A class ring. T-shirts with slogans. Tattoos. Pay attention to them because they're usually accurate signs. Here's Sam :

Now this is all pretty personal. So what about if you're trying to read someone in a professional context?

Want to know if someone is good at their job? Then watch them do it for thirty seconds - or even just six seconds . Your guess about their competence is more likely to be right than wrong:

In the 1st study, consensual judgments of college teachers' molar nonverbal behavior based on very brief (under 30 sec) silent video clips significantly predicted global end-of-semester student evaluations of teachers. In the 2nd study, similar judgments predicted a principal's ratings of high school teachers. In the 3rd study, ratings of even thinner slices (6 and 15 sec clips) were strongly related to the criterion variables.