The Jordan Harbinger Show - 878: Body Language | Skeptical Sunday

Episode Date: August 13, 2023

Can we accurately read someone's body language to gain access to their innermost thoughts? Andrew Gold joins us on this Skeptical Sunday to find out! On This Week's Skeptical Sunday, We Discuss: Body language research has found that indicators of deception may include eye movements, blinking, posture shifts, and word choice, but these cues can vary widely and require careful consideration. Body language can be influenced by various factors, making it challenging to precisely interpret. The use of body language by experts like the FBI involves observing consistent patterns in a suspect's behavior over time. While body language offers insights, it is not foolproof, and understanding context and individual differences is crucial for accurate interpretation. The case of Amanda Knox — exonerated after spending four years in Italian custody — highlights the dangers of relying solely on body language as evidence of guilt. Connect with Jordan on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [e-mail] and let him know! Connect with Andrew Gold on Twitter and Instagram, and check out On the Edge with Andrew Gold here or wherever you enjoy listening to fine podcasts! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/878 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you do. get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger, and this is Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of the Jordan Harbinger show where journalist and podcaster Andrew Golden I will break down a topic you may have never thought about, open things up and debunk some common misconceptions, topics such as why the Olympics are kind of a sham, why expiration dates are nonsense, why tipping makes no sense, recycling, banned foods, toothpaste, chemtrails, and a whole lot more. And normally on the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact

your own life and those around you. We have long-form interviews and conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, the episode starter packs are a great place to do this. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on this show. Topics like persuasion, influence, disinformation, cyber warfare, China, North Korea, abnormal psychology, crime and cults, and more, just visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash start or take a look in your Spotify app to get started. Today on this episode of Skeptical Sunday, podcaster Andrew Golden I will be looking at,

with our skeptical hats on, of course, into the kind of detection that has taken the internet by storm, body language. Speaking of which, you're looking a little shifty over there, Andrew. I don't know. Perhaps it's a sign I'm nervous to be in the presence of greatness. Or you just have bad posture, or you're tired, or you're cold, or your chair isn't the right height, or you ate something weird for lunch. And that's the thing with body language. We're all familiar with that age-old movie trope with a detective, Colombo, or whoever, notices that a suspect is looking a little suspect.

And they look up or they look down and they stammer when they speak. And that helps the detective recognize that they're immediately a villain and they're obviously guilty. But is that even remotely close to real life? I'm pleased you picked up on the television tropes because I think that's part of where this all comes from. In TV shows and especially in the theatre plays that preceded them, it's vital that the audience know what's going on in the minds of the characters. Imagine one of Shakespeare's plays at the Globe Theatre hundreds of years ago. How does an actor communicate subtle hidden feelings to expectator at the back of the standing section

while the audience around them gaffore and shout and tempestuous rangers? drenches them. So here's what I didn't understand. Usually I'm with you, because we both speak English. I mean, you speak English, but why would you get wet while watching a play? Yeah, you'd think they'd build a roof, wouldn't they? But it's open air, the globe. Okay, that's, I'm like, why would you do that, especially in England? It's not, hey, we never get rain here. It's terrible. I mean, the plays go ahead in rain or snow, which fair play to the actors, they really go for it or did go for it in Shakespeare's time. The Globe Theatre's not around anymore, but a reconstruction of it on its old site called the Globe Theater is there,

and they still put on plays. And I got absolutely soaked when I went. And ironically, we were watching The Tempest. So we all had a good laugh about that. That's like those IMAX movies where they spray you with water and they're like, oh, it's so realistic. And you're like, actually, I could use less realism right now. Also, imagine you're getting casted for that and they're like, there's nudity. Are you okay with that? And you're like, it's not the nudity. It's the fact that that's going to be 30 degrees Fahrenheit or zero degrees Celsius or thereabouts. That's the part that bothers me.

That's why I don't want to be naked in this play. I had an issue like that playing soccer the other day because we didn't have different colored shirts. So I said, let's take our tops off. But it was raining and no one wanted to do it. And then I insisted and I looked a bit strange because I was insisting so much that everybody take their tops off.

So that was a similar experience. Yeah, we call it shirts and skins. Andrew's really into the skin thing. Is he married to that guy? He's engaged. To a woman, though, because he's a little pushing. with the skins thing here. Yeah, I know. The worst part was I was finally convincing everyone to come

around to my idea because you don't want to play when you can't see who's on your team. So I took my t-shirt off and I was like, come on, guys, let's do it. As I did that, the guy who had the bibs that you wear arrived in that moment. So I was the only one with my top off and everyone was like, oh, the bibs are here. And I looked like a complete plonker. Plunker is a word I'm definitely going to use. All right. You're getting soaked. It's very apropos because Tempest is a storm. I get it. It's very clever. Yeah, big storm. Anyway, it was, look, it was, it was important in those days, the Shakespeare days, to make characters' feelings known to the spectators. Shakespeare's plays were all about the audience knowing more than the other characters

because that confusion created humour and tension on stage, the fact that the characters are confused about each other, but we know what's going on. It's something we call dramatic irony, and it's where much of the humour in TV and stage comes from today. So to do this, Shakespeare often resorted to soliloquies, which are these weird monologues, where suddenly the rest of the cast can't seem to hear them, but the audience, us, we can hear what they're saying, so we get their inner thoughts. But soliloquies are a bit old hat and seen as a bit of a cheat by modern standards. So instead, we expect characters on TV today to betray emotions such as guilt or jealousy through subtle but visible downtrodden looks, sunken eyes, what we'd call facial dialogue.

As well as body language, a character that we're supposed to see as defensive might cross their arms. A nervous character might keep their hands in their pockets and shuffle their feet as they walk. Okay, so I remember learning about soliloquies, I think, in middle school and we had to write one, and then we went to see a play, and it's like, the lights go down, and there's a spotlight on the character, and he turns to the audience, and he goes, but do I really want to do this? If I do this, then that will happen, but if I do this other thing, then this other thing will happen, and it's really obvious, and you don't do that now. Now, poorly written movies have, what do they call it, exposition, where the character walks in and goes, Tom,

Why are you here? I thought your brother was in the hospital from nearly dying in an accident the other day, and you were supposed to be gone, and no one would be in the office. Why are you here all alone? And you're like, okay, whoever wrote this is not a good screenwriter, and they deserve to be fired. And if the real world looked anything like this, it would be really easy to catch somebody in a lie because of the body language stuff, right, the overacting. It would be like, where were you?

Looks down, starts biting nails and says, nowhere, boss, why are you asking me these questions? and you'd be like, okay, this person is up to something. Did you ever see that film The Room? The worst movie ever, I think it's known as. Yeah. Well, you were just explaining. Yeah, it's terrible. It's reminding me of it.

The exposition, Hi, Mark, what are you doing? And it was they had that whole exposition stuff because exactly, they didn't use body signals and stuff. Also, Jordan, we've got to get hold of the soliloquy that you wrote. Was it like a teenage angst thing filled with emotion and stuff? Oh, I don't even think it was that good. I wish I could remember it, but I'm sure it was based on characters that we had to create it.

It was probably mostly what I just gave as the example. Really crappy dialogue, something that makes absolutely no sense. Jordan, where's your dog? I don't know. I was walking him the other day. Oh my gosh, my dog could have run away. The other day, all these things happened that we don't have time to do in the play, but I need to tell the audience.

Nothing is lost due to that soliloquy ending up in what is now the recycle bin. I think a lot is lost. A lot is lost. Obviously, the most famous soliloquy would be to be or not to be, of course, where Hamlet is weighing up whether to act on the death of his father or the murder of his father. But the fact that we are smart enough to notice and understand the facial dialogue and body language in TV scenes means that, as you point out, we are also smart enough to hide those signs in our own behavior from other people.

Or at least try to, right? Because guilty people on TV, they look shifty, they don't hold eye contact, they look away, they hop from one leg to another, sometimes they tremble or they stutter and I noticed that. So if I'm trying to hide my guilt, I'm like, all right, eye contact, firm handshake, look him straight in the eye, shoulders back, look confident. I didn't do that obviously criminal thing. And I remember lying to my principal in middle school about something. And she actually told another kid that she didn't think it was me because I looked her in the eye and I looked confident when I was talking. And I was like, I'm so good at lying. But she was just terrible. That's amazing, because I've heard you say as well, and I really relate to you when you

say this, that it's very difficult for you to lie because you do get a bit flustered now as an adult and flushed and red faces, which even when I'm telling the truth, I'll go really red and sweaty and think, God, they must think I'm lying. Yeah, I'm a terrible liar now. But when I was a kid, I don't know if I was a good liar. I think I just practiced more, whereas an adult, I'm like, I'm eventually going to get caught. I should probably just be like, you know what? I did that. I shouldn't have done that. I'm also not committing crimes now. Back then, I was. No way to sugarcoat that.

I know about you, Jordan. I know what you've been getting up to. But you're right, yeah, as an adult, probably best just not to commit crimes. But when we do, humans are pretty skilled at using the basics, as you say, look, someone in the eye and that kind of thing, to cover it. So those TV shows pretty much give us instructions

on exactly what not to do, how not to look if you want to get away with something. So we mustn't rely on body language to tell us who is guilty or innocent. Some people cross their arms because they find that comfortable, not because they're being defensive. As it happens, the victim of one of the worst cases of over-reliance on body language has been on both of our podcasts.

Ah, okay, Amanda Knox, right? She comes home to find her roommate has been murdered in Italy. Police find evidence of DNA matching a known burglar in the area all over the victim's room. But then they decide that Amanda is the culprit, this random 20-year-old girl who's never done anything in her life. And that's episode 386, by the way. Tell us what you think, because it's obviously insane, in my opinion. Yeah, it seems mad looking back.

Although, still, whenever I speak about the case, I get a lot of hate mail from people assuming that suggesting it wasn't Amanda means that I don't care about the victim, which couldn't be further from the truth. It's just that we just want to make sure that the right person gets put in prison. I actually get a lot of that as well. I get a lot of cooks in the inbox, still on the comments on the YouTube video. Don't even get me started, but they say things like,

you've been hoodwinked by the mainstream media. She's a persuasive faker of all things nonverbal. And they cite some strange evidence usually that they've made up or that they found on an internet forum, implying Amanda was let off on some technicality of high court Italian law and is actually guilty, but simply has everybody fooled. I would suppose that finding a culprit and putting someone in prison probably makes us all feel better about the murder, like we cracked the case. but an innocent person in prison is actually just another tragedy that you can add to the first one,

especially she was 20 and she was in Italian prison for a long time, if memory serves. Yeah, four years in an Italian prison. That may not be as bad as losing a life and being brutally murdered, but it's far worse than anything that most of us will ever have to endure. To give a bit of context, Amanda Knox was a 20-year-old American exchange student in Perugia, Italy, her Italian boyfriend Rafaeli Solicito and her came home one day to find her housemate Meredith Kirch's door locked and it emerged that she had been brutally murdered.

I took a keen interest in the case at the time because Meredith was about my age and was studying at the same host college university as me, Leeds University. And we both took years abroad. I went to France and she went to Italy and she never came back. And it was tragic for her family and everyone in her orbit. But of course that doesn't mean

that locking Amanda and her boyfriend turned up for four years in an Italian prison was anything but an atrocious miscarriage of justice. So remind me, what was it initially about her that made police decide she was the culprit? Because there's circumstantial evidence, but I remember there was a lot of, ooh, normally at a murder, you'd never react in this way. And she was canoodling with her boyfriend at the murder scene, which is a little bit like, why would you do that? But it's also not like you definitely murdered this person.

Yeah, a lot of it came from the press, as well as an Italian detective desperate to find the murderer and the story of Amanda made headlines around the world because she was a young, attractive, intelligent and ambitious woman and there were suggestions Meredith might have been murdered in a sex game. In a sense, the story got so big because she was so atypical as a murder suspect and because of misogyny in the media. It looks like the cases prosecutors got a little too mixed up in the sensationalism of the whole thing. So while the tabloys printed stories that painted Amanda as a sex-obsessed lunatic, prosecutors did all they could to make every move she made fit that narrative. Confirmation bias. So she's caught buying red lingerie the day after the murder.

It looks suspicious like she really is this sex-crazed devil, but she just needed new underwear because she wasn't able to access her clothes at the crime scene. It had all been cordoned off. Sure, that makes sense, yeah. Yeah, she's seen, as you say, kissing her boyfriend outside the house the morning after the murder. And again, this is seen as a sign she's like a Randy psychopath. And I remember at the time feeling sad about murder this murder and seeing that kiss through the prism of the newspaper stories. And I thought it was really odd behavior from Amanda. But now I'm a lot older and I just see a scared young woman, as you say, 20 years old and a scared young man comforting one another, totally unprepared for how their lives were about to change

forever. Yeah, I remember thinking it's weird, and I remember the headlines, Foxy Noxie, which I talked to her about on the podcast. And I guess Foxy in English is more like wily. Ooh, she's a little bit, we would say squirrely, maybe, whereas in American English, it means sexy. So I guess it works both ways. But I would imagine if you are in another country, if somebody around you gets murdered, you're going to gravitate towards the person who speaks the language of the country that you're in, and that was this boyfriend. And so it's, yeah, I'm. I'm going to cling to anybody who's going to give me a little bit of comfort at that time, especially because that could have been me if I hadn't been over at that person's house

getting my shag on or whatever they were doing. So it seems as though she was shell-shocked, like she was walking in a bit of a daze, but from the TV shows, we really do expect a different reaction. We want her to be down on her knees, screaming at the sky, visibly distraught in a very visceral way that's obvious. And it's, okay, we're just not satisfied by her looking really tired and gazing off into the distance, totally zoned out, so we want to punish her for that. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think it was Malcolm Gladwell who wrote about this, that Foxy Noxie developed as her soccer nickname because she was Wiley, like, she was really fast when she played soccer, and she was like, quick on that. So they called her Foxy Noxie for that reason, and then it was taken by the press to mean this sort of sexy kind of thing. But we are, in this case, the Shakespearean audience, and the character isn't acting how we expect.

And that makes us mad. and I think she was in a days. She even told me on my podcast that she has a tendency to get very dear in the headlights. There's so much that went wrong in that case. The Italian authorities put her in a cell for hours and hours with nothing to do.

Now, they've done experiments where people try to sit alone in a room for a prolonged amount of time and people give up. They can't do it. Even if there's a lot of money they can win by staying in a room for quite a few days on their own,

people find that really hard. She's doing yoga to pass the time. She's stretching. She didn't do the murder. Why shouldn't she stretch and keep active? A guard walks in and decides that she's doing cartwheels. And then this goes down as further evidence of her bizarre body behavior. She's now celebrating the murder in herself. All of these things, the lingerie, the kissing, the supposed cartwheels, they all really had good explanations. But what if there weren't any? What if she was a sex crazed Foxy, Knoxie, she just doesn't care about the murder. She wanted new lingerie, screw it. and she was cartwheeling because she didn't give a crap. That's not great, but it's also not evidence that she actually murdered somebody. Not really. No, and that's the crux of it.

We're so influenced by what we see on TV that we sometimes find it hard to accept that people just act differently and weirdly and not how you expect them to. You have a right to not care about the murder of a person you didn't know very well. Sure, the people in your vicinity might judge you for that and might be a bit wary of you. But we don't put people in prison for not having the right. levels of empathy or the right reactions, we put them in prison because we have substantial evidence that they committed a serious crime. If I may paraphrase a line from George Orwell's 1984 to where

an improper expression on your face was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it, face crime. Face crime. Sounds like an app that you would use on your iPhone to do things that are illegal. We have to be careful to control that urge to punish people based on face crime, trademark. Yes. In Malcolm Gladwell, as I mentioned, his book Talking to Strangers, he has a whole chapter on the whole Amanda Knox saga, and he speaks of a theory of matched and mismatched people based on the work of communications professor Tim Levine. The idea is that some people are matched. That means that their body behavior tends to correspond with their inner dialogue, what they're thinking. But others are mismatched. Their body language is different to how we might expect, given what they are secretly thinking. So going back to that TV theme, Gladwell considers friends to be a perfect example of matched characters. He notes that Phoebe's jaw drops when she is surprised. Her eyes go wide, her eyebrows go up. So Gladwell gets a psychologist called Jennifer Fugate,

an expert in facial action coding system to watch friends and apply numbers that correspond with each facial action to get a sense of how transparent they are. So they've got all these different numbers for every single gesture and smile and smirk that your face and your eyes and your mouth can make. She concludes, of course, that Friends is very transparent and that you could watch an episode on mute and get a good sense of the plot. You can know what's going on without the volume.

Gladwell also believes that Amanda Knox was singled out for being mismatched. The press continued to portray her as cold and calculating and not remorseful. But as Gladwell points out, why should she be remorseful if she didn't do the murder? You know what's not just internet hype that makes you annoying at parties? the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. All of the advertisers' deals,

discount codes, and ways to support the show are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the search box on the website as well. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. Yeah, I think Malcolm and I talked about this a bit in episode 256 a while back.

So it seems that body language can lead us into all kinds of traps if we rely on it too heavily. But can it actually be helpful in catching criminals as well? Here's one statistic around its limitation. The National Registry of Exoneration's estimates between 2% and 10% of individuals and US prisons are innocent. Oh, yikes. That's a lot. I mean, even just one person's a travesty. So between 46,000 and 230,000 innocent people currently serving prison terms. If detectives and judges could ascertain a lot from body language, then no innocent person would ever see the inside of a prison cell. That communications professor Tim Levine that I mentioned earlier,

he does experiments where he sets students a trivia test with a cash prize. He assigns them a partner, but the partner is actually working for Tim, unbeknown to the students. Halfway through the test, the instructor leaves the room, and the partner who is working off of a script suggests that the student cheat at the test with them. 30% of the people doing this test decide to cheat for the cash prize. Now, afterwards, Levine interviews them to see if they'll admit to cheating.

Now, Malcolm Gladwell spent a day watching these videos and said he had absolutely no idea from watching the videos which of the students were honest about whether they cheated and which were hiding something. Levine showed the videos to many other people to see if they could guess correctly, and people guessed rightly on average 56% of the time. So a little more than a coin toss. right? And maybe not no innocent person would ever see the inside of a prison cell because there's

all these weird incentives and sometimes police or prosecutors are just like, I don't care if he's guilty or not. Let's throw him in prison because I got up my percentage or I don't like the guy. Being able to tell if somebody was guilty, it's a little bit more than a coin toss fine. So it seems like body language maybe has a tiny, minute, almost influence. Maybe it gives away something. But wait a minute, these were not actually experts who were judging. They were just Malcolm Gladwell and a bunch of other people like me just sitting there watching videos. Did Tim Levine actually get experts to look at these same videos? Yes, he got police officers, judges, therapists, people in all different lines of professional work.

But the accuracy didn't improve at all. That's because he didn't have anybody who's been watching a crap load of YouTube. Look at this. Have you met the YouTube body language experts? They would have nailed this. 97 out of 100. They would have got it in a second, but they weren't there. Those are the only experts that would have.

got it immediately. But the apparent experts, aside from the YouTube experts, are no better than the general public, despite what those TV shows and YouTube channels about detectives and all these things with a knack for knowing might want us to believe. Just for those who are maybe not able to pick up on the sarcasm here, the YouTube body language expert is not actually an expert in anything. Okay, so does that mean that the concept of body language needs to be entirely scrapped? As you said, 56% is better than a coin toss, although other researchers have found it more like 54%, so we're getting a little bit lower there. I think that slight advantage can give detectives clues about lines of questioning to pursue.

Former Guantanamo Bay interrogator Lena Sisko did this pretty effectively. She used to hook prisoners up to a lie detector, except it wasn't even a real lie detector. It was just an old game boy. She would draw up potential terrorist plots on a whiteboard and point to certain theories before asking the prisoner to give a yes or a no answer. She took clues from the body language of the prisoners to ascertain whether they might be lying. And then she manually made the Game Boy light up

whenever she suspected that the information they had given was false. She said it was remarkably effective because prisoners believing they had been caught in a lie then went on to spill the beans. So that's quite impressive. It's a nice little deception there. So it feels like your debunking body language is something that we can really rely on, but it can come in handy, which reminds me on episode

773 with human behavior expert Dr. David Lieberman, he said, you gather facts, and then you introduce a piece of evidence that's not true, but could maybe be true, and then you watch how your suspect handles it. So his example was, oh, there's a water main break, and traffic was backed up for hours. It must have taken you a while to get out, and maybe that's why you're late or weren't there. And then the suspect has a big problem because if they weren't there in the traffic jam, they won't know how to respond. So they're going to have to guess. But they'll do the one thing that everybody lying about a story does, which is hesitate. Yeah, I think that's pretty similar to what the Guantanamo detective was doing as well. So body language is most powerful when you're in control

of the situation, when you can introduce surprising elements and catch people off guard. Then, having monitored the suspect beforehand, you might spot subtle differences that allow you to continue down a certain path and catch them in a lie. But body language in and of itself, I think, is overestimated in society. I think the reason I wanted to cast a skeptical eye over it is because it has become such a huge part of our culture now. Celebrity gossip columns are filled with so-called body behavior analysts. We talk about Megan Markle and how she might have looked at Harry a certain way all the time. I have people emailing me all the time to suggest that my guests were lying on the podcast because they looked to the left or to the right. And that was the creative side of the brain or

something like that. So it means that they were fabricating events. And it's like you don't even know which way the camera is mirrored. So they were probably looking in the opposite direction to what you think they were. So that's just total nonsense. I remember a former friend of mine was like really into this. I think it was called eye accessing cues. And it's, ooh, up into the right, you're creating something in your brain, but then you looked left, so you're using your logical faculties to create the story, and then you go back up right because you're creating the next part of the story. And it's just such a complete load of crap. And it's, oh, he did it the opposite way because he's left-handed, so his brain halves are now switched. And it's like, what are you friggin'

talking about? And I get this stuff too, either because I looked up or down or left or right, or the guest did. And yeah, it happened a ton with Amanda Knox. They were saying, oh, she's looking upward all the time. She was seated really close to, I think, an iMac, which has the camera at the top of the computer. And so she's looking up at the screen and then she would look up at the camera and then be like, screw it. I'm going to look at Jordan because he's on the screen. And they're just going, oh, wait, look at her eyes moving in this very unnatural way. And the reason she was seated that way is because we needed better lighting. We needed her to be in a weird room with better acoustics. So she put the computer up on a shelf. And the shelf wasn't where she

normally worked. It's just all of this is, of course, lost on the self-appointed body language experts who decided that she was just making everything up because of her eyes, because of her body language. And also, bear in mind, this is edited. So, like, some stuff is take two and she's just saying it differently. Look how relaxed she was when she said this and how not relaxed she was when she said that. She had to say that four times because the internet wasn't working. It's just complete BS. What I conclude from that is that Amanda Knox needs to invest in a teleprompter. I think that's not a bad idea. Or like some acoustic panels for the room that she's comfortable in. When I spoke to her, she did have all that, and it might have been after you did.

So I think she does have it all. Some success has come from this. To cover up her lies. Anyway, so then you've got really popular YouTube channels like the Behaviour Panel. You go on their page and the trailer is like, Megan and Harry gave away a lot more than they intended in their Netflix special. I was about to go into an American accent there, and I didn't. I stopped myself. I've got nothing against the Behaviour Panel.

They seem nice, and they probably do know a lot more than most of us about body language. But this kind of analysis is very attractive to viewers because it's creating a narrative that's enticing. Look how Harry looks back to the camera here. It's a sign of how he wasn't supporting Megan in what she said. And you're like, maybe that's plausible. That could be true. In fact, it seems like it probably is true. But it might not be. Harry might also have been thinking in that moment about the older woman that he lost his virginity to behind the stables. Is that true? Is that a real thing? Yeah, that's a real thing. I read it. his book spare, to spare you the horror of having to read it yourself. And you know what? He's actually

been accused of basically doxing her. Well, yeah. Because he went into like quite a lot of detail, so she was easily recognizable. See, I've got into the whole gossip now, just from talking about Harry and Megan for a second. It seems like you wouldn't want to be that person because people are going to be like, you're a pedophile. Well, no, he was old enough, but also, no matter how you slice it, that doesn't look good. Yeah, she's supposed to be at work. She was working for Prince Charles at the time, King Charles now on grooming. And that was her, I'm not kidding, that was her title. She was a groomer. She was a groomer. How on brand for Prince Charles to have hired her anyway. She was a groomer. She groomed horses, of course, and had a canoodling with Prince Harry behind the

stables. He just goes into so much detail. I'm not going to go into a whole rant about them now, but for somebody who complains about press intrusion to then give up so much private detail about everybody he's encountered in his life in this book. Anyway, the point I was making was on the behavior channel and all these channels, we don't know what they were really thinking. And as you said before, especially in the Netflix documentary, it might be like the fourth take, the fifth take. They look different each time. So we have no idea of really knowing what he's thinking. Also, when you're editing something, you put stuff where you want it as the editor. I've done commercials, for example, or like online content for AT&T. And they'll take something where I make a

joke or a comment about something that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about in that moment. And they'll just move it. And it's because it's entertained. or it's funny or they'll add a bunch of us laughing, and we're laughing about eating the stale cookies at the shoot, and they'll put that after somebody's joke that nobody laughed at. That laugh was, that looks fake. They must have been queued to do that because it's a big overreaction compared to the joke,

and that wasn't even the same thing. Or they must all really think this person is high status because look at how much they're laughing at his joke, and it's nobody laughed at that joke, actually. They went over everyone's head, or they thought it was dumb, and it didn't really come through. So they added the laugh later on, and you can read literally nothing from that because it's constructed.

So, yeah, none of that makes any sense. That's the thing. So he could have been thinking, as I say, about that older woman or just about anything else. Right, yeah, like his earnings per second for that Netflix documentary. I think they got $100 million for that. The problem with that is we don't know what Harry's typical body language looks like when he's sitting at home with Megan. We only see him on TV.

I do know the behavior panel guys. They're great guys and all of them in person. I also know that they are hamming stuff like this up for YouTube because that's what makes for great TV. Nuance doesn't have the same effect. Just like we talked about with friends, the TV show, you don't want to go, this could mean 20 different things or nothing at all. No, I want you to say this means she's lying because that's what makes me interested in your video. Going back to that episode I did with Dr. David Lieberman, it appears that a lot of actual experts find the popular YouTubers to be pretty misleading a little bit sensationalist because we're not seeing what is. we're only seeing a projection of our wants, securities, and needs.

And that's a direct-ish paraphrase from Dr. Lieberman. It's a basic confirmation bias and projection. We see what we want to see. He goes on to say the fact that somebody's arms are folded or scratching their nose doesn't mean anything in and of itself. You'll get false readings time and time again. And the timestamp for this is in the show notes of people are interested in going listening to that exact quote from the show.

I remember Dr. Lieberman also spoke of sophisticated and unsophisticated liars. So a small child, yeah, maybe they're going to look down or look away when they lie. But adults, we've figured this out by age 10 or 12. You really have to sit with somebody for a long time and observe them to see how their behavior differs. You get a baseline on somebody. And that's why your mom pretty much always knows when you're full of crap.

But your teachers, the principal in middle school, she has no idea. But I could never have pulled off the same lie to my parents. Yeah, I was just thinking now, it's why it's so funny sometimes, not in a cruel way, but to watch children when they've been caught lying, because I guess they haven't quite learned the societal ways of behaving at that point, and it's really funny to look back and see they don't know how to hide it. You even get that with dogs when dogs look quite guilty,

and it's really cute to see them looking guilty curled up in the corner because they know they did a naughty thing, and I suppose the humor in that comes from, they don't yet know what we know. It's that dramatic irony, that Shakespearean thing. But of course, yeah, it's no surprise that another detection tool we use but can't rely on, the lie detector, works exactly the same way as body language,

which you can't just bring a lie detector on someone and get to work because they'll be nervous compared to normal or might have trained themselves to stay calm under pressure. You need to sit with them for a long time beforehand to get a sense of their usual heart rate, blood pressure, and sweat. Only then can you get a better sense of whether lying provokes slight changes that the polygraph can show. Even then, polygraphs are only 80 to 90% accurate. So if you relied on polygraphs and you tested 100,000 people in a year, you could be sending 10 to 20,000 innocent people to prison. And while faking a polygraph test is not as simple as putting a stone in your shoe or whatever, people can practice to fake polygraph tests. That's what Defense

Intelligence Agency senior analyst Anna Montes did to pass a lie detector in the States when she was secretly working as a double agent for the Cubans. She just practiced doing the lie detector so many times that she trained herself to no longer show signs of nerves when it came time for the real thing. Body behaviour, despite the numbers we can apply for each facial gesture and movement, is even less of an accurate science than polygraph testing. So I don't want to completely poo body language. If you look at, for example, the Chris Watts case where he murdered his wife and kids, when he's appealing for their safe return, he looks incredibly guilty.

And body language experts have explained why his voice does. doesn't show any despair. He's swaying. His volume drops. He has a double-handed hand shrug. He uses too many eye statements. And I have to admit, it seems right. He does look incredibly guilty. But I just wonder how much of this is obvious now with hindsight and confirmation bias. When you don't already know the outcome, it seems like an expert would have to observe a suspect for a very long time to get a sense of their normal habits for making any guesses. And they would be guesses about what they might be hiding. Remembering that episode you did with David Lieberman, he spoke of what I'd call a sort of Schrodinger's irony, and you called it the Heisenberg Uncertainty

Principle, and that makes us sound very clever, because you'll get much more accurate readings from body language when the suspect believes they are unobserved. Then you can look at a few things. For example, Lieberman told you that someone who stands with a more liberal posture, we might be more confident. And if someone is slumped over, perhaps they're less positive. Interesting, right. So these are indicators that somebody is confident in their story, which might give us an indicator about whether a person is being honest or deceitful in a particular moment, right? Of course, that's really helpful for detectives and FBI agents and, of course, the common person. It's useful to get a sense of whether your partner or your husband,

your wife, is lying to you, for example, but what about body language that gives away somebody's personality? Are there signs of narcissists and predators that would be good for us to be able to spot somehow. Yeah, to research this, I went back and relistened to episode 135 of the Jordan Harbinger show with retired FBI agent Joe Navarro, a really great episode. And he wrote the Dictionary of Body Language because he found that women would call psychologists to ask about the suspicious behavior of their husbands. And the response would be, do you have insurance? The person in charge of their insurance was the husband. So Navarro wanted to write this book to warn people about the common body language signs of narcissism and psychopathy to look out for.

That's right. So what kind of things should we look out for? Firstly, start documenting abusive, predatory, and toxic traits. Email yourself the behaviors that you are observing, partly because months down the line, you'll have forgotten half the things they've done to you, and also because it will help when you do go to the authorities, and it will help with defining the kind of abuser you're dealing with. There are all sorts of behaviors to look out for in malignant narcissists,

such as rage as opposed to anger, rage being totally out of proportion compared to anger. But if we're to zone in on body language alone, it seems to be about using your intuition. Navarro recalls being dropped off as a child by a coach, and he recalls the coach touching his knee a couple of times, and something about it he just felt was way off. He credits his limbic system,

the automated part of the brain, with realizing this, and he decided never to get in the car with that man again. years later he heard all sorts of rumors that man had been abusing children. Listen to the limbic system and don't hesitate to say I'm getting out of the car. You're looking down, left to the right, up and to the side, which means you should probably support the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.

Once again, thank you so much for listening and supporting the sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, fancy URLs are all in one place. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals or use the AI search bot on the website to search for any promo code anywhere on this show. Consider supporting those who support us. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. It's interesting. When I was a kid, I used to stand in my driveway and write down the license plates of every car that went by because, I don't know, I got in my head the idea that if you had someone's license plate, the police would need it later.

And I was like, I'll just track everyone's license plate. So I used to write in this book with magic markers every license plate. And I remember I would stand out there with my friend and do this. And we would be playing in the driveway until a car went by and we'd like run. and get the paper. My friend Tim, who I'm still really good friends with. And one day this crappy car was driving through the neighborhood, which it looked really out of place. And I remember being like, huh, that's weird. It looks like my cousin's car. My cousin was probably like 16. And this is a grown man in the car. He looked unkempt. I thought that was weird. And he was driving slowly.

And he stopped at the end of our driveway and goes, hi, kids, do you know where Schroeder school is? which actually was a school that was really near my house, but I didn't go there because I was on the edge of a district and blah, blah, blah, that's not where I went to elementary school. And I said, what's your name? And he paused. And he goes, what? And I said, what's your name?

And he pauses and goes, Gus. And I was like, I don't know anyone named Gus. And also, I remember the pause being very weird. So me and my friend, we ran in the house. We said, hold on, we're going to ask my mom. She knows how to get to the school. We ran in the house. told my mom, there's a guy outside asking where this school is, and she was like, holy crap,

she runs out of the house, dude's gone. So obviously he didn't really need directions. Also, who asks two five-year-old kids, six-year-old kids, seven, whatever, how old we were, for directions to an elementary school, definitely a kidnapper. And I remember the pause. I remember the car. I remember his haircut was weird. And I remember Gus sounded like a made-up name, even though it totally could have not been. The hesitation was so freaking weird. That was a sliding doors moment for you, I suppose. What's that mean? I've never heard that term. Sliding doors? There's a film called, I think, sliding doors. I think it's called that anyway.

It might be called something else, Gwynneff Paltrow. It splits into two when she's about to get on the train. The film does. So then you see what happens when she gets on the train. And then you also, every like a few minutes, it goes back to the story where she didn't quite make it through the doors. And the sliding doors moment is like your life could have been totally different if you had just like that slight thing had changed. Or a lot shorter, potentially a lot shorter. That was very obvious. Because obviously this guy was a kidnap-e kind of guy, and what happens when a stranger kidnaps kids is far different than what happens when a family member kidnaps kids. Oh, my God.

Navarro would say, I imagine, that Gus showed some of the body behavior signs that suggest he may be a predator. The point is you used your intuition, and this guy was odd. Something didn't add up. Other typical things to look out for include too much familiarity, violating space,

controlling your space and time, touching you. Navarro thinks of Bernie Madoff. He didn't have to show them a copy of the files, taking advantage of his friends. Bernie Madoff, yeah, he was a financial scammer who created a Ponzi scheme where he would take an investment and he would show fake returns. And if anybody needed a little bit of money, he would pay that person out with other new money that he got from scamming new investors. And he showed these above average returns. Nothing crazy, but over time it was like, wow, this guy never misses. and it turned out to be a big scam that ran for, I think, decades.

There you go. Because he was overconfident, he didn't have to show people a copy of the files or anything like that. He was overly friendly. Sometimes you just have to know a lot of things about somebody. So Navarro, again, he told Wired, there's a great video online where he talks to Wired, about finding a spy because the spy was holding flowers upside down.

That's how they hold them in Eastern Europe. But he also checks eyes, Navarro does, to see if they're red or indicate a lack of sleep, the same of the forehead, hands on waist, he thinks, can be a little bit territorial, that kind of thing. I don't remember the flowers thing, but that sounds interesting.

What is that all about? Upside down, flowers. Never heard of that. Yeah, Navarro was tasked with finding out if somebody was a spy, and while monitoring footage of him, saw him holding flowers, and noticed that he held them not upwards

as an American or most Westerners would do, you know, from the stalk, with the flowers, the petals at the top, but with the stalks high up, and the flowers down. And that's apparently typical of Eastern Europeans. When Navarro interviewed him, he said, we caught you, it was the flowers.

And the guy at that point admitted that he was the spy. Because he just knows those are the kinds of things that are such big giveaways. So sometimes it just helps to just know something about a different culture. You know what this reminds me of, dude? Have you seen inglorious bastards? Remember the long scene where the Nazis are talking

and they're talking with an American officer? It's just really tense scene. And the way that he counted with his fingers, he was like, that's an American or that's a Nazi. I can't remember who gets caught. But you count differently because in America, we don't use our thumb for one. We use our pointer finger for one.

And in Germany, I don't know how it is in the UK, you use your thumb for one, two, three. You do it totally differently. Watching that movie played with my head a bit because I remember afterwards thinking, well, how do I do it? Do I even know how to count? What do I do with these fingers and stuff?

That's why it's what you could tell, right? Because the guy probably went, I don't know, I'm not going to think about how I'm going to hold a frigging bouquet of flowers. He just did it the way he's, always did it growing up, and since he grew up in whatever, Czechoslovakia, they were upside down. Yeah, there you go. I love that. That's that point about being unobserved when somebody feels that they are unobserved or in this case is unaware of the thing that somebody is observing about you,

the way you hold your flowers, the way you put your fingers up. But yeah, the whole thing, body language is not an exact science, but that's the best we can really do for now. There is talk, and I find this quite exciting, of, and scary, of mind reading in the future, which is pretty scary. But there are these amazing YouTube videos. videos by Professor Jack Gallant and Yale Dean Dr. Marvin Chun, where they use fMRI scans to show on a screen what a patient is thinking. And you can actually see the video footage of like their dreams and thoughts. Dr. Chun explained to me on my podcast that it's a bit primitive right now. And that's because fMRI scanners can only go so deep. They can't yet isolate individual neurons.

But once we develop a scanner that can go deeper into the brain, we might be able to actually really read in real time what people are thinking. It's funny you mentioned this. We just did a show on this with Nita Farahani. And she talked about how brain machine interfaces aren't going to be something that you need implanted in your skull. It's going to be something that, you know how you walk through a metal detector at the airport?

It could be as simple as that, or it could be as simple as aiming a device at somebody, like how we can listen to sound in a room by aiming a laser at a window. That's really down the pipe. Right now, you might have to wear a watch or a headband and it's primitive, but in 10 or 20 years, it could be you're just walking in the airport

and they can see that you're a terrorist because they can see what you're thinking. It's only a matter of time. So then all this body language stuff won't matter at all, or at least for law enforcement, because they'll be able to put you in a room and go, we know that you can see the dead body in your head right now, and so you were there,

and so you're under arrest, and that's it, and it'll be evidence, and you won't even have to say anything. But it's about as fascinating as it is horrifying. We talked about this on the show as well with Nita Farahani. It's like a real life, minority report. And then you got to decide whether to put people in prison for thought

crime, which again, very Orwellian, not as Orwellian as face crime, or maybe it is the same level of Orwellian-ness. But if you know somebody who really wants to murder somebody else, what do you think? You just let them do it? We knew that was going to happen, but we had to wait until it did. The future is really just a confusing mess. Going back to body language, we know it's very difficult to read and that we can't tell too much from it right now. But FBI agents and other experts still kind of do use it for whatever advantage they can get from it. What kind of things are they looking out for besides upside down flowers? Besides upside down flowers, sounds like a radio head song or something.

It does. Veteran FBI agent Mark Bouton and writer of How to Spot Lies like the FBI looks out for a bunch of signs of deception in the people that he interrogates. Again, he emphasizes that it's important to look out for signs beforehand and while you make small talk to see what their usual, their baseline reactions are. One sign is eyes darting back and forward when a suspect feels uncomfortable.

That's apparently an indicator the suspect is looking for ways to avoid answering the question in a way that'll get him or her in trouble. Rapid blinking is another. So Bhutan says to watch out for people blinking five or six times in succession. That seems a little cartoonish some of this stuff. Surely we're all thinking,

all right, don't dart your eyes back and forward. Don't blink seven times before giving an answer. And maybe you can control it sometimes, maybe not all the time, but for God's sake, wouldn't you relax a little bit? Take a friggin' volume before you go in there? Yeah. And it seems impossible to just go off of those indicators. To make matters worse, people with conditions like Parkinson's blink slower.

Other conditions like schizophrenia make you blink at a faster rate. So there's so much to consider. Bhutan also claims that right-handed people, People often look to the right. Right-handed people also look down and to their right when lying about smells or sensations. It's all very hard to prove, but seems to be part of the FBI handbook. So you'd think it has some use. And then there's language without the body. So the words we use. Some of this gets a little wishy-washy and we get into the realms of French psychologist, Jacques Lacan. He believes our words unconsciously reveal our secrets. And I'm a linguist, so I'm fascinated by this stuff.

I found this great website by psychoanalyst Owen Hewitson devoted to Lacan. And Hewitson uses Lacan's methods to analyze the victory speech of Lance Armstrong before he was caught and disqualified for doping. This is the cyclist. And he notes that Armstrong apologizes three times when he says, for the people who don't believe in cycling, the cynics and the skeptics, I'm sorry for you. I'm sorry you can't dream big.

And I'm sorry you don't believe. There are no secrets. And it turns out, spoiler alert, there were some secrets. Yes, he had good reason to be sorry. It's why he kept saying sorry if we're to go along with the Lacan theory because he was actually guilty that he was doping. Now, that's a little psychological and theoretical. But Dr. Lieberman, going back to him,

he speaks of how interrogators might use our choice of words to catch us out. We'll use personal pronouns like I, me and my, when we're taking ownership of something with integrity, but distance ourselves from those pronouns when we feel on less steady ground. These are all things to look out for, and when combined with body language analysis and a long study of the suspect's normal or unobserved behavior,

it might give us some clues. It must be kind of a thrill, too, to be able to learn to use these observations and then actually spot them in the field, actually grilling someone, just totally sure that they're lying, and then they conjure up some lie about a smell or whatever, and they're looking down and they're looking to the right.

As long as we account for any confirmation biases and we're careful not to mount an entire case based on body language alone, which I would imagine is easy to do from a legal perspective because you need more evidence than that. But tough, once the police decide you're guilty, they're just going to start looking for evidence to corroborate that. Oh, absolutely.

And I agree. I can't think of much. That's more satisfying than you've got this big plan and you see someone look a certain way and you're like, aha, now I know they did it. And I wonder if that's why confirmation bias is such a concern. You've learned all this body language stuff for years, and you feel like you can see exactly what you learned.

The fruits of your labor in the people you're interviewing, it probably is quite thrilling and exciting, and you can see how it might lead to overzealous agents discounting some of the more boring physical evidence in favor of this psychological body language stuff. Face touching, pursed lips, excessive sweating, blushing and shaking one's head while talking are some of the other signs

that detectives look out for. Should we try it out on you? Sure. Okay, so is your name Jordan? Yes. Okay, so that's your normal face. I mean, unfortunately, yes. Okay, do you respect and love your listeners?

Of course I do. Oh, was that the slightest hint of rouge I see creeping across that handsome face? Of course, I'm just kidding. I think body language is undoubtedly a thing, a real thing with real consequences in the world. And there's that marketing philosophy where you can never predict how one person is going to act, but you can often predict how many will act. Humans in great numbers tend to be quite predictable, which is why some of these body language tells are relevant.

But when you pluck one person from the crowd, the prediction becomes extremely difficult. Right. It's just a little higher than a coin to us. But in any case, I'd still recommend not blinking or looking to the right while you read out your sponsors today. A Jordan Harbin, poker face is incoming for the sponsor breaks. Thanks, Andrew, for that journey into the truth about body language on today's Skeptical Sunday. It looks like the rise in courses supposedly teaching body language is leading to a rise in people who watch these courses and then think that they're experts in it. And so I think it's good to be able to give that concept of body language and basically mind reading a healthy dose of skepticism. Thank you all for listening. Any suggestions for future

Skeptical Sunday, feel free to fire them at me. Jordan atjordanher.com. Give me your thoughts. A link to the show notes for the episode can be found at Jordan Harbinger.com. Transcripts in the show notes. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And you can find Andrew Gold on his podcast, On the Edge with Andrew Gold. Anywhere you get your podcasts. This show is created an association with podcast one.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Ian Baird, Millie Ocampo, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. do your own research before implementing anything you hear on this show. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love, and if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who needs to hear it. Maybe somebody who believes all the body language stuff they see on YouTube.

In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on this show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. Hey, all, quick favor here. We pour our heart and soul into finding the best sponsors for the show. I hear feedback from you all the time about the sponsors. It is quite challenging behind the scenes, and your support means the world to us and helps keep us going. We need your help completing a survey at Jordan Harbinger.com slash survey. For the first 150 participants, we're offering a $10 digital Amazon gift card.

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Here's what you should check out next on the Jordan Harbinger show. Chase Manhattan Bank robbery. I'm a second negotiated on a phone. Hugh McGowan is a commander of the NYPD team. He puts me on a phone, and he takes this guy off. He says, you're up, you're next. This is what I want you to do. You're just going to take over the phone and say you're talking to me now.

And we're going to do it really abruptly. My point is to get a hostage out, which is what the hostage negotiator is supposed to do. And somebody hands me a note and says, ask him if he wants to come out. That was somebody that was listening. My friend, Jamie, Jamie Sedanio. Jamie's sitting there and something in Jamie's instincts is telling him that this guy wants to come out more than anything else. He just hears it. And he writes, ask him if he wants to come out.

I see a note pop in front of my face. So I go, do you want to come out? And there's a long silence on the other end of the line. And the guy says, I don't know how I do that. Which is a great big giant, yes. Yeah. Everybody goes like, holy cow, okay, get him out of there. I'm talking, I'm talking.

I'm talking. Again, probably about, I don't know, maybe half an hour later. No note comes in my hand. I don't know where it's from. As it turns out, it's from Jamie again. And the note says, tell him you meet him outside. And I say, tell him, I'm at him. How about this?

how about if I meet you out front of the bank and he goes Yeah I'm ready to end the shit I get out there I get on the PA I start talking to him So I say hi it's Chris I'm out here Standard operating procedure Is the barricade the exit

From the outside So bad guy suddenly doesn't run away So SWAT has barricaded the bank from the outside Which everyone has forgotten So I'm trying to talk this guy out the door We don't know how many bad guys are inside. We don't know how they're going to react. We don't know what the hell's going to happen.

He comes to the door. Oh, God. That would be rattles the door. He was like, ah. He's nervous, right? I mean, no crap. I'm trapped in here now. Yeah, and on the opposite, we go, nah, what do we do?

We forgot to unlock the door. And our bad guy is kind of like, oh, you want to play games with me, huh? For more from FBI hostage negotiator, Chris Voss, including negotiation and persuasion tips, along with a few crazy stories, check out episode 165 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger

show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact, questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not, the through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews

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