Author
Vanessa Van Edwards
The founder of the Science of People, who turns research on social behaviour into small, testable habits for conversation.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Vanessa Van Edwards founded Science of People, a research lab and training company that studies how people read and respond to each other, and writes and speaks on what it finds. She describes herself as a recovering awkward person, which is the starting point of her work: people skills can be learned the way any other skill is.
Captivate, published in 2017, gathers that work into a practical book on the first minutes of a meeting, conversation, and reading the people you work with. She followed it with Cues, on the nonverbal and vocal signals that make someone come across as charismatic.
The signature
Van Edwards writes in small, specific moves: show your hands, ask a question that invites a story, notice what lights the other person up. Each comes with the study or experiment that suggests it and an invitation to test it yourself. Her central distinction, drawn from social psychology, is that people judge us on warmth and on competence, and that charisma is the two together.
The questions they work on
- What decides how someone sees us in the first minutes, and how much of it can we shape?
- How do we get a conversation past small talk without forcing it?
- What signals make someone come across as both warm and competent?
Thinking tools
- First-Impression SignalsUses and explains it
First-impression signals are the few nonverbal cues people read in the first seconds of meeting you, chiefly visible hands, an open and upright posture and real eye contact, which Vanessa Van Edwards treats as the part of a first impression you can prepare.
Learn it: Build Charisma, Station 4 - Conversation SparksUses and explains it
Conversation sparks are open questions that invite a story or a feeling instead of a routine answer, such as asking whether someone is working on anything exciting rather than what they do, which Vanessa Van Edwards recommends for moving past small talk quickly.
Learn it: Build Charisma, Station 5 - Warmth and CompetenceUses and explains it
Warmth and competence are the two dimensions on which people judge others, according to the stereotype content model of Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy and Peter Glick: whether someone means well toward us and whether they can act on it, with warmth usually judged first.
Learn it: Build Charisma, Station 6
Limits and fair objections
Small, specific behaviours in the first minutes reliably change how people see us.
Captivate is a popular synthesis: it draws on many published studies plus experiments run by the author's own lab, and the in-house experiments are reported in the book rather than in peer-reviewed form. As BookYol reads it, the habits are sensible and cheap to try, but the strength of any single effect is best treated as a hypothesis to test in your own meetings, not a measured guarantee.
Stands on: an argument · BookYol's reading