Where to Actually Practice Reading People: Books, Tests, and Tools Worth Your Time
A short, honest field guide to resources for building social-perception skills — what’s free, what the evidence says, and what to be skeptical of.
There’s no shortage of "decode anyone" content online, and most of it is confident and unsupported. Here’s a shorter, honest list — organized from free to paid — with what the evidence actually says.
Start free: validated tests
Two free, research-grounded tests are a great calibration of where you’re starting from. The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley hosts a short emotional-intelligence quiz built around reading expressions in photos.4 The "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" Test (RMET), developed by Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues, asks you to infer mental states from the eye region alone and is widely used in research.3 Both are free and take only a few minutes.
Train deliberately: micro-expression tools
The Paul Ekman Group sells structured micro-expression and subtle-expression training tools (METT/SETT).5 Does that kind of training work? For recognition, yes: a controlled study found a brief training significantly improved people’s ability to spot micro-expressions, with gains holding up weeks later.1
Myth Micro-expression training makes you a human lie detector.
What the research says This is where to stay skeptical. Recognizing expressions in a lab is not the same as catching deception in the wild, and research testing this transfer has found weak real-world lie-detection benefits.2 Train to read emotion more accurately — not to "bust" people.
Read widely: books worth the time
- Emotions Revealed by Paul Ekman — a readable tour of the basic emotions and their facial signals, from the researcher most associated with them.
- Crucial Conversations by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, Switzler & Gregory — practical structure for high-stakes, emotionally charged talks; strong on reading and managing the room.
- Cues by Vanessa Van Edwards — an accessible, example-rich popular guide to signals; enjoyable, though best read alongside the more cautious research above.
Be skeptical of: “read anyone” apps
We looked for consumer apps with solid published evidence for improving everyday social-cue reading and didn’t find much that’s independently verified. That doesn’t mean none help — it means you should treat big claims carefully. Favour tools that cite real research, acknowledge limits, and let you practice rather than promising to decode minds.
A simple plan
Take a free test to baseline → pick one skill (say, genuine vs. polite smiles) → practice it in short reps → read one good book to deepen the why. Repetition beats bingeing.
Now try reading a cue under a little pressure.
Short scenarios, instant feedback — free, no sign-up.
Sources
- Matsumoto, D., & Hwang, H. S. (2011). Evidence for training the ability to read microexpressions of emotion. Motivation and Emotion, 35(2), 181–191. Link ↗
- Jordan, S., Brimbal, L., Wallace, D. B., Kassin, S. M., Hartwig, M., & Street, C. N. H. (2019). A test of the micro-expressions training tool. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, 16(3), 222–235. Link ↗
- Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., & Plumb, I. (2001). The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test Revised Version. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42(2), 241–251. (Take the test via the Autism Research Centre.) Link ↗
- Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley. Emotional Intelligence Quiz. Link ↗
- Paul Ekman Group. Micro Expressions Training Tools (METT/SETT). Link ↗