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.

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 is the author of the book Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World

Below a lecture given at Google in which he summarizes some of the findings of his research:

Harvard Business Review reports the breakthrough Ideas for 2009, it is worth to check.