← The Watch Floor with Sarah Adams
Loading summary
Transcript28 lines
- [00:00]
Sarah Adams
Welcome back to the Watch Floor. I'm Sarah Adams. Today's episode is about something I get asked about constantly. It's about body language. Reading people tells. Now, I want to be clear from the start. This is not some sort of magic trick. It's not a lie detector test. And if anyone tells you they can read a person within 10 seconds, they're probably telling you something. But I do want to go into the concept of this and at least give you, like, a quick hack. There are things we see when you can quickly realize something has changed or, you know, in this instance, I think I should take another look. Real verification takes time, but awareness is something fast and something we can use in this case. Before we delve into kind of the mechanics of how to do this, though, I want to play something familiar. It illustrates how telling body language can really be when you're saying something completely different. It's just a fun way to get the idea in your head. Let's roll the clip.
- [01:32]
Roman
I first found that Nathan was conducting the investigation after I spoke with you after he was killed.
- [01:39]
Interrogator
You're lying, and I know you're lying.
- [01:42]
Roman
Oh, you know it, huh? Well, you read my mind, Roman. Is that it?
- [01:45]
Interrogator
No, I'm not. I'm reading your eyes. The eyes can't lie. Didn't you know what I was doing? A quick lesson in lying. See, this is what us real cops do. We study liars. Example, if I ask you a question about something visual, like your favorite color, and your eyes go up and to the left. Well, neurophysiology tells us that your eyes go in that direction because you're accessing the visual cortex. Therefore, you're telling the truth. If your eyes go up and right, then you're accessing the creative centers of the brain. And we know your.
- [02:23]
Sarah Adams
Now, that's a great example of how Hollywood thinks tells work. These exaggerated expressions, this change in posture, the intense eye contact. Right? Look at me, look at me, look at me. Of course, all those movements are saying something much differently than his words. Of course, in real life, trained observers don't really rely on single moments like this to determine whether someone's lying. They build a baseline, and then they look for deviations from that baseline. For those of us that come from the CIA, reading body language really comes down to one rule. It's baseline plus deviation. So someone's baseline is how they're acting when they're perfectly relaxed. It's a normal situation. They're not being threatened by anything. When you get a deviation to that, it's like this meaningful shift away from their normal behavior. It's quickly noticeable, you know, without a baseline, if you're trying to like talk about someone's body language, you're really just storytelling because there's no evidence based behind it. But when you have a baseline, what you're really doing is pattern recognition. And that's what's important here. And that's what we're going to teach you, you know how to do today. But I first want you to kind of think about a long running TV charact. Let's pick one of my favorites, Carrie Matheson from Homeland.
- [03:54]
Carrie Matheson
I didn't want to be alone my whole life.
- [03:56]
Sarah Adams
Like me.
- [03:56]
Carrie Matheson
Like you.
- [03:57]
Interrogator
I have to go.
- [03:58]
Supporting Character
I'm hanging out.
- [04:00]
Carrie Matheson
I don't know what you're doing. No mementous and monsters.
- [04:06]
Sarah Adams
Okay, I'm gonna get you a bit more Ativan to settle you down.
- [04:09]
Carrie Matheson
I don't need to settle down.
- [04:11]
Sarah Adams
Tell him.
- [04:13]
Supporting Character
I'll tell him.
- [04:15]
Carrie Matheson
Leave me alone. Take your fucking heads off me.
- [04:18]
Sarah Adams
If you watch this show, you know exactly how she's going to act or respond, right? It's going to be probably 100% different than the route you would have taken. But she always does it the same way. So the few times when she doesn't act that way, you notice it immediately. You might not know why yet, why there's this change in her, but you saw it the second it happened. When we're establishing this baseline of a person, you don't really start with any kind of interrogating. And it's really about watching and observing how someone behaves when they're just talking about routine topics, right? Maybe my plans for the day that I'm gonna go to the grocery store, drop the kids off at school, go to the gym. Just the standard, normal everyday speak. You see how they're relaxed and respond, pay attention to who they are when they're not being challenged by something or when they're not defending themselves. In some, you notice like their normal speech tempo, how they do eye contact or not, their normal hand movements, their posture. And then you get a firm understanding of kind of left and right limits of their emotional range. So then when there are changes to this baseline behavior, that's when you've got something. I want to do another analogy. So think of Walter White in the early seasons of Breaking Bad.
- [05:59]
Supporting Character
What are you doing?
- [06:01]
Mike
These are my good clothes. You can't go home smelling like a meth lab.
- [06:07]
Supporting Character
Yeah, you can. I do.
- [06:10]
Sarah Adams
Those. Wow. Those.
- [06:14]
Supporting Character
You're keeping those on, right?
- [06:24]
Sarah Adams
Come on. So he's very soft spoken. He's hesitant, he's almost apologetic. That's the baseline, you know. But by season five, his posture, his cadence, and his stillness are completely different. Wow.
- [06:42]
Mike
Oh, that's some kind of logic right there, Mike. You screw up, get yourself followed by the dea, and now suddenly this is all my fault.
- [06:50]
Sarah Adams
You notice it, right? Cause you knew who he was. You know, in real life. We're looking kind of a smaller version of these changes. Now. I want to talk through a few body language indicators that are gonna matter. Nothing here is foolproof, you know, everything is contextual. You aren't gonna look for just one simple tell. You're gonna kind of look for them clustering together to really make an assessment. So, for example, when people are feeling kind of internal stress, you'll see maybe like a touching of their face and neck. They'll suddenly have some sort of mouth dryness. You're gonna know this cause they keep reaching for the water over and over again. They'll do this hard swallowing that's super noticeable. There'll be increased blinking. I think I blink way too much, so good luck doing that one on me. You know, there'll be a rigid posture. Their shoulders will, like, start creeping upward, and then they'll be fidgeting. But it doesn't really match the situation or their normal movements. Stress doesn't mean they're lying. It means that there's some sort of effort going on. Their brain just started working harder at something, and you need to figure out what that is. So think about it like this. If you watch, like, the court scenes in A Few Good Men now, when the characters are relaxed, they lean back, they talk freely. Now when they're under pressure, their body tightens and their words change, right? This is why the famous line, you can't handle the truth landed the way it did. Because they almost, like, built you up to it. You felt the stress, right? It. And then this confession happened that, like, you were almost waiting for. Now, there is a really simple and useful framework that I like to go by. It's this idea of, like, comfort versus discomfort. So when someone's comfortable, they have an open torso, relaxed shoulders, you know, like natural breathing, they have a genuine smile. It's like one of those smiles that like. Like you see through their eyes. They're fluid, their gestures are normal, and they're leaning slightly, they're engaged. They want to be there. They want to be a part of, you know, whatever is going on within this interaction. Now, when there's discomfort, there's closed Shoulders right There's shrinking in posture. They start protecting their torso with object. It's like when a woman pulls her purse close to herself when you're talking to her, right? That's not a good sign. You need to back off. You're causing some sort of discomfort. You know, the feet are pointing away, they lean back suddenly and then they just cross their arms. Now they have their arms crossed the entire time. That's not a big deal. But if you ask them something and they start to cross, right, Some sort of discomfort just occurred. A really great analogy here is if you think about Shark Tank, okay, so these entrepreneurs come out and they're super open and animated. You know, they've even practiced this pitch so many times, they're really, really great at it. Then the hard questions hit, right, the valuation of the company, what kind of debt they have, you know, what is profit margins going to look like? And then, you know, their posture stiffens. It's still the same person, but now they're in another state. It's such a great example. Another key thing to talk through quickly is pacifying behaviors. These are simple like self soothing actions. They don't explain discomfort, they just signal it's occurring. You know, this can be like the rubbing of hands again, kind of like a touching a face or a neck, stroking your hair, lip compressions, the legs bouncing and then playing with like your watch or your jewelry. You know, when you don't normally do that, it's almost like, you know, when you're trying to stream something and it's like that buffering circles on the screen. That's kind of what the brain's doing in those cases. In those situations it's like operating under pressure and it's showing you something. It's so similar to buffering in spy films. They always exaggerate this. So they'll have a character delivering a lie, but then they'll have him doing something else to indicate it's a lie. So maybe he has a giant ring and he's rubbing his ring on while he's saying the lie, right? That's for you to realize, ah, he's being deceptive here. So let's just quickly have like an important reality check because I don't want you to get this wrong. So when you start putting these indicators together and they start clustering, right, you now know somebody is uncomfortable, but you still like do not know why. So think about it. Stress. And it doesn't just come when someone's lying. You know, they could have some sort of fear in this situation, they could feel shame maybe for what they're talking about or what they're being questioned about. There could be like some anger, maybe how they're being confronted. They're like, why is this person asking me this? There could just be a trauma from the past that's now being brought up in some way and they're thinking, thinking through that and almost off in their own world instead of really engaging with you in the conversation. There's also the possibility of a power imbalance. I could have been taking out of my vehicle by law enforcement. Now I'm questioning some room. I don't even think I really did anything wrong. But now I'm in this imbalance because this is a legal representative of the law. I might have done something wrong. And then another thing is some people just aren't good of being put on the spot and they don't act the way you'd really expect. But remember, you had to pay attention to that baseline of how they always act in those situations. So those of us from the CIA, we don't try to jump to conclusions right away. We pause, we observe and we look for repetition. And then over the course of time, and then within the context we're in, right, verification of the truth is very slow, especially if someone is really trying to employ deception against you. So this is almost like an alert system and you should think about it that way. Even in the CIA though, people do get it wrong. I want to bring up a great example. So, you know, I caught the senior leader in the Taliban and I questioned him for months and then I was like rotating from overseas to go back home. My PCs, as we called it, was over. My year away was done. So I started training up my replacement who then started going and questioning that detainee and others. Okay, so there was another detainee he started questioning that I had spent a lot of time with. He's kind of was like a step down, more like a Taliban shadow governor. And I start reading through his write up of that day and his report, and his whole report is about how the person's deceiving him the entire time. And so I go and ask him and I say, hey, I read this line, this line and this line and all has assumptions that he was deceiving you, but saying it factually, like, you know, why can you explain to me what was the change in behavior that led to that assessment? Because I spent a lot of time with this detainee. And first off, he pretty much was only deceptive. Secondly, he wouldn't answer anything. He wasn't forthcoming or useful in any way. And the interesting part is when I got the answer, the answer was, he scratches his head. Every time he lies to me, I go to this new debriefer I'm training up. I'm set. So nobody told you he has lice. He had lice the entire time. He was always scratching his head. But because this new debriefer hadn't spent five, six days a week with him like I did, and I guess didn't look at the back history of some of these things, he didn't realize he was infested with lice. So it's why you don't make those quick assumptions. Now, what he should have done is like, hey, I notice he's scratching his head. Let me talk to the people who met with him previously and hear what they think about this or if they saw the same thing or even why it's occurring. That's why you always need to think through the context in the entire picture and understand the circumstances here. Now, let's just go back. I promised you in the beginning I would help you at least use some of this thinking as a quick hack. So we're just going to walk through some basic steps. First, when you want to employ this, the most important thing when you're interacting with someone is you listen and observe and then you talk. Second, right, because you need to get as much as you can of hopefully when they're acting normal, before you even interject something into this interaction. Then from that little bit that you saw, you need to establish kind of what their normal behavior is before something is at stake, before you confront them with something. Because if you confront them right away, you never got to see or understand the normal baseline, Right? So that's a fail. So you can't do that quickly. You'll see this sometimes in, like, police shows, and they'll be like, I know you're lying.
- [17:17]
Interrogator
It's a nice try, but it's bull Rashid.
- [17:21]
Sarah Adams
Like, why would you ever, you know, start with that line? You know, I was joking once with a debriefer at the CIA, and he did that with, you know, a very famous terrorist that was involved with 9 11. He gets in front of him and he says, I know everything about you. And so the terrorist crossed his arm and leaned back. He said, then we have nothing to talk about. Right? He took control of that situation because the debriefer really wasn't ready to kind of set the baseline, and he was brand new to the situation and Newly in front of this individual. Now, another thing is, you then need to notice the changes in this person, like how they act in certain moments or how they respond to certain questions, right? Because, again, you're still focused on, hey, I really need to collect as much information as possible to understand this baseline. Then you really need to engage, but don't be accusatory in any way. Like, just be casual and normal and curious, right? Like, hey, I'm just here to learn. I'm not here to blame you or say you did something that you didn't do, right? Just, I'm here for knowledge. And then let all these patterns develop before your judgments do. Right? If you put your bias in right away, every action they take, you'll use that as like a confirmation. Oh, yes. See, my judgment was right. They did this. They did this. Oh, now he's tapping his leg. You don't want to do that. Let all the patterns form, and then you can make assessments off of them. So if you remember just one thing, remember this. Single behaviors can lie, but the patterns don't. Here in the watch floor, we're here to look for behaviors. We're here to track patterns. And we really want to be grounded in the reality of these things, not the theatrics. Hollywood's great. We showed you some fun examples today. But some of this really is an art, and it really can benefit you if you understand how to work through it. And again, as we said in the beginning, you know, awareness is. Is like this power. And if you're patient, you really can take the skills you learn from watching and observing and, you know, use it responsibly. Thanks for tuning in today.