Vanessa Van EdwardsScience of People, Science Of People · Behavioral Researcher, Founder, Author, Harvard Instructor

Is Social Perceptiveness the New Career Trend

20 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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1:06

In this video segment, Vanessa Van Edwards highlights social perceptiveness as a rapidly growing skill on LinkedIn, emphasizing its relevance in an AI‑driven workplace. She defines social perceptiveness as the ability to read a room, interpret body language, emotions, and hidden intentions behind words. Van Edwards argues that heightened social perceptiveness improves communication, leadership, meeting effectiveness, and helps anticipate miscommunications. She then outlines concrete positive cues (smiling, vertical nods, leaning in, slow triple nods, head tilts, animated gestures, open posture) and negative cues (furrowed brow, down‑turned lips, distancing, blocking), noting that clusters of negative cues can signal underlying issues.

Chapters

One of my favorite things to do is look at career trends, and right now there's a trend in a skill that LinkedIn users are adding to their profiles. It's social perceptiveness. Social perceptiveness is trending because we need human centered skills in the age of AI. Social perceptiveness is your ability to read a room or read people, to quickly read body language, emotions, even look at hidden intentions behind words. If we can be more socially perceptive, it makes us better communicators, more effective at work, better at leading meetings, and better able to suss out potential miscommunications or challenges before they arise. Positive versus Negative Cues so positive cues are the ones you think of like smiling or nodding vertically. Some ones that you might not think of as positive are leaning in. When we lean in, it's like we're trying to get closer to people. Other positive cues are a slow triple nod or a head tilt and we like something. We're usually doing all of those things. You might also see more animated hand gestures or broader body posture. On the other hand, negative cues are things like a furrowed brow or pull down lips. You can also see more distancing or blocking. So looking for those clusters of negative cues can indicate that something is going wrong underneath.