Vanessa Van Edwards breaks down how people judge your warmth and competence through four channels: words, body language, vocal tonality, and visual elements like clothing and background. Master these cues to control how others perceive you in any interaction.
How do we read someone's warmth and competence? It all comes down to our cues. Cues are these subtle but powerful social signals humans send to each other. There are actually 4 channels of cues. First, our words. Yes, our words communicate our ideas, but actually the words we use also signal our warmth and competence. The second channel is our nonverbal, so our body language, our facial expressions, our gestures. These also signal trust, warmth, and competence, reliability, or knowledge. The third channel is voice or vocal tonality. This is our volume, our pace, our cadence, how we say our words matters just as much as what we say. And the last, the smallest channel is our ornaments. So the colors we wear, the jewelry, what's behind us in our background, what's on our desk, the props we're holding in our profile photos, that also can signal warmth and competence.
