studying the extraordinary impact of our
ordinary, everyday nonverbal behavior

So much of what we do in the micro lab is study and document the ways in which we express who we are, what we think, what we intend to do (or not), whether we are lying, what we believe, and what we are about to do. We have projects examining the nonverbal display of racial bias, the nonverbal display of being socially ostracized, the nonverbal display of being single (vs. in a relationship), the nonverbal display of deception, of intent to vote, of intent to defect in a one-shot, simultaneous move prisoner's dilemma-type economic game, the nonverbals exhibited by highly-rated teachers, the nonverbals exhibited by funded entrepreneurs (vs. those left unfunded), and the nonverbal display of confidence, power, and status in various contexts. Finally we study the processes of mimicry and synchrony-specifically in the context of race, diversity, and in terms of mimetic desire (i.e., how we derive our desires and disdains by mimicking others consciously and unconsciously). In this major line of work (i.e., it is the primary thrust of the work in the micro lab) we have 3 goals: (1) to document nonverbal phenomena that have not yet been documented, to (2) test the utility of perceiving or enacting various nonverbal behaviors, and (3) when we find a useful nonverbal tool, to offer people the information needed to optimize both (a) interpreting others' behaviors and (b) expressing behaviors themselves.