■ About · The quick summary
A behavioral , , and company. We are building a new set of , , and that allow , , and to understand, navigate, and truly thrive in social interaction
Research
We run studies on real human behavior: blind dates, deception, poker players, and conversations at scale. Every interaction is recorded and coded frame by frame, so what we teach is measured, not assumed.
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■ Our experience
Some of the things we’ve done
- 01We conducted the largest behavioral study ever performed on poker players: three studies over twelve years of recording, tagging, and analyzing thousands of hours of video. Over 550,000 individual blinks and 25,000 hand gestures coded by hand.
- 02We've run hundreds of workshops (Behavioral Awareness, Dynamic Presentations, Leadership) in our NYC offices and around the world, for everyone from Fortune 500 employees to Army and Navy members to FBI Counterterrorism agents.
- 03We developed dozens of behavioral frameworks for reading, modifying, and controlling nonverbal behavior, refined by hours of video exposure.
- 04We've worked with CEOs, entrepreneurs, and executives on behavioral leadership: a data-driven system of recording, deconstructing, and reconstructing communication style to expose blind spots.
- 05We pioneered methods for using machine learning and natural language processing to record, code, and analyze human behavior.
- 06We started with real first dates, in a New York City restaurant rented and wired with cameras in 2009, and we've been recording real interactions ever since.
- 07We built SAURON, our own analysis platform, when no existing tool could hold the coding system: millions of frames coded, checked, and searchable.
- 08We're currently running the largest behavioral study of conversations ever attempted. It's recording right now.
- 09We've taught thousands of students to read and use behavior through The Social Edge and our New York City courses.
- 10We've coached professional poker players on reading, and concealing, behavioral information when millions are on the table.
■ The founder
Blake Eastman
Blake taught psychology at the City University of New York for six years: general psychology, developmental psychology, and group dynamics, with academic roots in forensic psychology. He played poker professionally and founded School of Cards, the first brick-and-mortar poker school in New York City, then spent three years traveling internationally studying cross-cultural differences in behavior and communication.
In 2009 he rented a New York City restaurant, wired it with cameras, and recorded real blind dates from every angle. In the footage he found what would become the company’s method: the exact moment a participant was offended, attracted, bored, challenged, intrigued. Visible, timestamped, and measurable. The Nonverbal Group was built to do that, systematically, for every kind of human interaction.
■ The session so far
The timeline of our work
A rented NYC restaurant, real blind dates, cameras on every angle: the study that proved the method and started the company. Its footage still runs through this site.
A behavioral research and education company, founded in New York City to systematically deconstruct and improve human communication.
People came to the office and lied to us, on camera, against ground truth we controlled. Every tell, hesitation, and recovery coded.
The company opens its first office. The classes, workshops, and studies get a home with cameras in it.
Good old-fashioned hand coding. We wrote our own behavioral coding manuals and coded everything frame by frame, by eye.
Groupon and LivingSocial send thousands of New Yorkers through our doors. We teach three to four classes a week.
The largest behavioral study of poker players ever run: three separate studies across twelve years, 88 professionals, 550,000+ blinks and 25,000 hand gestures coded by hand.
Late 2013: we host parties at the office with cameras in the ceiling recording everything. Approaches, exits, and group dynamics captured as they actually happen.
Large companies bring us in to help their people interact better: meetings, sales, leadership.
Manual coding, scaled: distributed coder teams, inter-rater reliability, and process built to keep rigor while the volume grows.
The research becomes a course: the most comprehensive behavioral training ever built for poker players.
We tested the available computer-vision coding systems against our coders. They lost. Manual coding stayed.
The world moves to video calls and every conversation arrives pre-recorded. We start studying turn-taking, interruptions, and camera gaze at meeting scale.
Consulting moves to recorded video: companies send their sales calls and meetings, and we run them through the instrument.
Mid-2020, a dedicated effort begins with one goal: build systems that can process behavior at research grade.
The first version of the flagship course: a complete people-skills curriculum, built from what the lab measured.
A full assessment of a person's behavioral patterns and how they're actually perceived, built from recorded interactions and structured feedback.
A complete behavioral analysis pipeline on MediaPipe plus our own technology, still checked against manual coding.
A standardized assessment of communication ability: measured tasks, coded performance, scored against the lab's data.
The second version: rebuilt on everything the pipeline had learned since v1.
Most of the lab's time now goes into technology that scales the research. The studies keep running; the instrument does the heavy lifting.
A mixture of computer-vision models and VLMs, trained on years of manual coding: the most robust pipeline yet.
Finally, models trained in-house: the highest-fidelity behavioral pipeline we have ever built.