What’s one gesture actually worth?

Tap what you’re seeing across the table. Watch how little a single cue buys you — and how fast a read falls apart when the signals disagree.

Nothing yet 0 cues

Nothing tapped — which is also the honest answer for most of an interview. Go ahead, pick one.

Cues pointing toward engagement
Cues pointing away
Start tapping

One cue at a time. The whole point of this thing is what happens to your confidence when you’ve only got one.

Why you should hold every read loosely: the biggest pile of research on people reading people — 206 studies, 24,483 judges calling truth-or-lie in real time — landed at 54% accuracy. Basically a coin flip (Bond & DePaulo, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2006). Same analysis: people did better on what they heard than what they saw, which is why the voice chips carry more weight than the postures.

Go deeper on whatever just landed

A cluster of engagement cues is permission, not applause. The thread you’re on is working — so add the detail you were going to cut, and clock which story lit them up, because you’ll want to come back to it.

The failure mode here is coasting: relaxing so far that the next answer gets sloppy.

Keep it a background layer anyway. If you’re tracking their posture closely enough to catch a shift in real time, you’re probably not listening closely enough to the question.

A read is a nudge to adjust — go deeper, or land the plane. It’s never a verdict on whether you got the job.

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