Why Body Language is extremely flawed way of reading peoples emotions, intentions or guilt. Yes, there is general truths, in our society, but there is also people that use the body language to sell you, charm and bullshit you. Even expert investigators get it wrong 50% of the time as we all learn from TV where everyone is faking it.
How well do you read people and communicate through body language? You are far worse than you think you are. 50% accurate is the best you are likely to score, so no better than tossing a coin and guessing. You will usually score worse when you think you know what you are doing and trust your ‘gut’ feelings. It takes deep skepticism and mistrust to detect if someone is bullshitting you and this character trait is uncommon and unpopular, because most people default to truth in order to be socially acceptable.
Reading the basics of separate emotions like anger, frustration or fear are easy, however, putting it together to know what it means is complex. To tell if you are being misled, bullshitted to, lied to, or being scammed is harder than you think. The ‘this means that’ method of body language reading gives indicators, if you can put it in context. Everything can be faked and can be naturally and seamlessly faked, as humans that deceive, learn to deceive from childhood. Even when people are giving off multiple signs of guilt, people often discount what they see because of reputation, expectation and second guessing themselves in the need to be liked, not be the bad guy or get it wrong.
Where does body language come from? When you are born – before you learn some words to put to your feelings, requests and desires. At the exact same time you learn to lie and use your body language to deceive and misled people. Your verbal communication develops to work in tandem with your physical communication and you are learning to use communication with body language, sounds and words to communicate. Every culture has social norms, and you will make grave mistakes thinking you can read someone from another culture’s body language when you cannot even accurately read someone from your own family.
My direct experience is from multiple reasons to read and understand people. From salesperson courses for selling pots and pans, to real estate. Then I joined the Army as an Intelligence Officer. During this period, I did interview training, interrogation training and read every book I could find on body language. I have worked in hostile environments interviewing staff and investigating security breaches. I have run a martial art club for 27 years and am a professional coach that has to communicate on varied levels with many ages and develop trust with people. I have also lived on planet earth for 55 years and been exposed to salesmen, politicians, deceptive friends, bullshitters, TV ads, mass marketing, and had people close to me bullshit me for their own self-interest. Everyone has an agenda, detect that before you trust your body language detector. I at least have the confidence now to know what I do not know and that most communication has elements of ‘unknown unknowns’ to be certain that nothing is certain.
Evidence is key, proven behaviour is important and identifying the agenda is critical. Context is very important, as is a person’s individual personality.
Be more sceptical, remain sceptical and question events, people and circumstances presented to you more often. You will reduce the chances you are bullshitted; reduce the chances people will let you down and you will not be caught out by people that are dishonest and deceptive. Do not immediately default to truth when you meet people. People you know are acting out of their own self-interest, all the time, and will be the ones who let you down the most. You will misread strangers as often as you misread people you know, as the principles apply universally. If you get conned by a salesperson, lose your life savings to investment fraud, get scammed to donate money to help an orphan in Ukraine – it is your fault for not being sceptical enough and questioning your own feelings, conclusions and decisions analytically enough.
To function in society, you have to trust people. We want to trust people; we want to be trusted. This is why it is easier for you to be fooled in little ways every day. Everyone that is nice to you is not your friend. Everyone that charms you is not your friend and wants something from you, or for you to believe in them. Trust should be earned, but it is given until it fails, and we default to trust. Even when you think you are sceptical, you are second guessing yourself to trust, not discount. If you distrust everyone, no one will like you, people will find you hard to deal with, but hey – you are less likely to be swindled.
Where do you learn body language? Formal schooling? NO. Science Class? NO. Psychology class? NO. Church? NO. You learn from life, but you also learn from books, salesmen books, self-help books, influencing people books, TV sitcoms, YouTube videos and professional courses. Every book and course will tell you it is not an exact science, but also a lot of it is based on what you think you already know, what you feel and what you have experienced, so it makes sense to you and therefore must be accurate. Even the most accurate lessons in body language and instinctive facial expressions that people make are so obvious they can be faked. For everyone that learns how to read people, the same people are learning to fake their own body language.
In the early 80’s, body language books (Alan Pease – Body Language, which I read on release) started being pumped out and psychology experiments started exponentially. Body language movements can be involuntary (like eye movements), facial expressions or deliberate, like folding arms to express defensiveness, but for every involuntary movement there is body language that can be faked. For every salesman or interviewer that learns to read your body language, there is an interviewer that is hiding theirs and a salesperson that is manipulating theirs, for the response they want from you. To develop rapport, be trusted and be your friend. Once rapport is developed, trust remains and is taken for granted, until it isn’t, and it is often harder to lose trust than it is to gain it, because want to believe and don’t want to be wrong.
When you spend a lot of time with someone, you will develop an understanding of their body language and their nuances. You can read people you know better than people you just met, as it is the nuances, context and history that you compile to understand the communication. This should be more accurate, but as trust develops you can also be fooled easier, as you don’t see it coming when the lies start, when the deception starts and is built in to and expanded by the trust you already have established. Never stop being sceptical, investigate, question, consider and if you are worrying about it, you are tolerating something you need to look into.
Actors learn to pretend and the better the actor, the more believable their character and emotions are. We are all actors at work, on dates, in social settings, job interviews and playing sport. Actors are another level and portray a persona we all believe, trust and understand. We emotionally but into an actor’s performance with less than 5 minutes of character development. We trust what they say, who they are and what they are trying to express. We trust and default to truth. You can watch a good TV show or movie with the sound down and understand what the characters are saying and meaning. So what? You watch it, you believe it, you laugh at it, or cry and you do this while you are being manipulated into believing a story. You are being educated into what emotion, physical body language and what the words mean. You and thousands of others can watch the same show and get the same feelings because it is universal. But is it? It is very general, but it is also manipulated and then mimicked by everyone that watches it, so in essence, you are being taught what the body language means and so is everyone else. Then we you use the same body language; you expect the same results and responses from people watching you. You will use the same nonverbal messages, movements, and expressions and when others use them, you think you know the meaning.
When you watch TV, especially a crime drama, you try to tell if someone is lying, who is the killer, who is telling the truth. A good show, gets you involved, gets you thinking. You are watching and listening, seeing if you can figure it out. A good crime drama has lots of potential bad guys and a good guy you just believe is innocent. You know it is not real, but you still get sucked in and let your self be manipulated. You only get to see what the writer wants you to see, and you only get the emotions and body language messages the director wants you to see, this is not real life. The only thing common with real life, is you are being manipulated. You try to do the investigators job, you critique the investigators, you comment on the bad guy’s behaviour as smart or dumb. You become your very own profiler and believe what you are presented. When the bad guy lies, you know, you can see them do it. When the investigators interrogate the suspect, you know if they are lying or not, even when the investigators do not but when the investigator has a hunch, you believe that too. You are thinking you are learning to ‘read people’, to determine the guilt, the innocence but you are only being manipulated to enjoy the story. You are also then believing that the body language the police read, and the bag guys used is real and happens in real life. You are wrong and might as well flip a coin to decide if what you think the body language is telling you is real or fake. Your perceived knowledge has been trained into you and has been faked and extremely over simplified.
Why, because actors used them, and you believed them. That does not make them universal, it makes them common and shows how easily mislead people are. I suggest it is in fact a contributing factor in the false belief that we can read body language accurately, because we are taught to by TV. We trust TV, don’t we?! It is not a conspiracy; it is just the cycle of life. Actors reflect life, we reflect the actors portraying life, but then because we trust, we believe, and when others act the same, we trust them. The actors are honestly acting but people in our real life, friends, politicians, media, work colleagues are acting for a more deceptive and natural purpose – self-interest.
When someone wants to lie, it is easy to fool people by using common body language with meaning and emotion. Your first response is to trust them, especially if the actions are common. People close to you don’t sit down and work out a routine like at acting class. They practice in life from when they are a kid, to get what they want, cuddles, pocket money, to stay up late, to go out, to get a lift or when they want to get out of trouble. Body language is learned and used from birth to death.
When you fuck up reading someone, you are not alone. You may get it right with the same person, a lot, but when you do not, you really don’t. You will do this at least 50% of the time. Most of it will not matter, but that reinforces the trust you give that can be used against you. Most interactions are innocent and part of life, but the big betrayals come from that build-up of trust. The more you want to trust someone, the more you will default to truth when interacting with people. The best CIA interrogators, loving partners, childhood friends, police homicide investigators, all get it wrong. Far more often than you want to think or realise. Why? Because they default to truth, they trust their experience and they trust reputation or institutionalised expectations.
Some people get misread often. Especially by strangers and/or in situations where they are stressed, like if arrested. People who know someone can tell better than a stranger what is wrong with someone in a particular circumstance. A stranger will often get the basics wrong because the basics is what they expect to be the big tellers of truth. If someone is extroverted in their normal life, they may act bizarre when under pressure and outside the norm expected of a guilty or innocent person which then leads investigators to ‘think’ or believe they are guilty because of the way they behave. Some people get nervous and ‘act’ like they are guilty because they don’t engage in eye contact, look down, fidget in the seat and keep getting their story mixed up. Are they guilty or just freaked out from being arrested and sitting in a small room being interviewed for something they know nothing about. Shy people will be reclusive and not want to talk but that does not always mean they are defensive or hiding something. It means they are shy and uncomfortable. Introverted people will clam up and look away, sweat more, get thirsty and often shake but that does not mean they are guilty of anything more than being introverted.
Guilty people will lie, mislead, have a story, and deceive. They will have their own truth and try to make you believe it by acting as much as they can like an innocent person would act. How they have seen people act on TV is where you get the expectations of truth. Then the investigators, who also watch TV, may expect a suspect to act a certain way because that is how they have experienced guilty people act. But did they learn that at police school or from police dramas? It is likely to be a congruence of both. If police have experience in how guilty people act and innocent people, they will act on that experience but if someone who isn’t a local, isn’t acting as they perceive to be guilt or innocence then they will assume based on their ‘experience’, which comes from training, policy, TV and their own lessons of life. There is a reason we have judicial system, reviews, twelve jurors and what is usually an evidence-based system. Because people are very unreliable at detecting the truth through body language.
Cultural differences. Were you grow up counts, a lot. Do you watch Bollywood or Hollywood? If you catch trains in Tokyo, your personal space will be different to someone from Broome. If you grew up in Italy, you will talk with your hands more than someone who is shy from Canberra. If you are African American and live in New York, you will be more defensive to police than if you are African American and have lived in Canberra for many years. If you are from Afghanistan and live in Canberra, you will trust the police less than people who live in Canberra, but you will also be more defensive if arrested or questioned for anything, even trivial. If you are an Imam from Syria, you will be believed on face value more than if you are an Imam in Melbourne. A Muslim lady may look down and not talk if her husband is present, as a Chinese farmer will do when speaking to a local official. This does not mean innocence or guilt, just intimidation and discomfort. If you are a priest at the Vatican, you will be believed you are innocent on face value, far more than if you are a Marist Brothers priest facing child sexual assault allegations.
We all have biases, and they will often look for body language that reinforces those biases before we even look for context or evidence. You must know your biases and factor them in before any body language can tell you the truth. We have gender, cultural, age, colour, work, respect, trust biases. Education, demographic and social biases to some extent and they all factor into truth telling. Your expectations based on a bias can have a huge distorting effect on seeing the truth or finding it.
When someone is out of context, when the incident is out of context and strangers from different cultures and backgrounds are all intermingled in anything stressful, everyone is likely to misunderstand everyone else. When parents get involved in anything to do with their children, they default to truth, to a desire that they must protect their children, to trust them, to have their back and despite the evidence parents will not even believe their kids are serial killers, even after they have been convicted. Parents should not defend their children under any circumstances, when their kids are at fault – which happens more often than any parent wants to admit. Parents cannot often read their own children under stress, because they do not want to know and cannot face the consequences of their own failures. Parents can tell if babies are hungry or tired but so can strangers, it is the complex lies and manipulation that can harm others that count.
Paedophiles get away with it (child abuse) because they often work in institutions that are trusted, and by default they are trusted. Scouts, schools, religious institutions exist on trust, belief in good and because they are honourable professions. Despite the proliferation of international, and local scandals (criminal offences) involving paedophiles abusing children systematically within these institutions, they still exist, because that trust is the basis of their existence. Allegations against them and against anyone who represents them are often meet with disbelief at first because people want to default to truth and believe the institution. Parents do not believe their children over the local priest; the local schoolteacher has a great reputation for helping under privileged kids and the scout leader is such a mentor for young men. The reputations provide truth and trust and when allegations are made, there is years of a built-up, in-depth story that protects the paedophile. It takes sceptical police, a lot of complainants, a lot of victims, before the truth can be found and even then, it is murky. This is all because the paedophiles pick these organisations as places to operate and hide in because they are believed as part of the institution’s trust.
NEVER REPORT A SEXUAL ASSUALT TO THE ORGANISATION THE PERPETRATORS REPRESENTS – GO TO THE POLICE. LOCAL AND FEDERAL.
For a disturbing account of the truth to the above read these cases.
- Larry Nassar – Sexually assaulted 265 young women as the Dr of the USA Gymnastics team.
- Jerry Sandusky. American Football Coach who systematically raped 50+ students for many years.
- I could not pick one involving the Catholic Church as they are abhorrent, numerous, international and the Church still makes excuses for it. In 2018 in Pennsylvania a grand jury found at least 300 priests systematically over decades abused over 1300 victims. This is a worldwide abuse phenomenon transcending every country the Church exists in, because people were not believed, people were scared, and police and governments did nothing for far too long. If the Church were any other institution or business, it would be forced to close, apologise and pay up! They just apologise and move on with more ‘internal’ adjustments. In Australia: Just Wikipedia search Catholic Church sexual abuse cases in Australia.
Body language is often accurate for the basics of expressing feelings and is universal across our culture. People do sweat when they are nervous, they also sweat because they are hot, in a room that is uncomfortable and if they are on some types of medication. People protect their lies and are sometimes protecting something they are embarrassed about and act a certain way, that may make them appear guilty for something else they are being interviewed for, when in fact they are hiding something else entirely. The appearance of guilt can be real, but it could be guilt for something else entirely. People are embarrassed about many aspects of their behaviour, if found out and will lie to hide it. It may be more important to hide the type of porn you watch than tell the truth about what you saw, when you were on the computer (looking out your window) whilst your neighbour was being robbed.
A child abuse victim may lie about the present her abuser gave her because she thinks she is in trouble for having it, or wants to protect her abuser because she is scared of how her dad might react. Her reactions to questioning will not be standard or simple to read. Avoidance of eye contact can mean dishonesty or low self-esteem; it can also mean you are looking for an escape because you are claustrophobic. You may tap your feet because you are agitated and nervous or you could just need to pee. A strong handshake can mean strength and honesty, or it is just a dick move to hurt your hand. Confidence is perceived as truth, but it could just be arrogance or familiarity.
A quick answer and confident story are more believable than a jittery, incoherent account but it is more likely the confidence comes from a predeveloped story, practice in the telling and a position of power when the uncomfortable, jittery, gabbling response to answers can mean a scared person, frightened or just introverted and claustrophobic. A sociopath my show no empathy and not react with expected emotion to an incident but that does not imply guilt of the incident, just too much Dexter. Too much detail is a good indicator of someone making up a lie, but it can also be someone with a vivid imagination or fantastic memory for detail.
There is always more depth to interactions than we ever want to look into. Interactions between people, strangers, crimes, investigations, cons etc. etc, are more complex than basic body language can interpret. Training, childhood, experience for years develops context of how people react and how they react to situations. People often misread other people because they do not have context and depth. Although the simplest option is to default to truth, it is a risky move if one person is manipulating you. The consequences could just be a vote or a like on Facebook, but it could also be your life savings. When worlds collide, context is everything, and a moment of pause and thought can prevent an overreaction.
Body language sells books, politicians use it, actors fake it, salespeople indulge in it, and we all learn it from our favourite TV shows. In situations that have no consequence, it is routine and basic. A baby cries, he is hungry, or she is tired, or it is angry. The baby learns to use the body language to get what they want and continues these behaviours as they learn to talk. As kids learn to smile and laugh, they get responses from others, as teenagers jest, dress, act and engage they learn to read people and to be seen as they want to be seen, this is socialisation. We learn to manipulate from birth, and it is 50-50 when reading and demonstrating body language. We control what we can and interpret what we can, but we are seriously not accurate, especially under stressful situations, out of our culture or out of our depth. The most common mistakes are:
- We are too trusting and default to truth because we need a functioning society that trusts and works together.
- We look for body language as learnt from books and TV and our own life. We trust our ‘gut’, but we need to add more context to every situation and every decision to put the entire package of communication into context.
- Not understanding your own biases and evaluating the mistakes you have made in life.
Be more sceptical! Be investigative, look deeper, trust with evidence.
For further and more detailed – Read, Malcolm Gladwell – Talking to Strangers.
Antman
Appendix.
I am a sceptic, and I can also predict the ending to 86% of Crime Dramas because I look past the apparent presented truth and question the context. When I watch TV, I look for the plot, the initial scene the reason for actors being there and not spend too much time on what is being acted out or revealed by the producer. Rarely is the highest paid actor an extra, they are victim or criminal. Random characters with no reason that keep appearing are guilty of something. I am no fun to watch TV with! If there is a gun in the first scene, it will be used in the last scene.
I have always been the one who looks deep at motivation of others. That questions why things have been done this way and why not improve them. I mistrust people that expect trust because of position. I mistrust people who restrict you doing your job when you are an investigator or security manager because of another agenda. Taking people on face value is easy but first impressions are what you want them to be, it is depth that counts and proven results. People in power or selling something need to be made uncomfortable and questioned, not taken for granted. Organisations like intelligence agencies, religions, schools, police and parents are often not as good as they are required to advertise. They make mistakes, and they protect themselves, as the institution is always more important than the individual. Do not label me as a conspiracy theory nut either, that would imply conspiracies are actually possible in the midst of incompetence. Government regulators often miss these things and internal regulation only works with the honest. People can hold conflicting and hypocritical beliefs simultaneously and believe both to be true.
