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You Are Not a Mind Reader: Uncover the Primary Myth About Detecting Deception

Did you know that the only universal language is body language? It is virtually the same across all cultures, genders, and ages. The only aspects of body language affected culturally are specific head and hand gestures and the concept of personal space. Signs of anxiety and stress, and displays of emotions are the same. Despite this, detecting deception is an inexact science. It is also difficult. I am not trying to discourage you; I just want to prepare you for this reality. You will need to rely on a toolbox of advanced techniques as well as your ability to identify hundreds of nonverbal and verbal tells (changes or deviations from a person’s normal behavior), and then determine whether someone is lying or not. If you figure out that someone is lying, you then have the responsibility, to yourself and others, to get to the truth. Detecting deception is only half of the task; extracting the truth is the other half. If you are not going to work to get the truth, why bother trying to detect deception at all? What good would it do you?

It’s easy to learn about common deceptive, nonverbal tells (deviations from the norm such as crossing the arms, rapid blinking, shoulder shrugging, and trying to disguise a smile) in someone’s body language, but these tells in and of themselves are not necessarily indicative of deception. Some of them merely indicate contemplation, stress, anxiety, or even embarrassment. As a former DoD certified military interrogator, I detected deception, both verbal and nonverbal, in my detainees pretty often. I was pretty accurate, but not 100 percent of the time. I challenge anyone who considers him-or herself an expert in detecting deception and who states that he or she is always right. Some people use the term “deception-detecting expert” to describe themselves; others use “body-language expert.” I prefer the latter because I don’t believe anyone can accurately detect deception all the time. That said, we can come pretty darn close, maybe even 99 percent of the time. I have used all the tools and techniques I teach in this book, and have had great success with them based on the actionable intelligence I collected that resulted in the identification of terrorists and foreign fighters, their missions, the locations of their training camps, how they were trained, how they were financed, how they recruited new members, how they communicated and traveled, and how they viewed the West. This information helped us thwart future attacks, capture other terrorists, and save lives.

When I tell people I read body language, I can’t tell you how many times they respond by asking me, “So, what am I thinking right now?” I can read the body but I can’t read the mind, although I wish I could! Even my company motto differentiates the two: “Move the body to influence the mind; read the body to influence people.” Meaning, when I teach people how to feel confident so they can speak in public or ace a job interview, I tell them they have to first look confident. Once they move their body and assume, say, a confidence or power pose, which I’ll talk about in Chapter 5, they will start to feel confident. I used to tell my students, “If you feel stupid, you look stupid.” Fortunately the converse is also true: If you look confident, you will feel confident. When you learn to accurately read body language—and you will be able to do just that after reading this book—you will be able to influence people to like, respect, trust, and be honest with you. So to make it clear, I can’t read minds, but I can read your facial expressions and body gestures, which can tell me an awful lot about what’s really going through your mind when you tell me, “I swear it wasn’t me!” as you turn sideways, shrug your shoulders, and try to hide a smile. I will know that what you are really saying is “It was me.” But I still can’t read your mind!

Today countless individuals, companies, and institutions teach the private sector how to read nonverbal communication to enhance communication skills, confidence, and rapport. These skills have rewarded everyone from small-business owners to huge corporations. For every one person who teaches it, however, there seem to be 20 who refute it and refer to it as a voodoo science—hokey at best, and unreliable at worst. The problem lies with how reading body language and detecting deception are taught and learned. For example, many people think that just because they watch the Lie to Me series on TV, they are body-language experts, but the show neglects two very important elements of identifying deception and finding the truth: establishing a person’s baseline behavior (so that you can identify behavioral incongruence—more on that later), and knowing how to identify the exact moment you see that incongruence and then probe with precise questions to understand why there was a shift in behavior in the first place. Was he lying, or was it something else? The old method of interpreting body language to detect deception led people to believe that the observation of one particular body gesture was indicative of deception and automatically meant that person was lying. Just because someone shrugs her shoulders when she says, “I don’t know what happened to the money you left on the counter,” doesn’t mean she knows where the money is and she is lying to you. A shoulder shrug always indicates uncertainty, but in this case it doesn’t necessarily mean that this person is uncertain about the whereabouts of the money; it could mean she was thinking of the check she just bounced and was wondering where all her money went. Something to keep in mind is that when you falsely accuse someone of lying, you may lose both that person’s trust and your credibility.

Some people who take body-language training think they have become mind readers. This couldn’t be further from the truth. If you have ever watched the magician Criss Angel, you would swear he was a mind reader. Guess what? He’s not. He creates illusions, he influences people, and he reads body language (including facial micro-expressions), and he is great at all of it. He once had Oprah think of a number from 1 to 100 so that he could try to guess it, and of course he did. The number was 11. Here’s how he did it. First, he planted his foregone success in Oprah’s mind by saying, “I’m [going to] show you how I use psychology and how I study your mannerisms to get inside your head, Oprah, and tell you what you’re thinking.” As he began to “chunk” groups of numbers to narrow down which one contained the number Oprah was thinking about, her eyes widened ever so slightly and her mouth opened when he asked her, “Is your number between 1 and 15?” Her eyes and the expression on her face told him everything he needed to know. Now, I am sure Criss uses other magician’s techniques that I am not privy to, but even so, his guess was confirmed by her facial micro-expression.

But how did he come up with 11? Have you ever wondered why you always seem to look at a clock when it’s 11:11? I do this almost daily. Numerologists believe that 11:11 represents synchronicity, meaning that taking note of the number is not a casual coincidence but instead a purposeful coincidence. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist whom I will talk more about in Chapter 7, was the first to write about synchronicity. He described in very scientific prose how events that seem to be coincidental at first, often aren’t, but are in fact causally related. I like to sum up his theory with my favorite phrase: Everything happens for a reason. But back to the number 11. Why do we look at the clock when it is 11:11, why did Oprah pick the number 11, and why are there 11 chapters in this book? All coincidence? Or are we all subconsciously drawn to see, write, and think about 11? Unfortunately I do not have answers to these questions, but the fact that Oprah chose a synchronous number to begin with, and that fact that Criss saw her mouth open slightly and her eyes widen ever so subtly in surprise as he honed in on her number, could have assisted him in guessing correctly. Also, when Oprah initially wrote down the number on a large pad of white paper to show the audience, she used upstrokes on the 1s, the European way of writing the number 1, not just plain, vertical lines, the American way. Apparently someone in the audience asked what the number was, perhaps because she had never seen 1s written that way, so Criss was able to hear Oprah ask her audience, “For goodness’ sake, you don’t know what that is?” The audience laughed, and she rewrote 11, this time using the Palmer method of handwriting, with just vertical lines, and showed her audience again. They laughed more loudly, and she asked, “Okay, everybody got it okay?” Criss must have known there are only two numbers that can be written differently, one and seven. As a former archaeologist I was taught to write numbers as they do in continental Europe to avoid confusion, so I put hooks on my ones and slashes through my sevens. The bottom line is—and I bet he would tell you this, too—Criss Angel is not a mind reader, but he is very observant and sees a lot of things that most people don’t. After reading this book, you, too, will learn to see some of those things that Criss Angel, I, and other body-language experts can see, and then use them to your advantage. When you learn how to accurately read body language and detect deceptive tells, you will for all intents and purposes become an analyst.

There is an entire process to knowing how to use body language to detect deception. This process should always follow what I call the rule of three, which I will talk about in Chapter 8. In brief, you need to study a person’s body language to establish his normal body language behavior (the baseline), and then match up what is being said verbally to what is being said nonverbally through specific body gestures, looking for deviations from the baseline (tells). But one tell is not enough: You need to look for clusters of tells and then evaluate the context in which you see them. After you get a feel for someone’s baseline body language, you will be able to pick up on when it changes. For example, I am from Rhode Island and I’m half Italian, so when I talk, I talk loudly and quickly, with my arms swinging away. In fact, when I’m really excited, I’ve been known to accidentally hit people while I’m talking. This is normal body language behavior for me. If at any point I were to quiet my arm and hand movements while I was speaking, this would indicate a deviation from my baseline behavior. Was it because I lied? At this point you’d have no idea, but you’d know it’s a deviation, a tell, and that tells you to probe further. Again, one tell alone will not indicate deception; clusters of tells will. If you were trying to find out whether I was lying, you would need to probe the subject I was speaking about right when you saw the deviation, by using carefully formulated questions to see whether you could observe another tell. As you can see, the process of detecting deception is not as simple as people think. It’s a methodical process, and I will teach you this process in the following chapters.

You will also learn how and why people lie and deceive, along with techniques for how to extract to the truth from someone while maintaining respect and rapport. Wouldn’t you want to know how to get hardened criminals to like you and want to tell you the truth? Wouldn’t you want to know how to get the upper hand in a competitive situation, how to make a killer first impression, how to feel and look more confident, how to get people to want to listen to what you have to say, and how to get people to look at you as a leader and respect you? Wouldn’t you want to know if your new employee was stealing money from your business? Whether your daughter was being bullied? Whether your son was using drugs? Whether your coworker lied to your boss to get the promotion you were both up for? Whether your witness was purposefully omitting details in his testimony? Whether a convicted felon lied about the whereabouts of his victims? Whether a job candidate lied about her qualifications? Whether your patient lied to you to get prescription drugs? If you answered yes to any of these questions and want to take the skills I am about to teach you to attain success in your professional and personal life, then read on.

It is my belief that everyone, no matter what their professional or personal goals, should have these skills to take control of their lives, detect deception, garner respect, and know the truth. Whether you’re talking about a detainee who doesn’t want to tell you about an upcoming terror attack, a salesperson who is trying to rip you off, or a kid who is bullying your child but claims innocence, knowledge is powerful. Take the knowledge I am giving you here and use it in your everyday life. This book isn’t just about an interrogator sharing her tricks of trade to catch liars; it’s about improving how you interact with people overall.

Of course, catching liars is my forté. When I was being trained as an interrogator, I was taught all kinds of interrogation techniques, from building rapport, detecting deception, EPW (enemy prisoner of war) psychology, cross-cultural communications, how to properly ask questions and fully exploit information, how to work with interpreters, and, finally, how to report the information I collected. The three techniques that gave me the most consistent success, however, were building rapport, identifying verbal and nonverbal deceptive tells, and using advanced questioning techniques. If you decide to make a career out of reading body language and detecting deception, whether it is in teaching people these skills as a motivational speaker or using them in a profession, as I did, your credibility (and perhaps the credibility and life of the individual you are reading) is always on the line. Forewarned is forearmed!