Vanessa Van Edwards explains how to read body language: a single gesture like scratching your nose probably means nothing, but when multiple negative cues cluster together—shame gestures, mouth covering, blocking motions—someone is hiding discomfort or lying.
How do you tell the difference between an itch and an actual behavior? Either on the shame side or the nose-scratching side.
So the way that I like to think about these cues is buckets. When I think about body language, I think of there are positive nonverbals and there are negatives. If you just see someone do a little nose scratch or a little mouth touch and that's all you see, they're still smiling, they're laughing, they're head tilting, that's probably an itch, it's probably nothing. But if you see a shame gesture and then a mouth cover and then a block, that's 3 negative cues in a row. You're in some kind of nervous territory.
