Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People by Vanessa Van Edwards
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – Penguin

Van Edwards draws on a variety of popular social science research (others’ as well as her own) to build a soup-to-nuts guide to being more personable. The fourteen chapters of the book are organized into three parts that begin with how to spark a relationship, then how to deepen the relationship through better understanding of the other person, and finally how to sustain the relationship through behaviors that help make one more likeable. Overall, I found the book to be useful and informative, and felt it was successful as a mile-high overview of the subject.

Getting down in the weeds, however, I had some difficulties with the book. As a book that draws on varied research, it’s only as good as the research it’s relying upon at a given point, making the book a bit of a mixed bag. For example, Chapter six is based heavily Paul Ekman’s work on micro-expressions, the idea that our true feelings always leak through in tiny uncontrollable facial expressions that a careful observer can read, it is research that has not performed well under attempted validation and is now widely in doubt. This speaks to a bigger issue with the underpinnings of the book. Van Edwards’ book presents a kind of anti-thesis to another pop social science book, Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers. Gladwell’s argument, drawing on research such as that by Timothy R. Levine, is that it’s dangerous to think one can “read” [or to use Van Edward’s term “decode”] people through communication with them because some people have highly mismatched communication styles (i.e. neither their language nor their body language are necessarily consistent with their internal feelings.) Captivate, however, takes the view that one can decode other peoples’ inner worlds.

One may wonder why I’m more in Gladwell’s camp on this issue, certainly he has gotten a lot of flack for his books over the years — including the book that I mention here. I’m certainly not arguing the Gladwell book is infallible. On the point in question, however, I’ve noticed a larger pattern that goes like this: a.) everybody is a bit unnerved because we have no insight into the subjective mental experience of anyone else. b.) because of this anxiety, many people are willing to take a white-knuckled grip on any proposed method — science or snake-oil — that suggests it can eliminate this uncertainty; c.) these methods often survive long after they’ve been dismissed by advancements in the research (or successfully gain traction, despite not being backed by any sound study.) Combine all of that with the fact that what I’ve witnessed is that people are much worse at reading minds than they usually think themselves to be (and “experts” most of all,) leads me to favor the view that it is always and everywhere an activity fraught with danger.

I recommend this book for those seeking to learn how to be more personable, with the proviso to take the book’s midsection — which deals with how to hack the minds of other people — with a heavy pinch of salt.

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