Vanessa Van Edwards' Cues makes a promise that is easy to like. Charisma is not a gift. It is warmth and competence, sent through signals you can learn — the face, the voice, the words, how you look. Learn the signals, and people read you the way you meant.

Half of that stands on solid ground. The other half has a quiet assumption inside it, and for anyone working in a culture they were not raised in, the assumption is the whole problem.

What holds up

The warmth and competence part is not the book's invention, and it is well founded. Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy and Peter Glick, reviewing the research in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2007, set out why people size each other up along those two lines — is this person on my side, and can they act on it — and why the first question tends to get answered first. That is decades of work across many samples, not a book's framework.

The idea that people form these impressions fast, from very little, also holds. Observers can judge a lot from a few seconds of behaviour. A 2019 study in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes found people could judge how well a work group was functioning from clips as short as ten seconds, with the sound off.

So the premise is sound. You are being read, quickly, on warmth and competence, whether you do anything about it or not.

Where the evidence gets thinner

Some of the book's most quoted findings come from its author's own company rather than from journals. Science of People describes its analysis of TED talks — 760 volunteers rating talks on charisma, credibility and intelligence — as proprietary research, not peer reviewed. That does not make it wrong. It means nobody outside has checked it, and a finding like "the most popular talks used more hand gestures" can't tell you whether the gestures drew the views or something else drove both.

There is also a wider caution that applies to every book in this genre. A 2005 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin by Judith Hall, Erik Coats and Lavonia Smith LeBeau looked at nonverbal behaviour and status, and found that people's beliefs about what a cue means were stronger and far more common than the cue's measured link to status. We are confident readers of body language. We are less accurate than we are confident.

The assumption

Here is the part that matters for you. A cue only means something to the person reading it. The book treats the reader as more or less constant. The research does not.

Take the most basic signal there is — looking someone in the eye. A 2013 study in PLOS ONE compared Finnish and Japanese participants facing a real person who either met their eyes or looked away. Both groups' bodies responded to eye contact in the same way. What differed was the reading. The Japanese participants rated the same face, making the same eye contact, as angrier, less approachable and less pleasant than the Finnish participants did. The authors put the difference down to cultural display rules, not biology.

Same cue. Same person sending it. Opposite meaning, depending on who was watching.

That is the situation of anyone raised in one culture and working in another. The signals you learned to send — steady but not staring, waiting your turn, letting the senior person finish — were calibrated for readers who are no longer the ones in the room. Nothing about you changed. The readers did.

What to take from the book, and what to leave

Take the two questions. Every room is asking whether you are on its side and whether you can deliver, and it is asking fast. That is worth knowing.

Leave the idea of a fixed dictionary. A gesture list tells you what a cue meant to the people who were measured. It cannot tell you what it means to the three people in your Thursday meeting.

The better question is narrower: in this room, with these people, which signal of yours is being read as something you did not send? A long pause before answering, heard as hesitation. A quiet "I agree", heard as having nothing to add. Once you know which one it is, the fix is usually small — and it is a change to one moment, not to who you are.