4

STEP 1: GATHERING INTEL

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

—SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET

RECENTLY, a producer from Anderson Cooper’s new hit daytime syndicated show invited me back to participate in a segment called “My Husband Is a Murderer and How to Spot a Liar.” Just before I walked onstage to reveal how to spot a crooked mechanic, secrets to busting anyone in a lie, and how to use your body language to always appear confident so you send the message “you can’t lie to me,” I met a kindhearted gentle spirit named Mildred. Had you seen that segment, you would’ve discovered that Mildred was one of the women who was married to a murderer—although she didn’t know it until a couple of ATF special agents knocked on her front door in her Maryland home. “Do you know where your ex-husband John is?,” asked the special agent dressed in navy blue with giant yellow letters ATF on the back. “No,” she responded. “Well, ma’am, we’re here to inform you that your ex-husband John was planning on killing you—next.”

In October 2002, the Beltway sniper attacks took place during a three-week period around Washington, D.C. (in various locations throughout the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area and along Interstate 95 in Virginia).

Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose with picture of white van officials had been seeking in connection with the sniper attacks. (Associated Press)

Ten people were killed and three others critically injured during the terrorizing shooting spree. At the time, I was working for the ATF in Washington, D.C., and lived in northern Virginia, less than four miles from several of the shootings. Buying gasoline was terrifying. Waiting at a bus stop was terrifying. Leaving my house or the confines of ATF headquarters was terrifying.

Yes, Mildred’s ex-husband was John Allen Mohammed, one of the D.C. snipers. Mildred was a battered-women survivor and John threatened that if she ever left him with the kids, he would “kill her.” Despite her changing her name and moving three thousand miles from their former home, John planned to make good on that promise. When the special agent asked Mildred if she was surprised that her ex was going to be named the D.C. sniper, Mildred was immediately transported back to years earlier, when she and John were watching a Rambo-type of movie in their West Coast home. Evidentially, John bragged to his then wife about the sniper skills he had gained through being in the military. “I could take a whole community by siege and no one would ever know it was me,” John told her. The ATF special agent explained to Mildred that John and his murdering sidekick killed all those innocent people so that when he killed her, it would look like she was a random victim.

The vehicle used during the D.C. Sniper shootings. (Associated Press)

Witnesses at one of the shootings said they saw a white male in a white van or box truck leaving the scene—so the manhunt centered almost exclusively on white guys in white vans for several weeks. Anytime I saw a white van on the highway or in my neighborhood, I would act fast and write down the license plate number and get a good look at the person behind the wheel. Police eventually learned, however, that the shooting storm was perpetrated by two men who didn’t own or drive a white van or a white box truck. The shootings took place out of the trunk of their blue Chevrolet Caprice. The car was equipped with four doors and a special trunk platform that allowed someone to lie inside and fire a rifle. And they were not even the race that the “eyewitnesses” had described—they were African American.

On October 12, the same day investigators released a wanted poster of a white truck, Washington, D.C., Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said investigators were also looking for a Chevrolet Caprice that had been seen leaving the fatal shooting of seventy-two-year-old Pascal Charlot. While initially believed to be a separate incident, the Charlot shooting later proved to be done by the D.C. Snipers as well. Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose, who led the sniper investigation, was also asked about the car, but he dismissed the question. And, sadly, the Baltimore police found Muhammad and Malvo sleeping in that car one day before a thirteen-year-old boy was fatally wounded and became victim number eight. The car was not searched, and it is believed that they were simply told to move on.

How might this story have changed if the police and the media had remained open to other theories? If they explored all their intel and didn’t fall so deeply into the rabbit hole? We’ll never know.

Unfortunately, even the pros occasionally sniff out one or two simmering hot spots and turn around and say, “I don’t need to do any more digging—this guy is so guilty.” But nothing will kill your accuracy—and your relationships!—more quickly than jumping to conclusions.

In this chapter, we dig into the first of the five steps, “gathering intel,” or, as I like to call it, “baselining” or “norming.” Baselining is a very short stage in which you establish rapport with the “suspect” and then ask a short series of open-ended questions while you study him closely to get a quick take on his normal behavior. While this stage might seem tedious or unglamorous—maybe you’re thinking, Let’s get to busting some liars so I can find my genuine “girl next door” or my knight in shining armor!—baselining is the foundation of the entire BS Barometer. If you don’t get a baseline, everything you do from that moment on is simply guesswork.

Baselining is the skill that separates the pros from the wannabes. In my previous book, You Say More Than You Think, I talked about how, when I’m baselining, I imagine myself as a host on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom: “We’re in the subject’s natural habitat, studying his body movements, speech patterns, and behavior under stress, looking for his baseline behavior so we’ll recognize the signals when he’s about to lie.”

Can’t you just hear my murmur over the tall grass of the Sahara? Putting it this way might sound silly, but my studying-wildlife-in-its-natural-habitat approach has won me the respect of many influential members of the federal law enforcement community.

In fact, one of the proudest moments of my career happened during a government training session, and at the time I didn’t even know it was happening!

A good friend of mine had just been chosen by the State Department to be the American guy who carries the so-called briefcase filled with U.S. secrets over to Germany. While being trained for this highly classified position, the instructor began to slam the world of “body language.” He kept saying, “Everything we had taught for years about detecting deception through spotting crossed arms, nose scratches, and mouth touches was all a load of bull.” The well-respected instructor tore the entire field of body language analysis to shreds. My friend said he thought of me and cringed a little.

Then, in the middle of his anti–body language tirade, the instructor stopped and said, “Now, if you want to find out the real truth about body language, there’s only one book that gets it right—You Say More Than You Think, by Janine Driver.”

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I’m not going to lie—that instructor’s praise meant the world to me. And while repeating this moment of tremendous pride here could also be seen as a shameless plug—damn right!—it’s a great lesson for all of us.

Why did that State Department instructor, a person whose job it is to teach people how to protect our country, respect my book so much? Baselining. While most body language books spend only a few paragraphs on this essential foundation to any deception detection program, I had a whole chapter on it.

As we know from exploring body language myths in the first chapter, there are no 100 percent surefire signs of deception. So if you do not take the time to baseline someone, you will never see the changes in their behavior, and there will be no way to use your BS Barometer. It’s that simple. Before you can take even the tiniest step forward, you must get a person’s baseline, their normal nonverbal and verbal habits, behaviors, and idiosyncrasies. Any “findings” or conclusions made without this core level of knowledge will be based on total fantasy.

GETTING TO FIRST BASE

Everyone has a “norm”—a basic pattern of behavior under normal amounts of stress. Everything from how often they blink to which way they cross their legs (or don’t!) to what words they tend to use with their friends. Someone might jiggle his legs under the table or sit still as a statue—either one of these signs has been pegged as a tip-off of deception, but that might honestly just be the way he holds himself. Others might never mention their husband’s first name, instead your neighbor might say, “My husband”: “My husband said the cutest thing the other day....” “My husband and I are thinking about visiting Denmark in October.” Or you might witness the exact opposite; your BFF always updates her Facebook posts by mentioning her husband by name: “Charlie said the funniest thing the other day....” “Charlie and I are thinking of visiting Dublin in October.”

And just like everyone has a norm, everyone has a tic, a “tell,” a signal that they are uncomfortable. You’ve seen these in your kids or your husband—that little smirk or quick scowl when you say something they don’t like or ask them to do something they don’t want to do. Again, even if you see a “tell,” keep looking—you won’t know what the person is “telling” you until you learn how to ask powerful questions, which is the fifth step. (You’ll read about it in chapter 8.)

For now, getting to know her baseline will help you determine three key elements:

1. How does she normally speak and act?
2. What words does she use and how does she act under stress?
3. When do I see the most dramatic differences between those two instances?

Let’s see how you can find the baseline for anyone in just minutes.

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FIRST THINGS FIRST: ESTABLISH RAPPORT

When my mentor and dear friend, J.J. Newberry, a retired ATF agent and president of the Institute of Analytic Interviewing, once interviewed a possible suspect in a bombing case, even he was surprised at how smoothly he was able to get a confession. When J.J. asked the man, “Joe, what would you say if I told you your fingerprints were on the bomb?” Joe responded, “J.J., you wouldn’t because I wore gloves.”

True story!

How, in less than an hour, was J.J. able to build up enough comfort, and ultimately trust, with this suspect to get to the truth faster than Chelsea Handler can say vodka? Rapport.

Your best chance at getting an unguarded assessment of any person is to establish rapport. Rapport helps you establish a person’s comfortable, relaxed baseline so that you can spot lies later on. Being in rapport with someone—having them feel warm and trusting toward you—increases the likelihood that they will be honest with you. People tell more lies in situations where they feel uncomfortable or less connected with others.⁴

Building this rapport convinces people that you are trustworthy and makes them want to help you. One study⁵ found that when employees developed rapport with their superiors by mirroring their voice patterns and activity level, and by being conversationally engaging, they received nearly 30 percent better terms during employment negotiation. People in rapport with each other are predisposed to cooperation. Let’s learn a few ways to establish the rapport that’s essential for gathering an accurate baseline.

Set your intention and your body language will follow suit. More than anything, you want your body language to be open and welcoming. Aim for steady (but not oppressive) eye contact. (In Western cultures, this means maintaining eye contact about 60 percent of the time; in Eastern cultures, much less.) Uncurl your arms or legs—keep all your zones “open” when you’re establishing rapport. Angle your belly button directly toward her, even if the rest of your body is pointed away.

Next, lead with empathy. To detect deception, you must learn to think in someone else’s shoes. When you are confronting your teen, think like a teen. If your goal is to outwit a sneaky salesman, put yourself into his head. What do you want out of this encounter? You need to see how they view you from their perspective—what are your triggers? What are the things you want to hear? How might he be molding his message to you?

Listen to their stories. Hostage negotiators know that the first thing you do in a high-stress situation is to let the person tell his story. As James Cavanaugh, a retired ATF special agent in charge of Nashville, taught me years ago, it’s up to us to determine “What’s different today than yesterday?” Yesterday, that guy wasn’t standing there pointing a gun—what happened? What pushed him over the edge? Get him talking, so he can get everything off his chest, so he can begin to think straight again.

Now, chances are good you’re not using your BS Barometer with a guy on a bloodthirsty vendetta. But until the shooter, the liar, or other bad person can get their story heard in a high-stress situation, they won’t be able to get back to homeostasis. They need to regain their equilibrium—for you to get to the truth.

Mirror their movements—but very subtly. You can mirror someone’s posture, but be extremely cautious—obvious mirroring can turn the other person off and backfire in a huge way (that is, the other person might believe that you are not an honest person and clam up right away).

Carefully study the way he holds his arms or the way she is sitting: Are her legs crossed? Are her legs firmly down on the floor, evenly spaced? You can mirror someone’s arm or hand movements. If someone is jiggling his feet at a certain speed, you can very subtly shift in your chair at exactly the same rhythm. Matched rhythms literally put you in sync with one another.

Allow transparency to create an atmosphere of trust. In the winter of 2005, during an ATF training workshop in New York City, my good friend and ATF investigator Wayne Bettencourt called my room and inquired, “Hey buddy, I’m going to a party at Carson Kressley’s—want to join me?” Being a big fan of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (and of Carson), I jumped at the opportunity. In person, Carson was just as charming, playful, and energetic as he was on Queer Eye. After some small talk, Carson asked the small group if we’d like to stroll over to check out the new co-op he had recently purchased—it was in the process of getting remodeled.

While we made our way out of his current building, Carson shared with us a story about how he had barely made it on time for his interview with the board of his new co-op. As he had sprinted out of his current home, his sleeve got stuck on the door and ripped a gaping hole in the shirt.

With no time to run back upstairs and change, Carson simply turned lemons into lemonade. During his interview, Carson said something along the lines of, “My old building was trying to stop me from making it here today. It values me as a tenant and it wants me to stay put!” The board laughed, and Carson was approved to join the co-op.

“Confess” to something that might be slightly embarrassing and see what happens. By appearing more human, you’re simultaneously less threatening, which immediately lowers others’ guard around you.

The first impression you give determines how much another person will trust you—if you breach that trust at the beginning, you won’t be able to get an unbiased baseline because he or she will be guarded and looking at you suspiciously.⁶

Always err on the side of their relaxation. Your mantra for obtaining a baseline is, “How do I lower the stress in this situation?” Because how you confront any situation can change the outcome.

Instead of …	Do this …
Having the conversation in a formal place (from behind a desk, or in the “principal’s office”)	Talk in a well-lit, casual setting (on a couch; at the person’s house; in a lawn chair in the backyard)
Launching right into the topic at hand	Start off with some small talk
Making it high stakes (“This could cost you your job!”; “Don’t lie to me, young lady—or you’ll be grounded!”)	Keep things very low pressure (“I just want to ask your opinion about something that I’m a little confused about”; “I’m curious what your thoughts are.”)
Talking about embarrassing information (grades from high school, SAT scores, salary)	Talk about neutral info (what classes did they take, where did they go to college, what do they like about their job?)
Getting into a heated debate (religion, politics)	Keep things light (weather, summer plans)7

ASK OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS

The real secret behind detecting deception is asking questions. But you’re not out to win the Pulitzer in this interview—you just want to get an accurate read on the person. For right now, your primary objective is to get them talking.

Believe it or not, you can baseline people with just one or two very simple open-ended questions. The trick is to keep it light. Bring yourself into the conversation in a way that disarms the subject and takes the focus off of them.

• “I’m so excited to get home this afternoon—I’m buying my little five-year-old his first bike. Man, that brings back memories, huh? Tell me about the first bike you had as a kid?”
• [Check iPhone or BlackBerry, then put it away] “My best friend from when I was a kid just friended me on Facebook. I couldn’t believe it! It has been twenty years since I heard her name. She’s one of those friends that I always wondered what happened to them, you know? Tell me about your best friend when you were a kid?”
• [Putting wallet away] “I just remembered I have to go and get my driver’s license renewed. I hope I don’t have to retake the test. Man, I almost flunked it when I was seventeen! You, too? Tell me about the day you got your driver’s license?”

The key to crafting these sentences is to share a bit about yourself, then pose an open-ended question about personal information they’d have no reason to fabricate. Most everyone had a first bike, a first best friend. Everyone remembers getting their driver’s license (or in my case, embarrassingly flunking the first test after missing that damn three-point turn). And nothing about those experiences could possibly implicate them in this current situation, so they’ll be relieved to have a nonthreatening conversational topic to talk about—the perfect time for you to run through the baseline checklist.

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FOLLOW THE BASELINE CHECKLIST

In my first book, I talked about the baseline as essentially the same process laid out by the children’s song: head, shoulders, knees, and toes. (You’re singing it, aren’t you?)

Body language is where I typically start with my baseline, simply because I am extremely visual, and as a body language expert, I’m always putting my visual information channel to the test. In fact, research suggests that our nonverbal baseline is way more stable over time than our verbal one. One study found that medical residents’ body language norms remained consistent over two years—through their training and into an entirely new phase of their lives. Contrasted to this were their verbal norms, which fluctuated almost immediately after the start of their program.⁸ That makes the body language baseline information extremely helpful because those hot spots—those points of deviation—really stand out once you have a nonverbal baseline. We get into more nitty-gritty details about each communication channel in the subsequent steps, but this list gives you a quick start.

This list works equally well when you encounter strangers for the first time—car salesmen, other parents on the playground, new doctors—or people you’ve known forever but whom you’ve just started to suspect of lying.

As you go through this checklist, keep in mind two baseline rules to live by:

1. Keep your communication simple—we often get lost in smoke and mirrors.
2. Sometimes what’s not there is the most important clue.

Is He a Space Invader?

First you’ll determine how “big” the person is—and I’m not talking body mass index. I mean, how much space does this person take up, both while he’s stationary and while he’s moving? Is he becoming as large or as small as he possibly can be? Is he a big target or a little target?

(Left) Vince Vaughn poses on the red carpet with the definition of a wide open stance. (Getty Images). (Right) Coldplay at a press conference in Madrid, all with average open stances with their feet, but disappearing stances with their hands! (Getty Images)

Wide open stance. Are the person’s hand gestures outside the frame of her body, beyond her shoulders? Does he hook his elbow over the back of the chair? Or is he sitting in a figure four? With his leg outstretched in front of him, as if marking his territory?

Average open stance. Are his feet flat on the ground? Are her hands on her desk or doing a steeple? Are his gestures usually around his midsection, hovering near his belly button?

Disappearing stance. Are her ankles crossed? Does she always cross her legs—maybe her hands are folded on her lap? Are his gestures very soft and subtle, happening below the waist?

We are looking for the baseline, so we’ll notice when we see a change. He might still be making a hand gesture, but now all of a sudden instead of being up at shoulder height his gestures are really low. Why? What’s going on here?

What Is His Face Factor?

We talk about universal emotions and microexpressions more explicitly in step 2, but for now, we’re talking broad strokes—let’s look at the face as a whole rather than at the individual features or expressions.

Chin position. What’s his chin positioning? Does he tend to have his chin pulled in, level headed, or is his chin up? President Barack Obama loves his chin held high in the air. Is her chin pulled down in the Princess Diana pose?

Head position. Is her head generally straight or is it tilted? Tilted right or left? When you tilt your head to your right, you appear more attractive. When you tilt your head to your left, you appear more intelligent. We’re looking for a baseline because we want to see the shift. (If I ask you, “Did you cheat on me?,” and you suddenly change your head tilt the other way, why the change in tilt?)

Facial touches. Does he typically touch his face? How often is he touching his face? Does she have an itchy nose? When he’s thinking, does he put his hand over his mouth? Does she put her hand on her chin? Does she play with her earrings? Does she always push her hair back behind her ears?

Morgan Freeman and Sidney Poitier backstage at the Thirty-ninth AFI Life Achievement Award honoring Morgan Freeman. Morgan’s chin is level, whereas Poitier’s is pulled in. (Getty images)

Neil Patrick Harris tilts his head ever so slightly to the right. His thumbs are out, pointing to his naughty bits, which tends to be a signal of confidence. (Eugene Gologursky/WireImage)

How High Is His Fidget Factor?

When a person talks to you, does he turn his belly button toward you or turn it away? Does he cross and uncross his legs, continually changing the direction of the belly button? Is she sitting on her legs, or is she sitting still and facing forward?

Relaxed and calm: This person can sit still for hours on end, the perfect student sitting at a wooden desk.

Slightly fidgety: Every five minutes or so, she changes positioning.

Constantly fidgety: Can’t stop moving, his foot is bouncing, his leg or legs are constantly bouncing. He’s sitting on his leg, he’s facing you, he’s facing away—he is full-on twitchy.

What Is His Voice Saying?

Nonverbal vocal changes are among the best indicators of emotion—if you have the person’s baseline. A bonus: as we get older, our ability to detect deception via other channels dips dramatically—but tonal changes remain one of the factors we can still pick up just as easily as when we’re younger.

Our voices are a kind of music, and because differences in vocal tone are almost impossible to describe in words, please take a listen to the clips on my website. Where does your target’s baseline fit into this spectrum?

What Are His Words Saying?

Statement Analysis is an incredibly useful tool—once you start to notice the little language idiosyncrasies, you’ll be amazed at how much information you’ll get from them. We cover more about this in steps 2 and 5, but for now, there are a few global questions to ask yourself.

Is she using pronouns? Dropping pronouns is one of the few language faux pas that’s been definitively tied to deception—if you already have a baseline for the person. Some people never use pronouns; some use them without fault. You have to know which is normal for them. “I got up this morning, I called my mother, took a shower, went and got a bite to eat.” The person used two pronouns up front and then dropped them afterward—why? What’s happening there? Pay attention to politician’s speeches—you’ll hear this a lot.

Is she using verbal fillers? Many people clutter their chatter with a lot of um, ah, er. This tendency is extremely handy to recognize because once the lies start flowing, you’re bound to see a change in the number of these—if people use them normally, they may disappear, but if they don’t normally use them, any appearance of verbal clutter is a hot spot.

Is she using absolutes? I always do that, I never do that, I swear to God. I always shut the front door when I leave. Some people say, “I swear to God, I would never do that.” Really? Sounds like you’re overselling me. But only if it’s not their baseline. A lot of people speak this way normally: “I swear to God, when I was at the grocery store, this woman in front of me was the most obnoxious person I’d ever heard in my entire life.”

That’s it! If you run through this checklist and make these observations, you will have a very serviceable baseline. For now, absorb what you can about their norm. Soon you’ll discover how to spot the changes in their baseline, and you’ll also find out why they might be changing—that comes in later steps.

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MASTER CLASS: HOW TO MAKE YOUR BASELINE EVEN MORE ACCURATE

Once you’ve mastered rapport building and you’re becoming more confident in your baselining skills, you can up your game by keeping these helpful suggestions in mind.

Whenever possible, remain calm and in the same position. Whenever you exert yourself, your memory and your powers of observation are greatly hampered. One study found that when officers had to exert themselves in pursuit of a suspect, their memories of the situation and the suspect were faulty and incomplete. The officers made greater recall errors and had less accurate recollections of visual and auditory information when compared with officers who merely observed (but didn’t pursue) the suspects. During the test, 90 percent of the officers who observed remembered at least one detail about a random guy standing off to the side—but 30 percent of the running officers didn’t even notice he was there.⁹ Exertion will hamper your powers of observation.

This is one of the reasons that science is starting to prove that “eyewitness testimony” is a lot less bankable than good old-fashioned evidence. While more than 75,000 witness identifications are made every year, recent science indicates that only one-third of them may be legit. Since its introduction, DNA evidence has overturned hundreds of convictions.¹⁰

Make inattentive blindness work for you. Inattentive blindness can make you miss some key details—but it can also help you observe a target while he or she is totally oblivious.

Move over Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline, I’d like to introduce the world to my former BLI student and now friend Marti Miller, who is a ridiculously well-mannered, super-southern private investigator in Memphis (and author of Kid Raising That Works: Learn Your Child’s Body Language and Keep That Critter Safe). Marti specializes in following people to see whether they are breaking their agreements, whether a prenup, an employment contract, or a nondisclosure agreement. She hires mostly women, because she believes that women can go anywhere—they’re seen as less threatening and, as they get older, even as wallpaper.

As maddening as that last sentence is, being “invisible” is a huge asset to anyone getting a baseline. When Marti gets into an elevator with a target, she’ll go out of her way to talk to him in her sweet-as-pie southern drawl. “That’s a really nice shirt. Gee, it’s getting warm out, isn’t it?” So when she heads to court, she can positively identify him, because she actually spoke to him.

Most targets won’t think anything of it—she’s just a little country woman in an elevator. If you’re upfront and your body language is open, you’re perceived as no threat. But if you remain stealthy and pretend to ignore them, you close up your body language—you’re instantly suspect.

Seems counterintuitive, right? But imagine you’re in a restaurant and somebody comes walking in with their shoulders rolled over, hands shoved in their pockets. They’re looking around from one corner to the other, kind of shifty. These are the same tells of a shoplifter. When we spot this posturing and behavior, it feels dangerous to us. Now imagine that you have something to hide, and you see somebody in a public setting like that, you would be on high alert, right? Hell yeah; you’ll pay close attention to that person’s every move. You’ll spot that man or woman before you’ll see the woman over to the side laughing or the person who walks by and accidentally brushes against you and says, “Oh, excuse me, I’m sorry.”

Get a variety of baselines. A baseline will tell you who that person is under one circumstance: being with you. We all wear a variety of hats in our lives, though, and although our personalities and some idiosyncrasies may remain stable, our reactions will differ depending on the audience and the circumstance. What’s essential in detecting deception, and what makes the BS Barometer different than straight body language reading, is that you must also get a baseline when your target is with you and with people other than you.

Just think of how you would react to an off-color joke in front of your girlfriend, your dad, or your boss’s boss—you’d likely have three different reactions. To be really thorough, you need to baseline a person with three other people.

This approach works with anyone: you want to see how a person reacts with more than one person. This same strategy is behind the first interview / second interview approach to applicant screening—every interaction with a new person is another opportunity to learn about the potential new hire. You gather intelligence and build your dossier with every conversation.

Look for patterns. Wait until you have a pattern of activity before you confront the person. You want to be sure he can’t just claim it was a one-time deal if it isn’t—and your ultimate goal is to keep your relationships healthy, authentic, and strong, right? How long does it take to establish a pattern? You never truly know. The shortest amount of time it ever took Marti to fully bust someone was when a woman cheated on her husband twice in three days. Had she only photographed the wife coming out of her boyfriend’s apartment one morning, the wife could have said, “Hey, I went to a party and got too drunk to drive, so I crashed on the couch.” But once Marti caught her twice, the wife had nowhere to hide. Busted!

Make it thorough. When possible, it’s great to norm someone for several minutes—but it’s not always possible. Sometimes, an ATF arson investigator will only have two minutes with potential witnesses to do everything: establish rapport, read them, adjust her own body language (if necessary), and get the witnesses’ versions of the event. The longer the amount of time you have with someone the better—but it is possible to do this in a short period of time, just a couple of minutes, especially with the BS Barometer tools.

EXERCISING YOUR BS BAROMETER: GATHERING INTEL

The five-step program to strengthen your BS Barometer is designed to be flexible, depending on how much time you have. If you have five hours a day, great! Do everything. But if you’re a busy person, look over the following list and see which one of the exercises appeals to you, and do that one. You can customize your complete plan to the time available in your life.

Assessing Your Inattentive Blindness

Throughout the book, you’ll find exercises that train your brain to pay close attention. This is one of my favorites—I have given it to thousands of my students and clients.

Consider this bus exercise, as it’s the perfect illustration of why we sometimes miss the lie. In repeated testing, 90 percent of elementary students get this brainteaser right. Yet, when I test law enforcement (chiefs, detectives, special agents, lawyers, and so on), fewer than 1 percent do. That gels with what researchers uncovered in a study about empathy and inattentive blindness. Adults and children were both asked to look at a picture and answer the same question. While almost all the students got the answer correct, the adults most often failed. Let’s see how you measure up!

(Khrystyne Robillard-Smith)

The picture is similar to the one used in the study. Notice the A at the bottom left of the picture and the B on the bottom right. Left of the bus is a school; to the right is a pond in a park. In my keynote presentations, I ask the audience whether this bus is going toward A or B, and why. Inevitably, almost everyone becomes a mind reader:

• It’s going away from the school because the kids are smiling.
• The bigger kids are in the back, so it’s headed toward the school.
• The bus tips slightly down to the back, because it’s heavier. That means the motor’s in the front, so it’s going away from the school.
• It’s heading toward you.
• It must be heading left, otherwise the words would be written backward. (To which I say, “It’s a school bus—not an ambulance!”)

For twenty minutes, they go on and on. Out of five hundred people, I’m lucky if I get three people who know the answer. What’s your guess?

The answer is, the bus is heading toward A, toward the school, because we don’t see the door—it’s on the opposite side of the bus.

When I showed this to the director of education at the Body Language Institute (BLI), my mom, Lorraine Driver, she replied, “It’s going toward A because the door is on the other side. I don’t get it. Is there some trick?”

Prior to accepting her position at BLI, Mom retired as a nurse. At Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, where she worked for decades, she would park her car in an employee lot a half-mile from work and take a hospital shuttle to her building. Just like all the kids knew the correct answer because getting on and off of buses was part of their world, getting on and off a bus was part of my mom’s world.

The biggest lesson for us? Put yourself in someone else’s shoes and you’ll see things you didn’t see at first!

Baseline Builder

I have done this exercise with hundreds of people—the results are as close to foolproof as any exercise I’ve devised. I’ve even used it with my husband, Leif! Now, you’ll obviously never get a chance to use this exact exercise on your subject—but doing it teaches you, with your own eyes, just how stark deviations can be from their norm.

1. Stand directly in front of another person. Ask him to hold up his arms, shoulder height, toward you. You’re going to look at how he stands and where he holds his arms: Does one wrist turn in? Does one hand go higher than the other? Is his thumb inside his fist or is it outside? Is one hand closer to you or farther away? This is all about paying attention to details. Once you learn how to do this as a habit, it will help you get a quick baseline.
2. Take a coin and ask him to put it in one of his hands without showing you which one. You’ll guess which one it’s in, and then he will reveal it. As it’s being revealed, you’re going to look for subtle signs—is he quickly glancing at either hand? Based on your first impression of the way he held out his arms, has something changed? Is one hand further out than the other? That person might hold the coin closer to his body or thrust it away—you don’t know which—but the key is, there has been a change in behavior.

When I did this exercise with Leif, every time he held his hands out, he unconsciously tilted his head toward the side with the quarter. I figured this out by comparing it to his baseline, which was his head in a central, neutral position. The final time, he held his head up straight, and the hand I guessed was empty when he opened up his palm. It wasn’t until several months later that he confessed that the final time, he had stuck the quarter in his back pocket. Dope!

Are You Ready to See the Doctor Now?

Visit www.youtube.com and search “Derren Brown Change Blindness” (www.youcantlietome.com). Watch this five-minute video and find out just how often we don’t see what is right in front of our eyes. What tricks can you glean from watching this YouTube clip? Now put your own observation skills to the test:

• Describe what the last person you saw was wearing, without looking at him or her again. What shirt does she have on? What pants is he wearing? Describe his belt or her accessories.
• Ask yourself how many people in your office have blue eyes. How many have brown eyes?
• Recall the tallest person in your office. How about the shortest? Can you remember who prefers to stand with hands in their pants pockets or with arms crossed?

Were you surprised by how difficult this exercise was? Our brains conserve energy by discarding “meaningless” information—but you never know when you might need to call upon this info.

When you interact with the people in your life, what goes on inside your head? Are you having an internal dialogue? What’s your brain saying? How can you focus and pay more attention to the person standing right in front of you?

These regular mental workouts will help strengthen your observational muscles and train you to start paying better attention to small details in your environment.

For fun, ask your husband what color your eyes, your children’s, or his mother’s eyes are.... His answer might shock you!

Try It On

A study of forty-eight men and women published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology¹¹ found that the people who could best identify which camera angles corresponded with the position of LEGO figurines within a display—in other words, those who could imagine themselves in the position of the little dolls—were also the most socially adept. We know that empathy is a key skill in detecting deception; this study shows that the people who have the best spatial awareness are also the most empathetic; they literally have the ability to think from another person’s perspective.

To help develop this sense of “perspective-taking,” complete this exercise. Go to a pool, a mall, or another public place (a park, a bar, a restaurant). Taking one person at a time, study their place in the pool and imagine yourself looking at the world through their eyes—physically. If her right shoulder rolls forward, roll your right shoulder forward. If he has his chin tilted slightly higher than everyone else, get your tilt on. If she is biting her lip while looking to the ground to her left, do the same, Chief. Physically become as much like them as possible. What does the physical space around her look like, from her position, right now? What has caught his eye? What’s his breathing rate like? How do you feel being in her posture, stance, and facial expressions?

A Penny for Your Thoughts

We have held pennies in our hands so many times. We leave them all over the place, suck them up in the vacuum cleaner, dig for them at the bottom of a purse. We know pennies. Or do we?

I decided to do this test from Dr. Richard Wiseman, author of Quirkology, during a January 2011 seminar with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The results were surprising—even for me!

I gave each individual this prompt: “Visualize a penny standing on its side [as in the image shown]. Using your memory of the thickness of pennies, estimate how many pennies you would need to stack up to reach the top.”

Participants wrote down their answers. Check out the results from my guinea pigs at the FAA:

(Megan O’Neil)

Number of Pennies	Total Attendees Who Guessed That Number
5	28
6	5
7	30
8	4
9	3
10	5
11	1
12	1
13	3
15	9
17	3
21	2
38	1
39	1
40	2
42	1
49	1
51	1

Actual number of pennies it takes: thirteen.

I offer this test because it’s an excellent reminder about how fallible we can be when we take the accuracy of our own perception for granted. In my FAA trial, only 3 percent of the people in the audience got it right. Now, I’m not saying 97 percent of the people don’t have accurate perception—but we all do need to check our assumptions regularly.

JUST REMEMBER …

• Dial down the anxiety and put the person at ease. The best way to get a baseline for a person’s normal behavior is to have the person as relaxed as possible. Start out with positive intent. Use welcoming gestures and mirroring body language.
• Ask low-stress questions. Using questions like “Tell me about where you grew up again?” or “What are you guys up to this summer?” can help you get a gauge of what people’s baseline honest responses look like when they’re not worried about being believed.
• Trust your gut—but not exclusively. Our brains are sophisticated deception detection tools, but many intervening factors have muddled their accuracy. Remember, a quick read can be dangerous. Getting the baseline is only the first of the five essential steps. Keep in mind: trust your gut, but verify, verify, verify.