CHAPTER 1
The Steps to Reading
Body Language
Primitive man had a repertoire of survival skills that included reading body language. Etiquette and culture have blunted that natural human ability. Add to those factors the complexity of spoken language and modern conventions related to body language—stock gestures we see all the time in movies and TV—and the result is this: few people today can read body language well.
Most of the time, we don’t even know what our own bodies are doing. Human body language is more closely tied to ritual than planned behavior. I don’t think about how to pick up my glass when I drink, how to hold my fork, or start my car. Our brains are so complex, with multiple subprograms running at all times, that it is difficult to have complete control over every twitch and tap. It is difficult for us to even remember what we’ve done if the action has reached the point of ritual or habit.
I teach professionals in finance and sales to read body language, as well as investigators, interrogators, special operations forces, and security professionals. For all of the latter groups, the survival of their careers, if not their lives, may depend on that ability.
In the following chapters, I will introduce you to a system I call R.E.A.D.—Review, Evaluate, Analyze, Decide—an in-depth version of the course I teach government and military students in my body language classes. This is the same step-by-step training I give them, but I’ve added other modules, as well as my new system of reading moods, to make this book “the advanced course.” These additional pieces address the interplay between body language and emotions, how to use gestures and posture as tools in business and personal relationships, and tricks to remain inscrutable by controlling how and when your own body language leaks emotions.
Take a minute and refer to the flow chart provided on page 13. I want to give you a narrative guide to it as a complement, so that you understand at the outset how the information in the book helps you build the skill of reading body language. In other words, if you skip around, you’ll pick up some hot tricks, but you can’t become adept at reading body language by taking that approach.
Beginning with some notes about communication of all beings, I move to distinctly human communication. The next topic figures prominently in my course on reading body language: culture. In this section, I look at the human groupings that have a profound impact on the way we express ourselves. You cannot hope to read body language well unless you take culture into consideration. Next, I move to person-to-person similarities, and then person-to-person differences. After that, you can start to answer the question: What are the differences between a person in a normal state—a state of congruence between gestures and voice—and a person in the state of sending verbal messages that conflict with non-verbal messages? At this point, the focus goes to the individual.
What is normal for a particular person? What is abnormal for a particular person? Those questions put us at the narrowest part of the diagram. From there, I start moving back toward a broader perspective. Exercises in applying the skill begin with a look at celebrities, who give us a common point of focus. You know the players; you see them every day on television. That sets the stage for reading the body language of individuals around you, for understanding their motivation and drive in context. As you practice overlaying the culture in your developing picture of what’s happening, you can begin to employ the skill in one-on-one business and personal relationships, and then expanding the application of your expertise to groups.
Over time, your self-awareness of body language evolves as you review, evaluate, analyze, and decide what other people are doing. At that point, you’ve progressed to a level of knowledge and control that gives you powerful advantages over most other people in your daily life.
What the pros know:
TV vs. reality
The ability of television cops and lawyers to catch a killer seems almost magical. For them, clues glow in the dark and fall out of the rafters. And when they interview a suspect, they read his body language to confirm his guilt. Given the advantage of close-ups, and a director explaining when and how to mimic a behavior, you get to see what tips off the brilliant detective—but you don’t necessarily know what it means. Rubbing the legs while he’s talking (stress relief through energy displacement), pupils narrowing to a pinpoint when he sees a photo of the victim (the picture brings back the rage that led him to kill the guy who stole his money), and dry mouth (another sign of intense anger), all fit together for the smart cop, but all you perceive is a feeling that the suspect is an emotional wreck. These actors are, of course, working from a script, so they know the subtext, which the writer may or may not have gotten right. The truth is often much more subtle and difficult to read. Human subroutines can become really complex, and it is a rare combination of talent and experience that enables the writer-director-actor team to get it right.
Law & Order: Criminal Intent and The Closer provide great examples of the substantial information that a body-language expert can glean from interaction with a person. In the former, Vincent D’Onofrio stars as Detective Robert Goren, whom TV.com aptly describes as “an exceptionally bright homicide investigator with well-honed instincts that match up favorably with his criminal quarry.” That’s an eloquent way of saying that he does things almost no investigator outside of TV drama could pull off.
In an episode in which the killer is a method actor immersing himself in the role of a serial killer, D’Onofrio doesn’t just read body language, he manipulates it to exploit the interplay between body posture and emotions. Casually questioning the suspect in his own home, Detective Goren tilts his head markedly to the left. The man gives a natural response—without being aware that he is mirroring the detective’s action—tilting his head to the right. We look hard right and lean our head hard right as both a reflection and expression of emotion. Look at people at a funeral. Their eyes will be down and to the right, and sometimes the entire head is drooping to the right. Although some clinical psychologists have disagreed with me that this is possible, I have observed that “forcing” emotional body language through this mirroring technique actually pulls a person into an emotional state. This is what Goren did with his suspect. The man’s responsive body language helped put him into an emotional state that made him vulnerable—and ready to confess.
My students have seen shows similar to this and think they’ve picked up lots of tricks. Because my students, who are aspiring interrogators in both the military and civilian sectors, have been hand-picked for my body language class, they come through the door embracing a paradox of their own creation: I’m good enough to be in this class, so I must already know most of what Hartley’s going to teach me. (The ones who know I have a book out on the subject have a little more humility. The ones who’ve also researched what I’ve said are a little more cocky.)
I ask them what they know.
They often reference John Travolta’s 2003 movie Basic, which “taught” them that a person looking up and to his right means he’s lying; I tell them that they’ve been deceived. A broad conclusion such as this about a particular piece of body language usually has very little meaning. Until they are connected with other factors, and until you have baselined a person to determine what is normal behavior, you can’t draw a conclusion about truth or deception based on a single eye movement. If you want to “read someone like a book,” you need to look at the entire text and not just the section titles.
Another common misconception is that crossed arms always signify a barrier, a defensive gesture to block someone out, primarily because of insecurity. This gesture alone means nothing, and to make my point to students I cross my arms, furrow my brow, point to the person with my head, and overly enunciate the words, “Do I seem insecure to you?” This gets a chuckle from the students I didn’t pick on, but my “victim” shuffles. He shifts in the chair, breaks eye contact, and laughs nervously; he may even blush. Do you recognize this body language? Yep, it’s embarrassment.
Some of the other mistaken beliefs even come from “expert” sources writing about human patterns of behavior. They see a phrase such as “73 percent of the time, a man with his fingers in a steepling position is feeling self-confident” and conclude that the theory applies to all steepling—up, down, or sideways. Not so, as you will soon find out.
I think that using percentages similar to this to justify a conclusion about human behavior borders on nonsense. To me, assigning numbers to behavior patterns is an attempt to mask uncertainty. Humans are easily represented on a bell curve for any demographic. The greatest percentage is going to fall somewhere near the center with extreme deviations lying near the edges. This works for intelligence, skin tone, how white your teeth are, and how many times you have skinned your knee. It is not magic; it is simple math.
Even after these folks go through the basic body language course, they often allow their projections to contaminate what they observe. The turning point tends to be their failure to pinpoint the bad guy in a scenario that serves as a kind of final exam.
Right now, I’m going to give you one of those scenarios. If you determine what kind of body language the terrorist would have, then you are on the road to expertise in this field.
The scenario
You and two other people in your unit are sent to a farmhouse in northern Iraq. You have been told that an informant alleges that someone in that house is an IED (improvised explosive device) kingpin. You have room for only one person in your transport besides yourself, so you must find the individual that is most likely to be that person. In addition, you know that this person is known as Abulhul, or “father of despair.” That’s what the Sphinx is called in Egyptian, by the way.
You and your buddies kick the door in and find five people in the room having dinner—a middle-aged Iraqi male and two Iraqi couples. Everyone in the house appears to be Iraqi because of their physical appearance and clothing; everyone speaks an Iraqi dialect. At this point, you have one hour to determine who the terrorist is and get that person back to your unit.
You ask one of the men, who has a noticeable scar across his forehead: “What do you do for a living?”
“I sell timers and radios,” he replies. He wrings his hands and rubs his head. Have you struck gold immediately?
His cousin, one of the other men in the room, admits to being an electronics repairman. “Don’t listen to that stupid man,” he says. He explains that his cousin suffered a serious head injury and functions only on a marginal level. He has trouble remembering words; instead of saying clocks, he said timers. “I try to help him,” the man says, “by giving him clocks and radios that I repair to sell.”
Suspicion now moves to the electronics repairman. You keep an eye on him, as he taps his fingers on the table and shifts in his chair. He clearly resents your presence, but says nothing.
You watch him out of the corner of your eye as you question his wife. She appears to be a simple woman who gives straightforward answers to questions, but clearly hates Americans. With nowhere to go during the day, she sits home and watches television with her kids around the clock. The farmhouse is equipped with satellite TV, so she not only gets news, but also American crime shows, and a plethora of programs that cause her to conclude that the United States has a population of immoral, insane people. She spits at you and the other soldiers, as her husband gestures for her to sit down and shut up.
The electronics repairman’s brother owns the house; he’s a sheep farmer who makes a point that he has a thriving business. He uses his arms to indicate that his flock is enormous and that they keep him busy night and day. His wife has two kids at home and, similar to her sister-in-law, all she does is take care of the kids all day. From the way she answers questions, she seems to be more educated than the other woman.
After you ask a barrage of standard questions, such as “Where you were born? How long have you lived here?” the tactic you and your buddies use is to ask questions designed to make each person leak information about the others. You go after the woman who is vocal in her anti-Americanism and suggest she’s obviously alone in her feeling.
“No!” she screams and points again and again to her sister-in-law. “Ask her. She knows what they’re like!”
The other woman strides from where she was standing and faces you directly. “Yes, I know because I saw for myself how you kill,” she says quietly. “She sees it only on TV.”
The answer revealed
The students who figure out who the guilty party generally do so through questioning and by putting aside their preconceived notion that “father of despair” must be a man. Good questioning of the woman who hates Americans will reveal that she does not like or trust her sister-in-law, whom she does not consider a real Iraqi. Why? The wife of the shepherd left Iraq when she was 10 because her father was on the outs with the Saddam regime. Her family lived in Germany until after the first Gulf War, and then came back, thinking that the Shi’ites would take power.
A star student of body language will notice three telling things. First the wife of the electronics repairman points at the other woman in an accusing way as she says, “Ask her!” Second, the other woman moves in a way that suggests she has only recently started wearing Iraqi garb again. A woman who had worn pants for period of time would stride, but not a woman who has worn a dress and lived among traditional Iraqi women her whole life. Third, the shepherd’s wife approached her questioner directly, which is uncharacteristic behavior. She has a Western woman’s sense of comfort talking face-to-face with a man.
The truth you needed is this: She still has friends in Germany and mules sensitive information back and forth. She is the source of sophisticated design information and supplies for new IEDs.
The moral of the story is: Don’t jump to conclusions based on things you think are true. Watch and listen for clues that add up logically, not ones that fit a pattern you think should be there.
One of the photos I show to provoke class analysis invariably gets the same reaction. The photo captures the face of women in babushkas. The students uniformly respond with descriptors, such as “weak,” “frail,” and “helpless.” I remind them of the so-called Black Widows, Olga Rutterschmidt and Helen Golay—73 and 75, respectively, when they were captured in 2006—who murdered homeless men as part of their insurance scams. I find this to be a cultural bias. In a culture that values youth and vigor, the old cannot possibly be dangerous. Most Americans never consider what they would think if they met a 65-year-old Harrison Ford who didn’t have the benefit of makeup and a good camera angle. Is he still Indiana Jones, or is he suddenly Professor Henry Jones?
Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is now serving a life sentence at the Federal Administrative Maximum Penitentiary hospital in Colorado, is a blind Muslim cleric. Linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, among other heinous acts, he may have looked pathetic, but his fatwa calling for violence again U.S. civilian targets made a powerful terrorist.
What I teach the pros
Communication
I break human communication into three channels:
Verbal: Word choice.
Vocal:All human voice components that do not include word choice.
Non-verbal: All other pieces of communication.
I think of the verbal as the servant of the will; it is the easiest channel to control. People can more easily select their words than they can control their nervous coughs or eye tics. Think about how much more powerful your communication becomes as you increase your level of control over the other two as well.
There’s no doubt that you’ve had exposure to someone so well-spoken that simply hearing him or her inspires you. When I was a young soldier, I worked for a lieutenant with this gift; he thoroughly impressed me until I realized he was speaking at half the speed of everyone else. That gave him time to choose each word carefully. Great speakers not only make precise word choices, but they control cadence, similar to the lieutenant, as well as tone, pitch, and a host of utterances that are part of the vocal component of communication.
The third channel—non-verbal—includes gesturing, posture, proximity to others, and other factors explored throughout this book. A premise of the approach I teach is that, in terms of non-verbal communication, there are fewer differences than similarities among people, otherwise we couldn’t communicate as a species.
I start every class with a definition of communication that is straight from Merriam-Webster: “A process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior.” While your brain may focus on the last part of the definition—symbols, signs, or behavior—I want to call your attention to a couple of words that precede it, namely, “process” and “system.” Process is what occurs between the beginning and the end. It implies causality. System describes independent parts coming together into an organized whole. For example, rage may be sparked by a thought, but the communication of it is the process that includes a balled fist, an arm that goes rigid, contracting pupils, a rigid back, and so on. The end point may be the enraged person planting his knuckles on some other guy’s jaw. This rage can be communicated without intent, too, as long as you know the sequence of body movements that effectively convey it. A good interrogator has the capacity to communicate rage where there is none, just as a good actor does. Although many interrogators believe that this is the most difficult emotion to portray, I don’t because few people have ever seen true rage.
Therefore, given that communication means a bit more than a single grunt or foot stomp, a typical first question from students is, “Do animals communicate?”
The simple answer is yes. Cats, dogs, horses, goldfish, hamsters, and monkeys all have a system of symbols and behavior that convey information. I want to draw a distinction here between those actions that take shape as communication and simple, non-verbal behavior. When a cat scratches her ear, she isn’t trying to tell you anything; she’s scratching because her ear itches. Keep this distinction in mind for humans behavior, too. Sometimes a scratch is just that.
The difference between animal communication and human communication is, of course, complexity. Our pets generally communicate in a series of utterances, shifts in posture, flexing of extremities, and eye movement. The most mentally advanced of these animals, the primate, has monkeys on the low end of the spectrum and great apes toward the high end. Beyond them, sitting at the tip of this communication chain, is the greatest of apes: human beings.
Often when I teach or deliver a presentation, I get people who reject evolution, so they challenge me: “So you believe we descended from monkeys?”
I say, “No. We are monkeys—really fancy ones.” I often call humans the shaved ape, which is a take-off on Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape. I think we are not “naked,” as much as “shaved,” meaning that we try very hard to remove the animal from who we are.
A version of another question usually comes up after that: “Is human language an effective system of symbols? Most of my students instantly say yes. My answer: no.
A very effective system of symbols would be one that conveyed our thoughts precisely. Even with the most astute communicators, spoken English can be confusing.
No reading aloud.
No reading allowed.
Homonyms, multiple meaning of words and connotations that overtake the denotations of words (for example, terrific) all make English a tough language to learn. The French Academy makes rules to avert this kind of mess; we in the United States seem to enjoy the creative exercise of fostering the mess.
Read this question aloud: Would you prefer to lie?
What is the meaning? It could be an accusation, or asking about a choice of relaxation. Whether in print or spoken, you cannot tell. Should you be insulted if a person says this to you? Maybe you look tired and don’t know it. How much of the meaning comes through in the spoken words? How much of the meaning would the speaker convey through body language? Would a slight drop of the brow or scowl of the lips help you to understand? How about tone and inflection? Emphasis on “you” carries a different sense from an emphasis on “prefer.” How much do you think an accent or pronunciation would affect comprehension of the meaning if you simply heard the sentence on the radio?
Akin to our chimp cousins, we convey information on many channels, and although we prefer to think of ourselves as so much more, we respond to these signals as readily as our chimp cousins. It means that someone who better understands the cues and meanings can control the conversation in a way even Machiavelli himself, with his humanist beliefs, could not imagine.
By missing the animal piece of communication—shrieks, limbs flailing, eyes darting, and arched back—we reduce our ability to comprehend. No language alone can reach the subtlety of spoken language overlaid on effective non-verbal communication.
Body movement
The next question I ask in class that guides me to my step-by-step instruction is: Who understands body language? I then move very close to the desk of one of the people who does not raise his or her hand and stare menacingly at that student. As the class laughs, the person usually raises his hand. The point is made: We all understand body language on some level; most people simply do not pay attention to the subtle pieces of daily communication. Many people can see body language on a subconscious level, but they override their perceptions. We are taught to “be logical,” as if there were such a thing as logic when dealing with most humans.
As I mentioned previously, I go from verbal to vocal to nonverbal communication, with the latter two receiving primary focus, because reading those is the real meat of the subject, or something my fellow interrogators often call “voodoo,” that is, reading the unintentional cues presented by the source. In other words, what is the other person telling me that he really does not want me to know?
After we move through the body-language curriculum, I give my students the offensive applications, or how to influence someone gently into what you want. A long-time colleague of mine calls this “interrogator mind tricks,” an obvious reference to George Lucas’s inflated version of this, the Jedi mind tricks. The connection is intimate: I teach the ability to tap in on a subconscious level to a person’s mind and get the response I want or need.
There’s a systematic process behind this. I begin with baselining, and then move to body parts.
Baselining
Baselining is a portable version of the polygraph. You use it to pick up subtle variables in body language and tone of voice. Once you know what to look and listen for, you can detect changes that accompany stress of varying degrees. That ability gives you a high degree of control in your interaction with someone.
Starting later in the book, I will emphasize the importance of observing the body language of an individual in a relaxed state, that is, seeing what happens naturally, without affectation or stress.
I will highlight what gestures and physical responses are involuntary and universal, because these are not what you focus on in baselining. You will take every other kind of gesture and physical response into consideration, however.
Body parts
In beginning the scan of body movements, I start with the face. To steal the words of Desmond Morris, the face is the organ of expression. Our agreement ends there. Morris conjectured that it is the easiest to control because it is the closest to the brain, but I strongly disagree. When it comes to the face, I think we’re dealing with a paradox: The face is both the easiest and the hardest area of the body to control. There are many things we do with our faces that we aren’t even aware of because they are second nature.
A lot of emotion comes out through the brow in both voluntary and involuntary expressions. We use the forehead muscles when we normally interact with people, even on the phone, and we develop wrinkles as a result. If Morris were right and we can control the muscles in the face more easily than others, then we wouldn’t be using so much Botox. We could voluntarily stop using the muscles that create the problem, and even voluntarily reverse the process of wrinkling by exercising them. In addition, if the face were under our control, more facial movements would be cultural, not universal.
Facial movements become practiced behavior over time, because we learn how to present an even smile when meeting someone and an arched eyebrow when our kid drops mustard on the floor. But the plethora of muscles in our faces makes it hard for us to keep track of them. We often do not even realize the range of emotions and physiological reactions we express with our faces. What does that upturned brow mean? Is there a difference if the person sending the message is male or female? If the receiver is male or female? How do the sexes differ in messaging, not only with the same sex but the opposite sex? Is that well-intended signal misread because of differences in the two brains? The head is the workhorse of communication. And although much of what it conveys is intentional, we still leak messages that are impossible to cover.
From the head, face, and neck, I move to the arms, and then down to through the rest of the body: hands and gesturing, torso, legs, and feet. Do those folded arms really mean the person is guarded and maybe even disgusted? Do those crossed feet indicate you are shutting me out? This is where people’s absolutes start to break down, because they learn that you can’t draw conclusions without understanding context.
Context
At first, my students fight the premise that context has huge significance in reading body language. “John Travolta didn’t need context to figure out the guy was lying....” The assumption they embrace is that an involuntary movement can be understood out of context, for example, pupil movement. The pupils enlarge to take in more information and contract to block it out.
That action does give you a clue about the person’s emotional state, but without context you will not know if the pupils dilated because of sexual arousal or fear, or if they narrowed to pinpoints because of disgust.
Context contains a number of elements in addition to gestures and facial expressions, such as space, time, and even smell.
What to expect
At the end of the session on reading body language, my students look at everyone differently. From their prisoners or employees to their in-laws, they have a more intelligent understanding of what the other chimps are saying to them.
They, and now you, will look at newsreels of Adolf Hitler’s wild, flailing arms and see something that his desperate followers did not. You will understand why, years after his insane despotry, many people still call him a communications genius; you will perceive the mechanisms that allowed him to be effective. You will also see gestures that bleed sickness.
You will regain something your primitive ancestors used daily: a second sight to body language.