Non-verbals are anything that communicates, but it’s not a word. The public knows them as body language, how we dress, how we walk, have meaning, and we use that to interpret what’s in the mind of the person
My name is Joe Navarro and for 25 years I was a Special Agent with the FBI. My job was to catch spies. Most of my career I spent within the National Security Division. A lot of it had to do with looking at specific targets and it was about how to get in their heads and how to neutralize them.
Our security is based on non-verbals. We look at the person through the peephole, we look at who’s behind us at the ATM machine. We know from the research that most of us select our mates based on non-verbals.
So we may think we’re very sophisticated, but in fact, we are never in a state where we’re not transmitting the information.
There are a lot of myths out there. The ones that stand out are if you cross your arms, it’s a blocking behavior. That’s just nonsense. Even when you don’t like the person in front of you. This isn’t to block them out. It’s actually to self-soothe because, in essence, it’s a self-hug. When you’re sitting at a movie and you’re watching, you’re going to cross your arms, when you’re waiting for somebody you tend to cross your arms.
What’s interesting is we do this behavior more in public than in private.
The other one that really stands out is, as we think about something we may look in a certain way. As we process the information we may look in another way. It’s certainly not indicative of deception and it really shouldn’t be used that way. All we can say is the person is processing the information.
The other misconceptions are that if the person clears their throat, touches their nose, or covers their mouth, they’re lying. We do these behaviors as self-soothers. They’re pacifying behaviors, scientifically and empirically, there’s just no Pinocchio effect.
And people who prattle that and say, well, we can detect deception because the person touches their nose or covers their mouth. That’s just sheer nonsense. We, humans, are lousy at detecting deception.
espionage. org is often nowhere near what we see in movies. And in one of the cases we had information from another country saying you have an American, we think is actually a mole who somehow entered the United States, is able to pass as an American but he’s here working for a hostile intelligence service.
And just fortuitously he was video-graphed, coming out of a flower shop, we’re looking at the video and everybody in our small unit we were saying, ‘‘well, there’s not much there’’. You know, he’s coming out of the shop getting in his car and I said, stop the film right there.
Just as he came out of the shop, he took the flowers and most Americans tend to hold the flowers by the stock. So the flowers are up. This individual took them, grabbed the stock, and then held the flowers so they were facing down. And I said that’s how they carry flowers in Eastern Europe.
Rather than confront him about being a spy, I decided to do what’s called a presumptive. So as I sat there with him, I said, ‘‘would you like to know how we know? And he had this look on his face and I said it was the flowers. And then he confessed.
When I came into law enforcement, I thought it was all about confession. It’s really about FaceTime. In my 25 years in the FBI, it was a rarity that a person didn’t eventually reveal what I needed to know. Because we would sit down and have these very lengthy conversations.
I look at behaviors to do an assessment, ‘What is this person transmitting in relation to any stimuli?’ My further questioning comes from my observing these behaviors.
1. The Forehead
The first thing I look at is I look at the hair. Does it look healthy? Does it look well groomed? The forehead is very interesting. Because a lot of times we reveal stress. A lot of the things that we have gone through life are often etched on the forehead.
2. The Eyes
I look at the eyes to see if they’re red, or not enough sleep, this small area between the eyes is called the LaBella. It’s one of the first areas that reveal information to us.
Most often when we don’t like something we do that runny nose of ‘I don’t like 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 mandibular.
3. The Cheeks
At the cheeks, we may do something like rub our tongue against the inside of the cheek. But when we try to hide it, then it tells me that this person is trying to do some perception management and if they are I want to know why.
4. The Neck
At the neck, I want to see if there’s any head tilt because, with a head tilt, the person is more relaxed. The minute the head tilt goes away, there’s usually some issue.
5. The Shoulders
I’m looking at the shoulders. You ask somebody a question and they don’t know, both shoulders shoot up very quickly.
6. The Hands
Then I look at the hands when something’s troubling us we tend to stiffen our fingers, interlace them, and almost like a teepee. We move our hands back and forth very slowly.
This is to be differentiated from when we do the steeple. When something’s at issue we tend to put our hands on our hips, and we become very territorial. This is called arms akimbo. But it changes when we put our thumbs forward and then it becomes more inquisitive, but I also look for any behaviors of ventilating because men tend to ventilate at the neck and we do at the very instant something bothers us.
7. Legs
Then I look at the legs to see if there’s any brushing of the legs with the hands, which is again to pacify, and then the feet.
Do I see any behaviors such as wiggling of the feet? Kicking off the feet?
If I asked a question and all of a sudden the feet withdraw and are crossed, perhaps the person feels a little threatened by that question.
So when we study non-verbals, it’s not about making judgments. It’s about assessing what the person transmitting at that moment.
It really is looking at an individual and saying, ‘What are they transmitting?’
We’re all transmitting at all times. We choose the clothes that we wear, how we groom ourselves, how we dress, but also how we carry ourselves.
Are we coming to the office on this particular day with a lot of energy or are we coming in with a different sort of pace?
And what we look for are differences in behavior down to the minutiae of what is this individual’s posture as they’re walking down the street.
Are they on the inside of the sidewalk, on the outside?
Can we see his blink rate?
Can we see how often he’s looking at his watch?
I know your blink rate is around eight, eight times a minute, but you don’t know that you’re not sitting there counting all these things factor in because they’re transmitting the information.
Now it’s up to us to then use that information to say okay, we need to marshal resources to be on that individual right now.
In most Western cultures, the first time people touch is when they shake hands. Touching becomes that important because we can always remember a time when we shook hands with someone and we didn’t like that.
It’s also the first time when our bodies release these bonding chemicals that say I like this person or I don’t like this person. So handshaking is both necessary and essential in most cultures.
Like during UberEATS delivery, actually.
When I was in college in the early 70s, there were really no courses on nonverbal communication. You quickly realize that to a great extent it’s really about what you can interpret from behavior and so we talk about non-verbals because it matters because it has gravitas because it affects how we communicate with each other. When it comes to non-verbals this is no small matter. We primarily communicate non-verbally and we always will.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
—
Photo credit: Drew Hays on Unsplash