Corrections
Anyone publishing for long enough will get something wrong. This page is where we record what we got wrong and how we fixed it.
How corrections work here
When a reader, editor, or researcher points out a factual error in one of our articles, we verify the claim, fix the article, and add an entry to this page describing what changed and why. Minor tweaks (typos, broken links, clearer phrasing without a change in meaning) are made silently. Anything that changes what a reader would take away from the piece is logged here.
If you've found something we got wrong, please email [email protected] with the article URL and a description of the issue. We respond to every well-evidenced correction.
Log
- 2026-09-02
Retraction. The entry on phones opened by calling a phone visible on the table “the one mistake with actual data behind it rather than folklore” and told readers to put it in a bag rather than face-down. That is the mere-presence effect from Przybylski and Weinstein’s 2013 experiments, and it has not replicated: Courtright and Caplan pooled six mere-presence studies with 601 participants and found an average correlation of −.20 that was not statistically significant, and Linares and Sellier’s direct replication with 356 participants reported no movement on any original relationship measure. The section has been rewritten around the behaviour that does have evidence — picking the phone up during the conversation — and now says what it previously got wrong. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-02
Two corrections in the same section. It stated that “the average person checks their phone around 90 times a day”, a figure with no source attached; the closest logged measurement we can find recorded a mean of 84.68 unlocks a day in 23 participants, in a study whose actual point is that people’s own estimates of that number do not correlate with reality at all. The figure has been removed. The section also presented a phone left face-up rather than face-down as a readable signal, which is the mere-presence claim retracted in the first-date-mistakes entry above, and cited Mehrabian’s implicit-communication work in support of reading it — the same misuse of those experiments corrected here on 1 September. The section now covers phone use during the conversation, which is the part the research supports. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-01
Rewritten in full because four of its claims did not hold up against the sources. It opened with foot direction as a reliable cue, which has never been tested: it is absent from Montoya, Kershaw and Prosser's meta-analysis of 309 effect sizes and from Hall and Xing's coding of 36 behaviours, and traces to popular body-language books rather than to research. It credited the eyebrow flash to Eckhard Hess, who did not study it, and read it as an attraction signal; the cross-cultural work is by Grammer, Schiefenhövel, Schleidt, Lorenz and Eibl-Eibesfeldt, it documents a greeting and recognition display, and Montoya's synthesis places eyebrow raises among the behaviours with no evidence of a relation to liking. It treated pupil dilation as an attraction signal, where Bradley and colleagues show the pupil indexes arousal and dilates for unpleasant images too. And it cited Mehrabian's implicit-communication work as general support for reading the body over the words, which is the standard misuse of two 1967 experiments about conflicting cues. Open body posture and leaning in, also presented as tells, are on the same null list. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-08-31
In-article correction added to the section on unconscious mirroring, which described behavioural synchrony as a reliable correlate of felt interest. Grammer, Kruck and Magnusson state in their abstract that they were unable to demonstrate a relation between synchronisation defined as movement echo or position mirroring and the subjective experience of interest. The correction was published the same day the contradicting source appeared in another article on this site, and the full rewrite followed on 1 September.
- 2026-05-13Site-wide editorial pass
Expanded all 21 English articles with additional explanation, examples, and citations. No factual corrections — this was a depth-and-clarity update across the catalogue. The previously shorter versions are no longer live; the canonical URLs are unchanged.