Honest Signals

An MIT professor says he can read how much nervous energy you have by hooking you up to what he calls a “sociometer”. It’s a gadget that tracks nonverbal interactions. In one experiment, Sandy Pentland used it to predicte how well business plan pitches would be received just by looking at the tone of voice used to pitch the plan. Bottom line: It’s easy to mistake charisma for content. Pentland writes about the findings in his new book Honest Signals.