← Back to homeThe audit trail · what we teach & what we reject
Sixty years of research.
Zero pop-psych.
Reading people isn't intuition or a trick. It's a discipline with peer-reviewed research behind it — and a graveyard of popular claims that don't replicate. Below: the five pillars we build on, the proof they work, and a public obituary for the myths we refuse to teach.
It's a measurable skill, not a gift.
Lie-detection accuracy
50% = coin flip
Reading people isn't a gift you're born with. It's a measurable skill — and the gap between guessing and knowing is trainable.
Every lesson traces to a name you can cite.
Each discipline was chosen because it produced replicated effects in peer-reviewed journals, has field validation outside the lab, and survives the scrutiny of skeptics inside its own field. Primary sources, not popularizations.
Robert Cialdini
40+ years · replicated across decades
Required reading at FBI Academy hostage-negotiation courses. We teach all seven with their boundary conditions and the failure modes Cialdini himself documents.
Cialdini, R. (2009). Influence: Science and Practice (5th ed.). Pearson. ISBN 978-0205609994.
Chris Voss
24 yrs FBI lead kidnapping negotiator
Taught as Voss teaches them at Georgetown — not as Twitter threads remix them.
Voss, C. & Raz, T. (2016). Never Split the Difference. Harper Business. ISBN 978-0062407801.
Navarro · Johnstone
25 yrs FBI counter-intelligence
Paired with Keith Johnstone's status dynamics from Impro — humans constantly negotiate dominance through micro-cues. We do NOT teach single-tell shortcuts.
Navarro, J. & Karlins, M. (2008). What Every BODY Is Saying. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0061438295.
Johnstone, K. (1979). Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0571111107.
Daniel Kahneman
Nobel Prize, Economics 2002
Built on Kahneman & Tversky's original prospect theory. We use the surviving experiments and explicitly flag the ones that failed replication.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0374533557.
Aldert Vrij · SUE
Cognitive approach to deception
Detecting deception from behavior alone tops out near 54% — barely above chance. The cognitive approach (load + Strategic Use of Evidence) raises it to 67% in controlled trials.
Vrij, A. (2008). Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities (2nd ed.). Wiley. ISBN 978-0470516256.
Granhag, P. A. & Hartwig, M. (2008). A new theoretical perspective on deception detection: On the psychology of instrumental mind-reading. Psychology, Crime & Law, 14(3), 189–200.
What we publicly reject.
Our curriculum is defined as much by what it excludes. These claims never survived replication — or were never supported at all. We name them so you never meet them inside Cipher.
Crossed arms = defensiveness
No single cue maps to one state
People cross their arms when cold, comfortable, or thinking. Navarro rejects this himself.
Navarro, 2008Nose-touching = lying
Effect size ≈ zero
The 2003 meta-analysis of 158 deception cues found essentially no signal.
DePaulo et al., 2003DePaulo, B. M., Lindsay, J. J., Malone, B. E., Muhlenbruck, L., Charlton, K., & Cooper, H. (2003). Cues to deception. Psychological Bulletin, 129(1), 74–118.
NLP eye-accessing cues
No relationship found
Three studies tested eye direction (recall vs. construction). Nothing.
Wiseman et al., 2012 · PLOS ONEWiseman, R., Watt, C., ten Brinke, L., Porter, S., Couper, S. L., & Rankin, C. (2012). The eyes don't have it: Lie detection and neuro-linguistic programming. PLOS ONE, 7(7), e40259.
Mehrabian 7-38-55% rule
Misquoted — he never claimed it
His 1967 study measured contradictory verbal/nonverbal messages in a constrained lab. He has repeatedly stated the numbers were misappropriated and don't apply to general communication.
Mehrabian, 1967Microexpressions detect lies
Poor correlation with accuracy
Recognizing microexpressions correlated poorly with lie-detection accuracy. The cognitive approach (Vrij, SUE) outperforms it.
Jordan et al., 2019Jordan, S., Brimbal, L., Wallace, D. B., Kassin, S. M., Hartwig, M., & Street, C. N. H. (2019). A test of the micro-expressions training tool. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, 16(3), 222–235.
Power posing alters hormones
Failed replication
Carney, Cuddy & Yap (2010) reported a hormonal effect; the original first author disavowed it in 2016 and large pre-registered replications failed.
Ranehill et al., 2015Ranehill, E., Dreber, A., Johannesson, M., Leiberg, S., Sul, S., & Weber, R. A. (2015). Assessing the robustness of power posing. Psychological Science, 26(5), 653–656.
Why this matters.
The reading-people genre is dominated by pseudoscience because it sells. We built Cipher to be the opposite: every lesson cites a primary source, every framework states its boundary conditions, and every popular myth gets a public obituary. If we ever teach something that fails replication, we remove it and tell you why.
Found a citation you believe is misapplied? Write to info@cipheracademy.net. We publish corrections within 30 days.