Former FBI Agent Explains How to Read Body Language | Tradecraft | WIRED

Non-verbals are anything that communicates, but it is not a word, the public knows them as

body

language

, how we dress, how we walk, they have meaning and we use it to interpret what is in the person's mind. My name is Joe Navarro and for 25 years I was an FBI special

agent

my job was to catch spies most of my career I spent within the national security division a lot of that had to do with looking at specific targets and then it was about how get inside their heads and how we neutralize them our security is based on non-verbal words we look at the person through the peephole we look at who is behind us at the ATM we know from research that most of us select our partners based on to non-verbal words so that we can think that We are very sophisticated but, in fact, we are never in a state where we are not transmitting information.

There are many myths out there. The one that stands out is that if you cross your arms it's a blocking behavior that simply doesn't make sense, even when you don't do it. I don't like the person in front of you, this is not to block them, it's actually to adjust to yourself because in essence, it's a hug to yourself when you're sitting watching a movie and you're looking, you're going to cross. your arms are waiting for someone you tend to do this the interesting thing is that we do this behavior more in public than in private the other thing that really stands out is that when we think about something we can look in a certain way while we process the information that we can see in another way certainly is not indicative of deception and really shouldn't be used that way, all we can say is that the person is processing the information, the other misconceptions are that if the person clears their throat they touch their nose or cover their mouth , they are lying, we do these behaviors to calm ourselves, their pacifying behaviors scientifically and empirically there is simply no pinocchio effect and the people who blab about it and say well, we can detect deception because the person touches their nose or covers their nose. mouth, that's just nonsense, we humans are terrible at detecting deception, spy work often doesn't come close to what we see in the movies and in one of the cases we had information from another country that said you have an American who we believe he is actually a mole that somehow entered the United States. he may pass himself off as an American, but he's here working for a hostile intelligence service and, by chance, he was filmed leaving a flower shop.

We're watching the video and everyone in our little unit was saying, well, there's not much. there you know he's leaving the store getting in his car and I told him to stop the movie right there, right when he came out of the store, he grabbed the flowers and most Americans tend to hold the flowers because of the stock, so the flowers are up. One individual took them, grabbed the broth and then held the flowers so they were upside down and I told him that this is how they carry flowers in Eastern Europe instead of confronting him about whether you are a spy.

I decided to do what is called a presumption, so I sat down. There with him I said: would you like to know how we know? and he had this look on his face and I told him it was the flowers and then he confessed when I went to the police I thought it was about the confession, what it's really about. In my 25 years in the FBI, it was rare for a person not to reveal what he needed to know because we would sit down and have very long conversations. I observe the behaviors to evaluate what this person is conveying.

Regarding any stimulus, my additional questions come from observing these behaviors. The first thing I look at is the hair. Does it look healthy? Does he look well groomed? The forehead is very interesting because we often reveal a lot of stress. of the things we have gone through in life are often etched on our foreheads I look at my eyes to see if they are red or I don't get enough sleep the small area here between the eyes called the glabella is one of the first areas that reveals information to us more often when we don't like something we make that bunny nose of I don't like it we don't really know what our lips look like and we tend to compress them when something bothers us when something really bothers us we tend to suck them in the jaw and look at the cheeks, we can do something like this, we'll rub our tongue against the inside of the cheek, but when we try to hide it, it tells me that this person is trying to do it. some perception management and if so I want to know why in the neck I want to see if there is any head tilt because the head tilt the person is most relaxed at the time the head tilt disappears usually there is some problem.

I'm looking at the shoulders. you ask a question to someone who doesn't know both shoulders rise very quickly and then I look at our hands when something worries us we tend to stiffen our fingers, we intertwine them and almost like a teepee we move our hands back and forth very slowly. We have to differentiate it from when we do the steeple that we do in this position when there is something at stake we tend to put our hands on our hips and we become very territorial this is called kimbo arms but look how it changes when we put our thumbs forward and then it becomes one more.

I'm curious but I also look for any venting behavior because men tend to vent in the neck and we do it the moment something bothers us and then I look at the legs to see if there is any rubbing of the legs with the hands which again is to pacify and then the feet. I see some behavior like moving the feet, kicking the feet if I ask a question and suddenly the feet move away and maybe cross over. the person feels a little threatened by that question, so when we study non-verbals it is not about making judgments, but about evaluating what this person is transmitting at that moment, it is really about looking at an individual and saying what they are transmitting, we are all transmitting at all.

Sometimes we choose the clothes we wear how we groom ourselves how we dress but also how we behave do we arrive at the office on this particular day with a lot of energy or do we arrive at a different pace and what are we looking for are differences in behavior down to the details of What is the posture of this individual as he walks down the street. Are they inside the sidewalk? Can we see its blink rate? Can we see how often he looks? On his watch, I know that your blink rate is about eight times a minute, but you don't know that you're not sitting there counting all these things, because they're transmitting information.

Now it's up to us to use that information. To say it's okay, we need to gather resources to be with that individual right now, which is why in most Western cultures the first time people touch each other is when they shake hands. Touching becomes so important because we can always remember a time when we shook someone's hand and didn't. It's not like that, it's also the first time that our bodies release these bonding chemicals that say: I like this person or I don't like this person, so the handshake is necessary and essential in most cultures, it is He supposes that pigeons are like dirty birds, ladies, hello.

I'm joe navarro I'm laura laura how are you and you are cathedra how are you okay let me ask you this let's back up a little is it that comfortable for you yes yes it's a little more comfortable but it's not for you okay? Thanks, okay, so keep talking. What we've done here is we've talked about the importance of space and comfort. They don't realize how much further apart they are now and it's because we've brought this on. subject so that they feel comfortable saying hello, it's okay to be comfortable at the perfect distance and now we see that when they swing, they move away from each other and create this space, if you notice that their feet tend to move more, there is a dynamic .

They are happening here where they are trying to find what is the perfect space what is the perfect distance and we know that they are restless because of the high degree of movement that is happening in poker it is an interesting game the similarities of Sitting in front of a spy or sitting in front to players are their reactions to a stimulus, we have behaviors indicative of psychological distress that we use at home, at work or at the poker table, so let's take a look at poker players and some of them.

body

language

that you'll find in a typical poker game, so we'll pause it right there, so one of the things you'll notice for the first time is that when a table is called, this is the first time many of them have seen each other. . a great opportunity to look for behaviors that indicate discomfort we will see the individual moving in his chair we will see an individual reaching out and grabbing his shoulder the woman in this case her shoulders are quite high this is a great opportunity before the game even begins to gather information about poker, okay guys, the button is good, Clinton is good, so we'll stop right there, look where his hands are here, we're looking at player number two and number three and we notice it right away. that their hands are on top of the cards some players will cage their cards some players will put their hands directly on top of them and press them down and they can do this because the cards have now increased in value player number one tends to keep their hands very close to their body , player number four, actually moved his hands off the table because when we like things we tend to move our hands forward, when we don't like things we tend to move them away, so when we look at player number three, i A I am often asked about players who shuffle their chips.

What you're really doing is calming yourself down and it just helps you get through the game and that's really all we're looking for. Oh, come on, okay, so we'll stop. Player number five is sitting with his arms crossed, not much activity is seen, that does not mean that he is not transmitting a lot of information in the future. I want to see where those thumbs are because he keeps them so close. when nothing happens, but that changes as the game evolves, if you're looking at non-verbal elements, it's often helpful to look at them at double speed because all the non-verbal elements that are critical jump out at you like they're a cartoon.

Stop there, woman in position number four. You see her head moving quite a bit. Player number three. You see a lot of activity with his hands. When we look at player number five, his hands are now fully extended. This is as far as we go. We've seen them before, at this point we know he's committed and he's interested now that the game is open. 75 to 80 of the information we need is there, what you often see is that everyone is looking at their own cards or looking at the community cards instead of looking around you should look around to see what the reaction was because you're going Let's see that reaction again.

You know, in poker we used to say that you can have a poker face, but I found that you can't. i have a poker body somewhere this will be revealed when i was in college in the early 70's there really weren't any courses on nonverbal communication you quickly realized that to a large extent it's really about what you can interpret from behavior, that's why we talk about non-communication. -verbal because it matters because it has seriousness because it affects the way we communicate with each other when it comes to non-verbal this is not a small matter, we communicate mainly non-verbally and we always will