Trending
Written by: Chris Carnazzo | Your Money Cues
My idea for your money cues was simple enough to write on an index card.
-
Each money script runs on a dominant emotion.
-
Microexpressions are how emotion surfaces on a face before a person decides whether to hide it.
-
Spot the flash, name the emotion, and map back to the script underneath.
It was clean. It was clear. It didn’t survive contact with reality.
Why It Wasn’t That Easy
First, even when you catch a cue, you can’t know what caused it. A flash of anger in a meeting might be something you just said. It might be the argument they had at breakfast, or with their father thirty years ago. Paul Ekman, whose research pioneered the study of the seven universal microexpressions, put it plainly in a 2016 talk at UCSF: “Emotions don’t tell you their trigger.” The only way to know is to ask, not assume.
Second, a single cue is easy to misread. In one recognition study, Xun-bing Shen, Qi Wu, and Xiao-lan Fu found that people shown a single expression for a fraction of a second regularly mistook disgust for anger or sadness and confused fear with surprise. Fear was the hardest of the six to catch.
That’s why Vanessa Van Edwards, the behavioral researcher who trained me to read these cues, teaches her three Cs: context, culture, and clusters. Never read one cue by itself. Look for three to five.
Third, some of the emotions at the center of the money scripts don’t cue cleanly. Guilt and shame are self-conscious emotions. They carry no reliable signature, the way anger or surprise do.
In her Decode course, Van Edwards points out that shame often surfaces as self-disgust:
“If someone’s ashamed of what they’re talking about, they’ll say, ‘I can’t believe I did it.’”
That disgust shows up as a crinkled nose, like you smelled something bad.
In her Big Think interview, she names the other tell, eye blocking: a hand to the side of the forehead, shielding the eyes from what feels uncomfortable to see. So the emotions most central to a person’s money story are the easiest to miss and misread.
What a Cue Actually Gives You
Ekman made a distinction I keep coming back to. Sometimes a held-back feeling slips out, and the real emotion becomes briefly visible. He called that leakage. More often, you get a hot spot: something changes in the face, voice, posture, or timing, and you can tell emotion entered the room. You don’t yet know which emotion or why. Only that something mattered.
In Telling Lies, he named the cost of confusing the two the Othello error. A liar afraid of being caught and a truthful person afraid of being disbelieved show the same fear. The error is rarely in the cue. It’s in the read.
So a money cue is a hot spot, not a readout. It tells you the water is hot. It doesn’t tell you what lit the burner.
Asking the Experts
Since my theory wasn’t landing cleanly, I decided to ask the experts.
My old professor, Rick Kahler, didn’t completely dismiss it, but he didn’t know of any evidence to support it. “I can’t say I have tied money scripts to specific kinesthetic affects,” he told me. “Kinesthetic affects can lead to the discovery of a money script category, but I am not sure of any data that would suggest the reverse.” When I admitted I couldn’t tell whether it was insight or a dead end, he wrote back, “It could be either!”
Brad Klontz, who helped build the money scripts framework, was generous about the idea and blunt about the evidence. “Your questions are fabulous, and unfortunately, none of them have been explored scientifically,” he wrote, “so I can’t report on any script-specific patterns.”
So nothing here is validated. No cue reliably means a money avoider. And yet money brings emotion to the surface in ways you can see, often before a client says a word.
Four Categories, Four Guesses
So here is my attempt, as an interested layman, to line up cues with the four categories of money scripts Klontz, Britt, and Mentzer identified in 2011. The quoted phrases below are theirs. The cue pairings are my theory, not research. Educated guesses, held loosely.
First, a primer. Ekman documented seven universal microexpressions:
-
Happiness. A real smile reaches the eyes.
-
Sadness. The inner brows pinch up, the corners of the mouth drop.
-
Surprise. Brows up, eyes wide, mouth open.
-
Fear. The whites of the eyes flash, brows lift, lips part.
-
Anger. Brows pull down into two vertical lines, lips press thin.
-
Disgust. The nose crinkles, the upper lip raises.
-
Contempt. One corner of the mouth pulls up, the only asymmetrical one of the seven.
In money conversations, my guess is that the last four do most of the work.
Money Avoidance
Money avoidance is the belief that money is bad or that you don’t deserve it. For the avoider, money “stirs up fear, anxiety, or disgust.” Disgust has a face: the nose crinkle, the raised lip. Its quieter cousin is contempt, the one-sided smirk, Van Edwards cataloged in people who are “contemptuous, literally, of having to talk about money.” When the subject comes up, watch the middle of the face and the corner of the mouth.
Money Worship
Money worship is the belief that more money is the answer. The scale items read like a chase. “Things would get better if I had more money.” “There will never be enough money.” The research behind them says the relief never arrives, and my guess is the gap shows as fear when the real numbers land: whites of the eyes, brows lifting, someone bracing rather than taking it in.
Money Status
Money status ties self-worth to net worth. One scale item says it outright: “Your self-worth equals your net worth.” Status believers are more loss-averse than most, because losing money means losing standing. A threat to the image, my guess goes, surfaces as anger: brows pulling down, lips pressing thin, often before a word is said. Van Edwards saw it most around pricing.
Money Vigilance
Money vigilance is the sense that money is never safe to discuss. It runs on “alertness, watchfulness, and concern,” on being “heedful of pending trouble or danger,” and it makes money “a deep source of shame and secrecy.” So here, my guess is not a flash but a cover: the polite smile.
A genuine smile reaches the eyes and crinkles crow’s feet, the marker Ekman called the Duchenne smile. The vigilant client’s smile stays in the mouth. Agreement on the lips, eyes neutral, the real answer kept somewhere safer. As Van Edwards put it, “fear actually comes from the no,” they didn’t feel safe saying.
Notice the overlap. Fear and anxiety run under avoidance and vigilance alike, and my worship guess lands on fear too. Even a clean read of the emotion would not hand you the script. The map refuses to resolve to one answer. That’s the point.
Cues = Clues
When I brought all this to Ed Coambs, Chief Relationship Officer with Alpha Financial Advisors and both a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Certified Financial Planner, he gave a knowing laugh. “It’s a pretty normal journey,” he told me. “We want to make simple psychological inferences out of complex systems.” He added, “It’s a humbling experience the further you go into it.”
Which is roughly where Klontz had pointed me from the start: “just apply what you are learning about emotional reactions, non-verbals, etc., as they apply to resistance and what advice a planner might be offering that could trigger resistance (based on the client’s specific money script).” Stop hunting for a decoder. Start watching for where the plan meets friction.
When I asked Coambs how hard to lean on any of this, he told me to keep it more on the hint side than on the predictive side. A cue was never going to tell me which script is running. It can tell me that a script is running, right now, in the room. That isn’t an answer. It’s an invitation to get curious.
One last note. The Shen, Wu, and Fu study has a second finding: with practice, the participants got markedly better at reading those expressions. Spotting a cue is a learnable skill. That is the whole premise.
Related: A Ten-Year-Old Ran My IRA
References
Ekman, P. (1985). Telling lies: Clues to deceit in the marketplace, politics, and marriage. W. W. Norton.
Klontz, B., Britt, S. L., Mentzer, J., & Klontz, T. (2011). Money beliefs and financial behaviors: Development of the Klontz Money Script Inventory. Journal of Financial Therapy, 2(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.4148/jft.v2i1.451
Shen, X., Wu, Q., & Fu, X. (2012). Effects of the duration of expressions on the recognition of microexpressions. Journal of Zhejiang University SCIENCE B, 13(3), 221-230. https://doi.org/10.1631/jzus.B1100063
University of California Television. (2016, November 3). The atlas of emotions with Dr. Paul Ekman and Dr. Eve Ekman. UCTV. https://www.uctv.tv/shows/The-Atlas-of-Emotions-with-Dr-Paul-Ekman-and-Dr-Eve-Ekman-31210
Van Edwards, V. (n.d.-a). Body language expert: 7 cues that make you instantly more likable. Big Think. https://bigthink.com/series/full-interview/body-language-first-impression/
Van Edwards, V. (n.d.-b). Decode [Online course]. Science of People. https://www.scienceofpeople.com