Yes, men, women, and children are different. And the long answer is that people can be sorted according to how they learn, how they remember, how they relate to other people, and what they are mentally adept at doing. Some of these differences relate to gender, some to age, and others might be attributed to a genetic predisposition.

Are you a visual, an auditory, or a kinesthetic learner? What drives your recollections: sequence, or relationships of one thing to the next; time, as in hours and minutes; or events, so that some experiences come through clearly and others don’t even get the tiniest bit of memory? Do you have a man’s brain or a woman’s brain? Do you take in information through the five physical senses, or do you consciously rely on that sixth-sense of intuition? Are you driven by logic or feeling? Are you older or younger than 25? Perception, memory, and your ability to express why or how something occurred all take shape because of the factors just mentioned. They also affect your filters for information and establish where you have natural advantages and natural challenges as someone who can spot a liar.

Even if you can identify these differences under the hood, however, you’ll have a hard time using that information unless you grasp the commonalities between people.

I’ll work my from head to toe to highlight the physical traits human beings share so that you will have bench-marks for picking out the different ways people telegraph deception. Human beings naturally look for patterns, so, as you progress to the techniques for spotting a liar, you will find that this basic knowledge prepares you to build on talents you’ve used all your life.

A quick tour through the brain provides the foundation for reading and accessing cues related to eye and head movements. The visual cortex is in the back of your head, and you use that to process anything you see—it’s to store visual information as well as to envision something. The sounds you conjure up or actually hear will be stored in your auditory cortex (temporal lobe), which is also responsible for motion and sits over your ears. This could explain why we respond so quickly to auditory stimulus as opposed to visual. It’s a short trip from stimulus to perception. Anything related to higher thought involves the prefrontal cortex, or the front of your brain—what makes us fancy monkeys.

Unless the brain has sustained certain types of damage, the human face is the most easily controlled portion of the body. It also involuntarily leaks emotions in specific, easily identifiable patterns.

One reason why the human face presents us with such a range of possibilities for expressing both deception and genuine emotion is that it is the most complex system of muscles in the body, and an area where muscle connects to skin instead of bone. Watch Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (New Line Cinema, 2003) to see how a face can telegraph a stunning array of emotions. The face of this animated creature illustrates his emotional transition from the pathetic, bitter Smeagol to the greedy, murderous character who wants the ring.

Shortly after birth, babies can recognize the characteristics of a human face, even though they see nothing more than gross shapes and shadows. In a study documented in the December 2004 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, when presented with two drawings—one, a circle with two dark spots below and one dark spot above, and the other, a circle with one dark spot above and two dark spots below—a baby fixates on the one that looks more similar to a human face. One conclusion you can make from this is that human beings are programmed from birth to read human faces. They are how we identify each other, how we determine basic qualities about each other. Even language reflects that with phrases such as “he lost face.” Face is our primary means of communication, whether or not we say a word.

The commonality of our facial expressions is, in fact, grounded in our animal nature and not where we grew up or what language we speak. Paul Ekman, an authority on facial expressions and their meaning, explains in Telling Lies (W. W. Norton, 1991):

A lot of body language, including eye movement, isn’t nearly as consistent across cultures, races, and geography as faces. An Arabic proverb says, “To learn another language is to gain another soul”; this reflects the fact that language affects brain patterns. Albanians shake their heads when they mean “yes.” In Asian societies, constant eye contact is not polite, but Arabs like to maintain steady eye contact. American culture generally associates eye contact with honesty and wandering eyes with some kind of deception, but that varies from person to person. We can find myriad other differences in body language, therefore, even among types of people who have a cultural commonality. Generally speaking, however, facial expressions are universal, meaning that human beings were designed to communicate with the face.

Given that we rely so much on our faces to convey intent, reactions, and so on, that means that we have more practice using our faces to communicate than we do using other parts of the body. It follows that we should be better at controlling our faces than any other part of our body in creating deception. We do have involuntary facial micro-gestures, however, that give away our secrets. You and I might be having a great conversation at a party. I’m smiling broadly at you and then I notice that a guy who beat up my sister just walked through the door. The remnants of a smile might still be there, but the corners of my mouth might turn down and my brow wrinkles. I was caught off guard and couldn’t control my reaction; a noticeable in-congruence resulted. And even in situations where we have contrived and controlled the appearance of emotion on our face, our body naturally responds to stimuli before we have time to control it.

High stress impacts your body in the ways I enumerated in Chapter 1. The brain says, “Alert! Body, you’d better do something!” The body responds with, “Okay, this is my area! I’m going to protect us!” And then the cognitive part of the brain shuts down and lets the body take charge. Under emotional but less-stressful conditions, human bodies from the neck down still share a few response characteristics. The movements themselves aren’t the same, but why and where they occur are.

Zoologist Desmond Morris posited that the hardest areas of your body to control are those farthest away from your brain—that is, hands and feet. People do lots of different things with their hands to defend themselves, whether from physical threats or from verbal, psychological, or emotional ones. Whereas the arm and hand positions of a person in fight or flight are extreme and well defined, the hand positions of someone who feels annoyed, slightly threatened, enthusiastic, and so on differ greatly. What they have in common is what they mean.

You use your hands to accomplish the following, among other things:

First and foremost, baselining is the most important thing in ascertaining the meaning of a gesture. If someone naturally crosses his arms, it means nothing. If the arm crossing only occurs when you ask a pointed question, it means something. One of the classic signs of self-protection, at least for a man, is to cover his crotch. No doubt, you’ve seen this posture of a man’s hands folded in front of his body—the fig-leaf posture—perhaps standing in a way that makes him appear to be at attention. It’s a type of barrier.

Humans are unlike most other animals in that we walk around upright with our most precious and vital parts exposed to the enemy. Every other creature on the planet, when prepared for combat, has its abdomen and genitalia safely tucked away. Barriers such as the fig-leaf posture, folded arms, and clasped hands are therefore invaluable indicators of discomfort. Other forms of barriers include a man who adjusts his shirtsleeves constantly under the guise of grooming. Unconsciously, he is taking attention away from himself and toward the activity while crossing his hands in front of the soft white underbelly. Most of the active forms of body crossing, such as nail grooming knuckle cracking and shirt adjusting, also include an element of displacement or relieving nervous energy.

One of the classic signs of driving home a point is batoning. In his public rebuttal of the accusation that he’d had an affair with Monica Lewinsky, President Clinton did this. He used his forearm and hand like a baton to emphasize every word of his denial. Adolph Hitler engaged in foot stamping and wild, animated hand gestures to whip his subordinates into a frenzy and his opponents into submission. Television evangelists commonly present outstretched arms and open palms to emphasize their point. A simple swat of the hand in the direction of anyone indicates they have been excused and are no longer of use to the conversation. Gestures such as these have become so much a part of communication style that vestiges of them will occur even when not intended.

Hands can signal a multitude of intentions and emotions, some exclusive to a culture. Among those that leak into our body language from the subconscious, the most prominent is steepling. You can regularly see examples on TV in interviews with politicians and experts. The steepler places the finger tips of his hands against each other and raises the fingertips to a vertical position. This is an indicator, at least subconsciously, that the steepler feels superior or has the upper hand. This behavior can be seen in all cultures and at all strata of society. A modified and bold version of this behavior is to place the interlaced fingers behind the head. Steepling in another forms indicates a feeling of vulnerability submission or inferiority. Place your hands in the steepling position and rotate from the fingertips up position to one in which the fingertips are horizontal or pointing down. In a February 2005 AP photograph, a welcoming Prime Minister Tony Blair greeted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with his hands in this lowered steepling position. The point may have been wasted on Secretary Rice, but not on me.

All extremities can unintentionally signal emotions; it takes practice to prevent that. Once in an interrogation training I was playing the role of an American captured by the enemy. The idea was to demonstrate to students how much body language leaked, and I had agreed to allow the use of physical force by the interrogator to simulate an unscrupulous captor. We had rules to prevent this getting out of hand; one was that the captor could slap me only three times. I played the role of a cocky jerk and when I responded arrogantly, the interrogator struck me. In the end my fellow interrogators critiqued my ability to hide body language. Their finding: I had raised the index finger on my right hand—as if to say, “That’s all you get”—when the third slap came. I was completely unaware of it.

People use their fingers and toes to indicate significant things unconsciously. We routinely give directions and help make a point through the use of hand signals, so it is no surprise that we leak these when under stress. A person sequestered in a stressful meeting may point his toe to the door and fidget. Another may tap his wrist as the day winds on. All of these are ways the body uses its normal ritual to convey a message subconsciously.

The most interesting part of body signaling is that you can’t stop it altogether. If you mask eyes and torso and trunk and hands it leaks in the feet. Even when you master these skills the real struggle is to keep cadence. Cadence and smoothness of transition will tell on you every time. A person who has successfully lied, and then realizes he has duped the questioner, feels a sudden rush of relief and may change his demeanor abruptly. Among the many ways it could show up are the speed of hand or foot movement, tone of voice, and cadence of words.

In summary, you can use your legs and feet to convey the following, among other things:

Try to catch yourself in the act of rubbing your toes together, shaking your foot, tapping your toes, crossing your legs, or moving your leg up and down or side to side. What are you feeling at the moment? Would you rather be somewhere else, or with someone else?

For the most part, men and women don’t have distinctly different gestures that will help you spot a lie, but here are three to consider.

Having looked at the body, I’m now going inside the head—where we start to see big differences in the way people absorb, sort, and store information. And all of these differences affect the way people both perpetrate deception and detect it.

“I see what you’re saying.”

“I hear you.”

“I have a feeling about that.”

These statements are the most common way to ascertain a person’s access sense. Roughly 75 percent of people are visual, 20 percent are auditory, and 5 percent are kinesthetic. Teachers typically use a combination of visual and auditory in classrooms, but how many people do you know who seemed “stupid” in school and did well in the real world? I know of one woman who did so poorly in school, teachers deemed her learning-impaired—yet she excelled as an athlete and, later, as a personal trainer. She didn’t have the kind of balance many people achieve. She learned kinesthetically, and most every other approach to education bored her or didn’t get through.

For most of us, it’s not quite so dramatic. But interrogators know that the difference in access senses still exists. It helps to determine how to make questioning more appealing, and it helps to know what can drive someone to the breaking point.

For example, an auditory person exposed to “white noise,” such as the repetitive sound of children banging on a piano, would be in misery.

To extract information from someone through questions (as opposed to torture), you must know how he or she remembers things. Is the person time-driven, event-driven, or sequential in terms of memory?

Arguments will arise when an event-driven person in a relationship comes to loggerheads with his or her partner if that person is time-driven or sequence-driven. You get to church a few minutes late, but that drives him crazy because he must be on time. He gives you flowers at six p.m. on your first anniversary, but you were married at noon, so you wanted the event commemorated at noon. These differences affect our lives in countless ways. Take a look at complex recipes written by a sequence-driven person. You’ll definitely know what to do next, but you won’t know up front how long it takes to produce each segment of the dish or what the discrete activities are in preparing it.

With a time-driven person, I would ask, “What did you do yesterday?” and he might respond by telling me what time he woke up, when he went to work, and so on. An event-driven would tell me what memorable events occurred: “I met with my boss, had lunch with a client, closed a deal.” A sequential person would provide a chronology of activities: woke up, had breakfast, went to work, and so forth.

The way you remember can be due to training as much or more than it is to “what comes naturally.” Senior executives in companies often need to set their priorities in terms of events—product release, keynote speech—while other people around them concern themselves with time and sequence. Sports could reinforce or require a sequence-driven mentality, as in, “what play comes after that?” U.S. Rangers work on a clock. Their training stresses that an extraction time of 0830 doesn’t mean 0831. They will either have their butts at the helicopter on time or get left behind. To emphasize this point, I asked Dean Hohl, author of Rangers Lead the Way (Adams Media, 2003) and a former Army Ranger, to tell me about his experience during the invasion of Panama in 1989:

Depending on whether you are a sequence, a time, or an event person, certain types of lies are easier or harder for you to tell and defend. By the same token, certain types of questioning will elicit a calm lie of omission or commission, but other types will rattle the liar and cause him to leak emotion.

For example, let’s say a sequence-driven person steals $50,000 out of the company safe. When questioned out of suspicion—”What did you do yesterday?—he says, “I closed the safe and went home.” He simply picked up with the part of the sequence that was true, so the lie of omission comes out comfortably. If the question is, “What did you do with the money?” his response might be: “I put it in the safe and closed the door.” That’s harder for him to say because the statement doesn’t track with the actual sequence of events. It is now a lie of commission because the true sequence is that he put some of the money in the safe and some of it in his briefcase, and then he closed the door. It takes more energy for him than the lie of omission, and he is more likely to signal that lie through his body language.

Event-driven people are big chunkers, if you want to use the information sorting nomenclature from the last chapter. They put things in order of what’s important, so in responding to a question about what they did yesterday, they might not even mention what happened in order. Sequence-drive people are small-chunk sorters; one thing hinges on the next. Time-driven people have a sequence that is dictated by chronology, so they are likely to remember how long it took for something to occur and what time the next event happened. It’s another version of small-chunking.

Before trying to extract information, you need to ask baselining questions to determine what kind of person you’re dealing with. After that, you can choose to undermine the person’s pattern of communicating by using a conflicting style, but that could interrupt your progress. More often than not, you’ll want to tap into the way your source communicates, not confuse him. For example, you might ask your sequence-driven spouse, who’s on a business trip, “What did you do today?” What you really want to know is, “What significant things occurred?” but he hears your question in terms of a sequence of events that began when he woke up and ended at the point when you’re asking the question. He starts with, “Well, I got up when the alarm went off, caught the morning news on NPR while I was shaving….” If you want to maintain a strong rapport so the questioning can continue, you need to just listen, even if you feel as though you’re Archie Bunker in the sitcom All in the Family. It was a running joke that Edith would ramble in response to Archie’s questions and he would interrupt her with, “Just get to the point (pronounced “pernt”), Edith.” To be fair, I should note that the Ediths of the world go crazy when they’re deprived of the details.

Pretend you’re an Archie, as I am, and you’re interrogating a person who remembers sequentially. You could redirect him by interrupting with a question about an event or time of an occurrence, but you run the risk of alienating him on a subliminal level, if not a conscious one. At that point, you might cause him to skew the data. You also might telegraph that you have more interest in one thing than all the others: “I wonder why she didn’t care about that new bridge construction, but wanted all the details of my lunch meeting with Sherry?”

Memory is sketchy at best. You want him to remember items the way he logged them; the more you drag the person away from his normal thought process, the more liable he is to distort the data. Put up with a couple of extra minutes of blah, blah. It’s easier, and more effective, for you to adapt your style of questioning than it is for that person to adapt his style of answering. That said, I will also give you tips on redirecting skillfully in later sections.

Commonly, women remember things in terms of experience, whereas men remember what happened. Here’s another generality that we use in interrogation: Relying on intuition, a woman can usually figure out that a man is on to her faster than a man can figure out that a woman is on to him. This is not to say that there are no intuitive men, but women seem to rely on it more naturally than most men. Look to the structure of the brain to explain this rather than Hollywood storytellers.

The corpus callosum is a thick collection of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres. Together, those structures make up the central nervous system’s main component (the cerebrum). In general, men and woman are not equal when it comes to the corpus callosum: Women win the contest of size and development. Signals cross from the left to the right side of the brain (and vice versa) more quickly in the “female” corpus callosum. Men use the left side. Stop. They use the right. Stop. The effect is that men seem to persist in a logic pattern or a creative mode, whereas women might agilely flash back and forth from creative to logical to creative to logical, and on and on. Because intuition involves both feelings and facts, you can see how the “female” brain would support it.

Both men and women can be left-brained or right-brained, meaning that one or the other hemispheres appears to be dominant. Here’s a scientifically questionable test to see what you are: Clap your hands together quickly and don’t pull them apart. Which thumb is on top? If you’re right thumb is on top, your left brain is probably in charge. If it feels strange to clap your hands and put the other thumb on top, then you are dominant one way or the other. If they feel equally comfortable, then it reflects an equality in your brain—at least in terms of which half is in charge.

Your eyes have different amounts of texture and color in them and can also give you an indication of which side of your brain is in charge. If your right eye seems to have more texture and flecks of color, for example, then you are probably left-brained. Look for texture more than color in conducting your observations.

Regardless of left-brain or right-brain dominance, men and women have different stress mannerisms—that is, they have different ways of touching parts of their bodies, as well as ways that parts of their body react involuntarily to stress. Under stress, a man tends to adapt by rubbing his skin (thighs, hands, and so forth), whereas a woman might flip her hair with fingers, tilt her head, or perhaps touch her neck. These are all auto-erotic gestures that redirect energy, but the woman’s seem friendlier. In fact a woman’s body language in the midst of deceit bears a remarkable similarity to seductive behavior. The key difference? When a woman uses these gestures to seduce, the lips are engorged with blood so they plump up, and in fact the whole face has a softer, fuller look. Under stress, the gestures might be the same, but blood leaves the lips so they look thin. Where does the blood go? To the muscles, because the person under stress has autonomic responses associated with the fight-or-flight mode. Men: Remember this signal when you meet a woman you find attractive and you’ll have a good sense of what could, or won’t, happen next.

We’ve seen a bizarre exception to this stress signal during interrogations. Some women find power so attractive that, even when threatened verbally in a fear up approach (see Chapter 6), they exhibit signs of seduction. Of course, a male interrogator will take advantage of that as much as possible to extract information (some feeling as though they’re the star of a spy movie the whole time.) It’s rarely true, however, that men find powerful women disarmingly attractive, so female interrogators take a different approach.

The key differences between men and women as interrogators show up during the approach and questioning phases of the process, which will receive much more attention later. In the approach phase, male interrogators can generally blend in elements of physical harshness more naturally than women, although the Abu Ghraib prison scandal showed that females charged with prisoners might use it, too. Depending on the circumstances, female interrogators might have an easier time building sexual incentives into their approach. The less-obvious differences come after the interrogator gets the source into an emotional state through the approach. The interrogator needs to keep the person in an emotional mode throughout questioning. This could require flashing back and forth between a logical questioning sequence and reinforcing the approach to sustain the person’s emotion. In teaching both men and women, I found that men often get stuck in the logical, whereas female interrogators can learn to shift back and forth more easily, but tend to sustain emotion when they should have turned it off. The concept is that the two have to blend: Interrogators have to be logical with the questioning sequence while, at the same time, reinforcing their approach.

The brain evolves forward in the same sequence in which it shuts off. So children are not born with the ability to think logically; in fact, some studies have indicated that the brain isn’t fully developed until about age 30.

Kids don’t polish their conversation or their body language. They don’t know how to deceive, and if you study kids you can usually learn a lot about their parents. They will do everything an adult will do with their eyes, for example, to telegraph a certain emotion. They pick it up by watching and listening. Why does a little girl who’s confronted with bad behavior cross her legs, twist her hair with her finger, tilt her head, and say, “I don’t know”? She’s an itty bitty woman hiding something at that moment. How many times have you had a positive image of parents you didn’t know well or had never met—teachers have this experience all the time—because you met a child with manners? On some level, you realize that some of that good kid is probably still alive in the adult.

In determining how and when young people are lying, there’s a complicating factor: whether they’re male or female. You can give a well-behaved, thoughtful child a healthy dose of hormones in adolescence and that child will overreact, talk back, and act stupid for a few years. Commonly in limbic mode, it’s a biological struggle for an adolescent to make sense. The hormones ramp up the endocrine system with the result that this teenager is essentially in fight-or-flight mode.

A common problem in communicating with a teenager, or someone exhibiting the characteristics of a teenager—say, an adult in sustained limbic mode—is that he’s likely to scramble information. You give strict orders to do one thing, but he hears another and acts on it.

As part of our efforts to arrange a cease-fire during Operation Desert Storm, we were making a tape to play loudly to the Iraqis holding down a building. We wanted to say, “Don’t fire on us. If you do, it will be bad for you. We’ll blow up the building.” And then they told me to insert a phrase, “All criminals come out.” I thought that was absurd, but we put it in the tape. Sure enough, about a hundred people came out of the building. In a highly emotional state, the mind tends to distort and generalize, and this is precisely what happened here. They heard “blow up the building” and “come out.”

Of course, kids are capable of intentionally lying, but keep in mind both their chronological and emotional ages before you assume they’re guilty of a deliberate act of deceit. As child psychologist Peter Spevak notes in Empowering Underachievers (New Horizon, 2000, p. 67), our internal defenses help us survive feelings that scare us, and kids who are stuck emotionally will commonly use a stock of defenses that result in lies of omission and commission. Specifically, he cites these:

If we could only leave these defenses behind when we grow up!