Popular culture suggests women are more nonverbally sensitive than men. And scientific evidence backs up this claim: Women are more skilled in terms of nonverbal expression. ³ In general, women are more open, expressive, approachable, and actively involved in social interaction than men. Their faces are more readable than men’s, and they smile and gaze at other people and approach them more closely than do men. Women are also gazed at more and approached more closely than men.⁴ During interactions women seem more focused on the other person, and they also elicit more warmth and less anxiety from others.⁵ However, the sexes are held to different standards of appropriate expressivity; women are typically considered more expressive, and men are viewed as more composed.⁶ Women anticipate greater costs and fewer rewards than men if they fail to express positive emotion in response to someone else’s good news.⁷

Nonverbal expressiveness is linked with social power. Greater expressivity is required by those of lower social status and power.⁸ In many organizations, women traditionally have lower social status than men. Indeed, in studies of visual dominance (measured as the ratio of time a person spends looking at his or her partner while speaking relative to the time spent looking while listening), women are often less dominant. High-power people are more visually dominant than low-power people.⁹ When women have uncertain support in a leadership position, men express more visual dominance than women.¹⁰ When people show more visual dominance, they are perceived as more powerful. Furthermore, when women and men are assigned to different power roles, low-power people (regardless of gender) are better able to read their partner’s cues.¹¹

In terms of nonverbal reception, women are no better than men at recognizing covert messages, such as discrepant communication (which we discuss later). However, when people are being truthful, women are more accurate than men; however, when people are being deceptive (i.e., when the negotiator is pretending to like someone), women are less accurate than men.¹²

In short, women are better at detecting feelings but are not necessarily better at detecting deception, because anyone who is inferior in status is more sensitive to states of mind of superiors. For example, when women and men are assigned to be supervisors or subordinates in organizational simulations, no differences are evident in emotional sensitivity between genders: Subordinates, regardless of gender, are more sensitive than their superiors.

People often assert dominance and power through nonverbal cues. Dominant people sit higher, stand taller, talk louder, and have more space and more resources than nondominant people. Dominant people are more likely to invade others’ space (e.g., putting their feet up on their own or someone else’s desk), make more expansive gestures, walk in front of others, sit in front of others or sit at the head of a table, interrupt more often, control time, and stare at the other party more, but they tend to look away more often when the other party is speaking.¹³

High social power is reliably indicated by patterns of looking while speaking and listening. People with less power look more when listening than when speaking. In contrast, more powerful people look about the same amount when listening as when speaking.¹⁴ When people interact with a dominant person, they often respond by decreasing their postural stance (i.e., they often behave more submissively); in contrast, people who interact with a submissive person often increase their stance (i.e., they behave more assertively).¹⁵ Interestingly, people like each other more when the interaction is complementary as opposed to reciprocal. Thus, dominance in response to submission and submission in response to dominance result in greater liking between people than dominance in response to dominance and submission in response to submissiveness.

When men and women have equal knowledge, power, and expertise (or when men have more), men behave visually as though they really are more powerful. However, when women have the advantage, they “look” like powerful people more often than men.¹⁶

Charisma is a social skill having to do with verbal and nonverbal expressiveness. People vary strikingly in the intensity, expansiveness, animation, and dynamism of their nonverbal (and verbal) behaviors.¹⁷ Differences in expressiveness are linked directly to affection, empathy, influence, and professional success, as well as to interpersonal experiences, such as the regulation of one’s own emotional experiences and physical and mental health.

Expressiveness, or spontaneous sending, is the ease with which people’s feelings can be read from their nonverbal expressive behaviors when they are not trying to deliberately communicate their feelings to others.¹⁸ Expressiveness instantly makes a difference in setting the tone of social interactions. Even commonplace interpersonal behaviors, such as walking into a room and initiating a conversation¹⁹ or greeting someone who is approaching,²⁰ suggest this social skill is immediately influential. Why? Expressive people make better first impressions and over time, they are better liked than unexpressive people.²¹ Expressive people are considered to be more attractive than unexpressive people.²² Furthermore, expressive people capture people’s attention²³ and then “turn on” the expressive behavior of other people.²⁴ Expressive people are good actors, feigning convincing expressions of feelings they are not actually experiencing.²⁵ It follows that they are also good liars.²⁶

The most interpersonally successful communicators are nonverbally sensitive, nonverbally expressive, nonverbally self-controlled, and motivated to perform for their “audiences.”²⁷ In social interactions, expressive people can “set the tone and frame the field.”²⁸

People are more likely to be deceptive when they are likely to get away with it and especially when their potential gain from deception is highest. In one investigation, people were given enticing prospects for large monetary gain in an ultimatum game if they deceived.⁴⁸ Although “proposers” and “responders” chose deceptive strategies almost equally, proposers told more outright lies.⁴⁹ Moreover, proposers were more deceptive when their potential profits were highest. Proposers deceived about 13.6% of the time, and responders deceived about 13.9% of the time.⁵⁰ Recipients in an ultimatum game use deception to obtain better offers, particularly when they are in a low power (i.e., poor BATNA) situation.⁵¹ Motivated communication is not purely opportunistic: If liars feel that they can “justify” a lie (such as when some uncertainty is involved), they are more likely to lie even when the costs and benefits for misrepresentation are held constant.⁵²

Consider two types of lies: monitoring-dependent and monitoring-independent.⁵³ Monitoring-dependent lies require that the liar monitor the reaction of the target for the lie to be effective; conversely, monitoring-independent lies do not require the liar to monitor. If someone wants to lie about a closing date, it would be important to determine what kind of closing date is preferred by the target (one cannot assume early or late). Conversely, if one is attempting to lie about interest rates, it is safe to assume that mortgage holders would uniformly want lower rates; and thus, it is not as important to monitor their reaction to this type of statement. Liars are more likely to tell monitoring-dependent lies when they have visual access (than when they don’t). The use of monitoring-independent lies is the same, with or without visual access. In this sense, visual access can actually harm potential targets of deception by increasing their risk of being deceived.

When potential deceivers have high incentives to deceive, they are more emotional.⁵⁴ It is hard to conceal these feelings. An exception might be people who have great practice at lying and few qualms about the appropriateness of stretching the truth in a selling context, such as experienced salespersons.⁵⁵

A key question concerns whether or not people are able to succeed in their deception attempts. Deception skill is a person’s ability to deceive others, which involves skills in masking feelings and thoughts while trying to appear credible and adjust their behaviors. Deception experience is accumulated from previous practice with deception, and deception becomes routinized. People who are more skilled at deception have greater success in terms of remaining undetected and winning the game they are playing. However, people with more experience at deception are less successful in terms of profiting from deception. In an online environment, both deception experience and skill contribute to the survivability of deceivers (i.e., the ability to remain undetected and continue deceiving others).⁵⁶ The volume of online communication entices people to engage in deception, and the skills required for detecting deception in virtual interaction are nuanced and complex.