaviours mainly communicate:
- a. Superiority
- b. Persuasiveness
- c. Understanding
- d. Intimacy and liking
Part 2: Seven true-or-false statements
- The raised middle finger is an obscene insult in nearly every culture.
- Smell counts as a channel of nonverbal communication.
- When someone's words say one thing and their face says another, we usually believe the words.
- Emotional intelligence and verbal intelligence are completely unrelated.
- Your pupils tend to widen slightly when you look at something or someone that interests you.
- The shape of a face influences how attractive other people find it.
- Most gestures can be translated directly into a specific word or phrase.
Answers explained
Multiple choice
1. b, the eyes. A felt smile, often called a Duchenne smile after the 19th-century French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne, uses two muscle groups. The zygomatic major pulls the corners of the mouth up, and the orbicularis oculi lifts the cheeks and creases the skin at the outer corners of the eyes into crow's feet. A polite or social smile usually involves only the mouth. The eyes are a useful clue rather than a perfect test, because some people can produce the eye crinkle on purpose.
2. c, anxiety. Ekman's classic list of six expressions recognized across cultures is anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. Contempt was proposed later as a possible seventh. With Wallace Friesen, he tested the idea with the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, who had little exposure to Western media. Anxiety is a real and common state, but it does not have one agreed facial signature. Some researchers today question how universal even the basic six are, arguing that context and culture shape how faces are read.
3. d. The Pygmalion effect describes how our expectations of someone can nudge their performance, partly through small cues such as warmth, attention and tone. The famous 1968 study by Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told teachers that certain randomly chosen pupils were about to "bloom." Later reviews found the effect is real in classrooms but usually small and short-lived, much weaker than early accounts suggested.
4. c, the body rather than the face. This reflects the idea that people control their words and faces most carefully, so stress may leak out through hands, feet and posture instead. The honest caveat is that most people, including police officers, detect lies at about chance level. No single cue, the body included, is a reliable lie detector.
5. a, love. Lovers hold each other's gaze far longer than strangers do. Context matters, though: a fixed stare between rivals can mean hostility, so read gaze together with the rest of the scene.
6. c, dominance. Posture is one of the clearest ways we signal status. Expansive, upright postures tend to be read as dominant, while shrinking, hunched postures read as submissive.
7. c, a raised hand. Holding a gesture in mid-air is a way of keeping the floor, a signal that you are not finished. Pauses, falling pitch and looking at the listener all invite the other person to come in.
8. d, intimacy and liking. Immediacy cues include leaning in, facing someone directly, standing closer and touching. Teachers, doctors and leaders who use them appropriately tend to be rated as warmer.
True or false
9. False. Gestures with a fixed, agreed meaning are called emblems, and they vary by culture. The raised middle finger is widely understood as an insult in Western countries, but in the United Kingdom the reversed two-finger V sign does similar work, and in Greece the open-palm moutza is the classic insult. A thumbs-up or an OK sign can also be rude in some places.
10. True. Anything that sends a message without words counts, including perfume, body odour and the smell of a home.
11. False. When words and expressions clash, especially about feelings, we tend to trust the face and voice. This is the grain of truth behind the overused "7-38-55" rule, discussed below.
12. False. The two are moderately related. People who are good with words also tend, on average, to be somewhat better at reading emotions, though plenty of exceptions exist.
13. True. Eckhard Hess and James Polt reported in 1960 that pupils widen in response to interesting images. Later work showed pupils also dilate with arousal and mental effort, so a wider pupil means "engaged," not necessarily "attracted."
14. True. Facial structure affects attractiveness ratings. Faces that are close to the population average and fairly symmetrical are often rated as more attractive, although personal taste and culture also play a part.
15. False. Body language has no dictionary. Apart from emblems, most gestures only make sense alongside the words, the setting and the relationship between the people involved.
What your score means
Give yourself 10 points per correct answer, for a maximum of 150.
- 140 to 150: You have an excellent grasp of nonverbal communication.
- 100 to 130: You read people well and know much of the research.
- 70 to 90: You may lean more on words than on signals. That is not a weakness, just a style.
- 60 or less: There is plenty to learn, and the sections below are a good place to start.
A short quiz measures knowledge about body language, not skill at reading it in real time. Psychologists test that skill with videos and recordings of real expressions, and the two do not always go together.
Body language myths the research does not support
"93% of communication is nonverbal"
This figure comes from Albert Mehrabian's 1967 studies, which estimated that 7% of liking came from the words, 38% from tone of voice and 55% from the face. The experiments used single words such as "dear" or "terrible," involved only women, and looked only at how feelings and attitudes are conveyed when the channels conflict. Mehrabian himself has said the ratio does not apply to communication in general. Try watching a foreign-language lecture and you will see why.
"Liars can't look you in the eye"
Gaze aversion is the best known lie cue and one of the weakest. Studies find only small, inconsistent differences in eye contact between liars and truth-tellers, and practised liars often hold eye contact deliberately. Nervousness, shyness and cultural norms about eye contact can all look like guilt to an observer.
"Microexpressions reveal everything"
Very brief facial expressions, lasting less than a fifth of a second, can sometimes reveal an emotion someone is trying to hide. But an emotion is not proof of a lie: an innocent person under suspicion may look frightened too. Claims of very high accuracy from facial coding have not been backed by independent evidence.
"Crossed arms always mean defensiveness"
Crossed arms can mean someone is closed off, cold, comfortable or simply has nowhere else to put their arms. Single gestures are ambiguous. Patterns, and changes from a person's usual behaviour, are far more informative.
How to read nonverbal cues more accurately
- Learn the baseline. Notice how someone normally sits, speaks and moves before you interpret anything. A fidgety person fidgeting tells you little.
- Look for clusters. One cue is noise. Several cues pointing the same way, together with the words, are a signal.
- Weigh the context. A cold room, a tight chair or a long day explains a lot of posture.
- Check the eyes in a smile. It is one of the few reasonably dependable cues for felt happiness.
- Mind your own signals. Facing people, nodding and leaning in slightly show interest. Your expectations of others leak out too, so expect the best of the people you lead.
- Ask instead of guessing. When the signals and the words do not match, a calm "You seem unsure, is something bothering you?" beats any amount of silent decoding.
Body language is a useful second channel, not a mind-reading tool. Treat what you see as a question to explore, not a verdict.
Sources: Quiz adapted from Ronald E. Riggio, "Test Your Body Language IQ," Psychology Today (2014); Duchenne smile; Paul Ekman; Pygmalion effect; Lie detection; Albert Mehrabian; Pupillary response; Middle finger (Wikipedia).
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