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Honest Signals
How They Shape Our World
Alex (Sandy) Pentland
 Table of Contents and Sample Chapters
How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer, writes Sandy Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based "honest signaling," evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, offers an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values. If we understand this ancient channel of communication, Pentland claims, we can accurately predict the outcomes of situations ranging from job interviews to first dates.
Pentland, an MIT professor, has used a specially designed digital sensor worn like an ID badge—a "sociometer"—to monitor and analyze the back-and-forth patterns of signaling among groups of people. He and his researchers found that this second channel of communication, revolving not around words but around social relations, profoundly influences major decisions in our lives—even though we are largely unaware of it. Pentland presents the scientific background necessary for understanding this form of communication, applies it to examples of group behavior in real organizations, and shows how by "reading" our social networks we can become more successful at pitching an idea, getting a job, or closing a deal. Using this "network intelligence" theory of social signaling, Pentland describes how we can harness the intelligence of our social network to become better managers, workers, and communicators.
About the Author
Professor Alex ("Sandy") Pentland, is a leading figure at the MIT
Media Lab and is a pioneer in the fields of organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science. He co-directs the Digital Life Consortium, a group of more than twenty multinational corporations exploring new ways to innovate, and oversees the Next Billion Network, established to support aspiring entrepreneurs in emerging markets. In 1997 Newsweek magazine named him one of the 100 Americans likely to shape this century.
| "Honest Signals has a lot to offer. It’s evolutionary, with apes and human ancestors popping up throughout. It’s systems-oriented, driven by the recognition that “an effective group can potentially be smarter than any of its individual members.” It offers data to support its theory."
—Barbara J. King, Bookslut "Pentland's lucid treatment of complicated psychobiological principles effectively enables lay readers to grasp difficult but significant concepts... Similar in scope to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Pentland's book is better-suited and recommended for university collections."
—Library Journal |
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| "People are communicating more now than ever before, and we frequently joke about how great it would be to simply turn off our cell phones. Well, you should, for at least as long as it takes to read Sandy Pentland's Honest Signals. Sociometers are now gathering early data on the dominance of our nonlinguistic communications and their importance in increasing our 'network intelligence.' This book will help shape the future of communication."
—Bob Metcalfe, 3Com founder, Ethernet inventor, and National Technology Medalist
"A technology poised to change the world."
—Technology Review
"Sandy Pentland, always ahead of everyone, has captured in this snappy and well written book, the deep signals we use to communicate and how they shape and reveal our social behavior. A must read."
—Michael S. Gazzaniga, Director, Sage Center for the Study of Mind, University of California, Santa Barbara
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