Truth and Lies

What People Are Really Thinking

Mark Bowden, Tracey Thomson

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781443452106
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Skills
• Index: Business

National bestseller

A fresh, insightful guide to reading body language in the post-digital age

Whether you're at a job interview or a cocktail party, searching LinkedIn or swiping right on a dating site, you want (no— need ) to understand what people are really thinking, regardless of what they're saying. Understanding what others are trying to tell you with their posture, hand gestures, eye contact (or lack thereof) or incessant fiddling with their iPhone might all be even more important than what you're projecting yourself. Do they plan on making a deal with your company? Are they lying to you? Can you trust this person with your most intimate secrets? Knowing what others are thinking can tell you when to run with an opportunity and when not to waste your time, whether at work, in a crucial negotiation or on a promising first date.

Bestselling authors Mark Bowden and Tracey Thomson, principals at the communications company Truthplane, illustrate the essential points of body language with examples from everyday life, leavened with humour and insights that you can use to your advantage in virtually any situation.

Part One

Genuine Deceptions

I can read you like a book!

—All of us

Imagine a world where no one can pull the wool over your eyes. Think about the power you would have if you could detect someone’s deepest, innermost thoughts regardless of what they were saying to you. Living your life where the truth of the matter would always be in plain sight for you. No secret subtext. No covert conversations. Nothing ever left unsaid to you. No mystery. No mistakes. No mess. What a wonderful possibility.

But isn’t this just a fantasy? Every time you click on the link to yet another article that baits you with the promise of teaching you how to discern what is really going on in other people’s heads, are you already being lied to?

In order to interpret what someone is really thinking by analyzing their body language, there are truths you need to know first.

1

Body Language Lies

LET’S GET STARTED by giving you the most all-encompassing and powerful truth about reading body language, while revealing its greatest lie: You cannot read body language.

Live nonverbal communication, or body language, is a human communication system, although it is not technically a language in the dictionary sense of the word, like English, Greek, Yoruba, Cree or Mandarin are. It lacks many of the most important factors common to spoken languages; for one, live nonverbal communication does not lend itself to displacement—language’s ability to describe something that is either not here at all or not here right now. We cannot rely on nonverbal communication to clearly describe a concept such as democracy; nor can we expect nonverbal communication to tell us that the neighbor’s cat has been missing since last Tuesday.

Additionally, live nonverbal communication does not allow reflexiveness, which is a language’s ability to talk about itself; it would be an impossible undertaking to give a nod to your own future nod and for anyone to get that nod about the upcoming nodding.

Body language is the communication system that displays behaviors elicited in response to the environment, the experience and interpretation of which can differ from country to country and between cultures and people. These nonverbal behaviors can certainly communicate our feelings and intentions in the moment. And although body language is a physical response to our complex environment, it also has the capability of affecting it.

Hang on, you might say—what about all those books and articles and videos and documentaries about reading body language? There are certainly excellent books, experiments, research, scholarly articles, online talks and documentaries about this topic. However, whether online or off, we have taken to using the analogy that nonverbal communication is like a language in order to make it simpler and within our reach when making decisions about how to respond to others’ behaviors.

This reductionist approach to the complexities and many nuances within body language can help us understand the motives underlying a vast and complicated array of nonverbal signals. With this approach, sometimes we get it right, and the motives informing some physical actions turn out to be what we deduced. So the simplicity works when we make the right decisions. But often this simplistic approach leads us to the wrong conclusions—when we judge another’s body language within the framework of believing it really is a language, with consistent rules for translatability, we can really get ourselves into trouble.

Our trouble is not transcended in the online world but exacerbated. Online, where we increasingly spend our time, the multitude of ideas and advice have further chance to become confused. Our engagement in the Internet of ideas results in our online world mashing up the real-world intricacies of nonverbal meaning into a simple clickbait of instant help and quick fix.

In our online world, technology puts in our hands the power to play with the boundaries of what body language is ordinarily capable of. Through photos and video, a moment or sequence of body language signs can exist in myriad future contexts and so can appear to be capable of displacement. Social media platforms such as Facebook allow us to repost images of ourselves from years before and make new comments on them. Though it may seem that the body language moment is happening now, in fact it happened hours, days, weeks or decades previously. These images are always up for interpretation, and so perhaps not surprisingly, when we post an image of ourselves, we are overwhelmingly keen to control that interpretation, to guide the viewer to see us in the way we would like to be seen. This holds true whether it is our online profile picture, a Snapchat share, our YouTube channel or our personal or company branding.

As viewers, we strive to understand the meaning of the images we see of others, and as creators of our own images, we attempt to control how we are seen in the present and future by the online world at large. So it’s no wonder we are attracted to the easy-to-understand, one-size-fits-all general ideas about the meanings of body language, as this makes it easier and quicker for us to fit ourselves and others into simple classifications and categories. In addition, we may not often distinguish between the meanings of body language we encounter in person versus online. We mix and confuse the two, which can lead us to make some poor judgments.

Much of the popular thinking on body language, in keeping with the simplistic concept of translatability, follows an “if this, then that” rationale. It creates a set of absolute rules around gestures, the like of which we’ve all heard time and time again. For example: “Their arms are crossed—they are closed to me.” “He rubbed his nose—he is definitely lying.” “She crossed her leg toward me—she is so into me.”

While there are certainly times when those readings and interpretations prove to be true, what is generally overlooked is the impact of the essential factor of context—the actual situation in which the communication occurs. That is, how does context frame the particular nonverbal actions we witness and therefore influence our interpretation of what someone may be thinking?

Let’s look more closely at the example of the body language gesture and its widely accepted popular translation: crossed arms = the person is closed to you. We hear this rule and we think it makes sense. Crossing arms creates a barrier, thereby closing off the body in a defensive posture, intentionally or unconsciously blocking us off and closing us out.

For the most part, we have been happy to run with the easy-to-understand assumption of crossed arms meaning a person is closed to us. It is easy to see how this simple “if this, then that” idea gained momentum and became mainstream folklore—and ultimately authoritative “fact” and tacit “truth.” The jewel left in the dust is any mention of the context in which this line of interpretation may or may not be accurate.

Context is critical when interpreting body language. Going back to our example, people cross their arms for a multitude of context-specific reasons other than being closed to us personally or to our ideas. Perhaps they’re in a cold environment and crossing their arms as a barrier to the cold, or it’s midafternoon and they’re tired, so they’re holding their arms high and tense to keep themselves alert. Maybe they’re on their own at a singles bar, feeling vulnerable and therefore giving themselves a self-soothing hug. Or they could be in an important work meeting, concentrating by closing down activity in the hands and arms to direct energy and attention to thinking. So while they may be trying to remain in control, and they may be blocking unwanted stimuli, and they may look closed, just maybe—our point here—they may not actually be closed or blocking us or our idea at that moment.

We all tend to interpret situations in terms of our own frame of reference, as an expression of our egocentric perspective. In the words of Aaron T. Beck, regarded as the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, with added stress or when we perceive a threat in a situation, as happens constantly as we negotiate our day-to-day lives, our self-centered thinking goes into overdrive, and out of “the multiple patterns contributing to another person’s behavior, we select a single strand that may affect us personally.”¹ In other words, we tend to focus on and magnify just one aspect of what we observe from someone else and jump to a conclusion about what they intend toward us that is potentially incorrect. We take someone’s behavior as being about us, regardless of whether it is or not.

We also need to remember that making simple transactional deductions cannot effectively manage the reality of our everyday communications in shifting contexts, where the outcome of the last interaction is never necessarily the outcome of the next selfsame one. Just because someone crosses their arms and you deduce that they are closed to you—and it turns out to be true on this particular occasion—that doesn’t mean that the next time you see this sign, either from them or anyone else, they too are closed to you. What was right the last time may not be right the next.

This complexity in human behavior demands a more nuanced set of tools, to enable us to more accurately make the right calls when interpreting body language. We must adopt a more intelligent approach.

2

Powerful Thinking

WHEN THINGS GET COMPLEX, the last thing we should do is create a complicated system to deal with the situation. Nor is it entirely useful to produce a lexicon of overly simplified or generalized rules to help us form conclusions.

Instead, we have created a unique, easy-to-learn process for recognizing and interpreting body language that requires employing mindfulness as well as critical thinking. If you follow our approach, you will think smart and fast every time you assess another’s body language, whatever the situation. You will come up with more accurate judgments, a more accurate theory of mind—the attribution of mental states (feelings, intentions, beliefs and so on) to others and to yourself, and recognize that these may differ—and so more often get a handle on the truth.

This process of more intelligently assessing nonverbal signs is ultimately based on two simple premises, one about body language and the other about our brains: (1) All body language is a display of power or a response to a display of power. And (2) your brain doesn’t know anything for sure about someone else’s true thoughts and intentions by reading body language; it just makes assumptions and delivers corresponding judgments.

BODY LANGUAGE AS A DISPLAY OF POWER

By power we mean any force, be it physical, psychological, environmental, sociological or otherwise.

Every gesture, movement, signal or sound we make is a response, conscious or unconscious, to our overall interior and exterior environments. These gestural responses, our “body language,” cover everything from how we stand, sit, smile or frown to how we position our heads, hands, shoulders, torso, legs and feet. All our gestures and combinations of gestures can indicate our inner emotional, cognitive and physical responses to power as we experience it in our environments, be it the power of other individuals, of the community, of the physical environment or of our internal emotional or physical states. Our body language can instruct others, tell the tale or lay clues as to how we intersect on a moment-by-moment basis with that power—often a roller-coaster ride of feeling peaceful, resentful, fearful, happy, angry, sad and so on. Also, our body language can show what we want in relation to that power: whether we wish to control it or go along for the ride. We display our feelings and our desires consciously or unconsciously, and these displays in turn have an effect on the environment.

Therefore, our physical behavior displays the constant interplay of power, between us and everything around and within us. Our conscious and unconscious actions keep us in a balance of power within our world for our security, comfort, pleasure, hopes, dreams and beliefs.

Everything we do has a bearing on this power play.

Remember how in Paul’s story the murderer initially reacted to the institutional power of the law? He showed his disdain and lack of submission to that power by giving body language signals that displayed contempt. And Paul, recognizin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Genuine Deceptions
• Part Two: Dating
• Part Three: Friends and Family
• Part Four: Working Life
• Summary
• Bonus Bluff
• Learn more
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Authors
• Praise for Truth & Lies
• Also by Mark Bowden
• Copyright
• About the Publisher