Disgust
Disgust is often mistaken for anger. If somebody starts displaying subtle signs of disgust, like a small wrinkle in the nose, it is probably a sign that the emotion was only just triggered. You should try to respond to it immediately, in a subtle way, without mentioning what you’ve seen. You could ask if the person felt unfairly treated and if there’s something you can do to work it out. Don’t get defensive, because that can make the disgust explode completely. You should wait to give your arguments until the other person has finished talking. It’s important not to let this one lie and to try to turn this emotional state around at any cost. It’s difficult, because the triggers for disgust are deeply embedded within us. But you should remember Gottman’s research in the Love Lab—if you can’t manage to turn the disgust around, your relationship could be doomed.
Contempt
If somebody shows signs of contempt, it could be indicative of contempt for himself, contempt for whatever you’re discussing, or contempt for you as a person. If you suspect it may be directed at you, the best thing to do is actually to leave things be. It could be the good old contempt from inferiority that is sometimes displayed by employees for their bosses, by students for their teachers, and by children for their parents. Or it could be that the person reckons he knows more about what you’re discussing and that you’re completely wrong.
The person displaying contempt feels he is superior to you. This situation is unfortunately very difficult to turn around, no matter how good you are at establishing rapport. The best thing to do is actually to avoid this person from now on, if possible. If it’s a personal relationship, it won’t be any good for you anyway. If it’s somebody you have to face regularly in work situations or other settings, and whose decisions affect your work, it’s best to let somebody else propose your ideas and suggestions in those meetings. You could also see if there is anybody else who holds the same position, somebody you can communicate with directly to get the results you want.
A Little Repetition
You have come a long way on your path as a mind reader. It’s time for a break now, to think about all the things you’ve learned. You’ve learned to identify a diverse range of signs in unconscious, wordless communication. You’ve learned to adapt to somebody else’s way of communicating within these different areas, to be able to establish a good relationship on cue. You’ve learned to use this relationship to effect positive change in other people’s behavior and attitudes. You’ve learned to identify different primary senses in different people. You’ve learned about the differences that the various primary senses make to people’s thoughts, speech, and understanding. You’ve learned to recognize subtle changes in the facial muscles, changes that reveal the various emotional states people are heading into, and how this will alter their experience of your meeting. You’ve learned how to deflect negative emotions when required.
You’ve learned all these things. In theory at least.
My suggestion now is for you to go make sure you’ve learned all of these things in the practical sense, too. Put the book away. Head out into the world to practice mind reading, and keep at it! The second half of this book presumes that you are able to do everything you’ve read about up to this point. To give you some extra motivation, I will relate a brief story from real life, which should hopefully make it clear to you what a difference knowing how to use these techniques can make.
6
It’s Never Too Late
A MORAL TALE ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF READING MINDS
An interlude in which I tell you what can happen
when you use—or don’t use—your mind-reading skills.
A year or so ago, I was the emcee at a one-day conference. Several different seminars were taking place at once, all with different schedules, so there was a lot to do and I was soon very busy. I arrived at lunch quite a bit later than the other participants. I noticed a man who was sitting alone, still eating, and sat down with him. As I sat down I began to tell him about a funny incident that had occurred earlier in the day. I broke off abruptly when I saw the man’s reaction: he was staring at me with an expression of extreme disapproval. I felt like an insect under his gaze. I could have let it go right there and eaten my lunch in silence, but I wasn’t just the emcee—I was going to be performing later that evening. And I thought it would be a bad idea for me to let any of the audience members turn against me this early in the day.
I realized that I had committed a cardinal sin by not paying attention to who was actually sitting at that table, not proper attention. I had just gone ahead and started talking about myself without bothering to find out whom I was talking to. Now that I took a look at the man, I could see that he had all the classic attributes of kinesthesia: he was powerfully built, wearing a flannel shirt, and even had a beard. The fact that he was sitting and eating on his own supported my observation, because I estimated that it was because he ate slower than the others, at the pace of a kinesthetic. And there I had been, rushing in to try to interest him in an extremely visual anecdote. It wasn’t any real surprise that things had gone wrong.
So I sat there eating my food for a few minutes, while I began establishing rapport by following his body language and tempo (which was, predictably enough, much slower than mine). When I noticed that the lowered, contracted eyebrows he had displayed when he stared at me had gone away, I asked him a few control questions to see if he really was kinesthetic, while my voice followed the tempo of his movements. I asked if he was enjoying his food and what he thought about the conference. After that, I repeated the same story again. But this time I made an effort to use a different range of words when I told it and to accentuate the elements I suspected he would find the most important. I no longer described the beautiful curve an object had followed as it sailed through the air. On the other hand, I put great weight on how it felt when the object made impact with the back of my head. Yes, I know—it shouldn’t make any difference, according to the research we discussed earlier. But I did it anyway. This time the story was a success. By the end of our lunch, we were getting on very well.
This must have looked very odd to anyone looking on, because superficially there was no great difference. The first time I told him something, I was met with an angry glare. A short while later I repeated the same thing and was rewarded with approval instead.
I had used my knowledge of rapport, sensory impressions, and subtle expressions of emotion to change an uncomfortable situation into a good relationship, in just a few seconds. I just stopped thinking about myself and paid attention to the other guy for a while. It’s never too late to establish some rapport, not even when things have started off on the wrong foot. This was fortunate, because it turned out that the man I had met was the managing director of the company that had hired me for the day.
How did it go again?
If I am the same as you, you will understand and like me.
If you like me, you will want to agree with me.
7
Be a Human Lie Detector
CONTRADICTORY SIGNS AND WHAT THEY MEAN
In which you learn to recognize signs of pressure in people, and a student gives us the finger.
In this chapter and in the next, I want to discuss two special cases of “practical wordless communication.” There are some unconscious signs that we only display in certain situations. For instance, chapter 8 will be about attraction. You’ll be amazed at what your unconscious mind gets up to when it believes it has found a suitable match for your genes (i.e., an interesting hottie). But before then, we’ll take a look at a different interesting topic—the changes that can be seen in our wordless communication when we try to lie to someone.
As a mind reader it is important, naturally, to be able to tell when somebody is lying to you. You’ve already learned to identify a certain kind of false sign, since you learned to tell a faked facial expression from a genuine one. However, as you’ll see, when it comes to lies, we’ve barely scratched the su
rface.
The easiest way for us to lie is with our words, since that is what we’ve been practicing all of our lives. We are a little less good at lying with our facial expressions, although we’ve had a bit of practice in this area, too. The thing we’re the worst at is lying with our bodies. Most of us probably haven’t even thought of the fact that our bodies actually “speak” a lot. So it’s ironic that we pay the most attention to what somebody is saying to us, and give that person’s facial expression less weight.
If we suspect that somebody might be lying to us, we will concentrate even more on what is being said—when we ought to be doing the opposite. If we want to know what somebody is really telling us, we should care less about the words that are spoken and more about whatever he is expressing with the rest of his body and with his tone of voice.
But can you actually tell when somebody’s lying? Yes. And no. We can detect certain signs that are displayed for a certain kind of lie, which involves a certain level of emotional stress. So what we will usually see is that somebody is stressed or nervous, rather than that he is lying per se. But sometimes these signs are all we need to deduce that somebody is telling untruths. There are also some signs that only appear when somebody is lying. The trick is finding them.
Some people are very good at telling when somebody is trying to fool them with a lie, and others never learn to do it. And, of course, some people are born liars and don’t show any leakage at all (the best ones tend to be psychopaths), while others can’t even lie about how many donuts they’ve eaten without giving themselves away. We’re all different, but most of us display several of these signs, and most of us can improve our skills at identifying them.
What Is a Lie?
The art of lie detection fascinates many people, especially those of us that work in the police, military, and courts. Since the classic lie-detector machine, the polygraph, is often unreliable,1 people conducting research into lies (one of whom is Paul Ekman, mentioned earlier) have spent a lot of effort on identifying the signs that could reveal a lie. They’ve made some good progress. But what do we really mean when we use the word “lie”?
Most of us lie all the time, in the sense that what we say doesn’t accurately represent the true state of affairs. Our social rules presuppose a large number of trivial lies. If we’re asked, “How are you doing?” we’ll often answer, “Fine, thanks, and you?” even when we feel anything but fine. We know that the person who asked the question isn’t actually interested in a detailed description of our state and is simply using it as a phrase of greeting.
In some situations, we’re expected to lie and display something other than our true feelings. In a beauty pageant, it’s OK for the winner to cry and be emotional, while the runners up have to show how happy they are for the winner and be strong about their loss. If they would all show how they really felt, we’d probably get to see the finalists in tears and the winner shrieking with laughter and happiness. To hide your emotions, or to pretend to feel something other than what you really do feel, is another form of lying.
Of course, we’re not interested in these kinds of permissible lies. The kind of lies that interest us occur when somebody lies in a context that isn’t socially or culturally permitted and when the motive for lying is personal gain. This also means that the lie has to be a conscious one, so the liar has to know that what she is saying doesn’t correctly describe reality. Remember, a lie can be a claim, but it can also be a matter of which emotions we display or don’t. If I tell you I won a tennis match that I actually lost, I’m lying to you. But if I display happiness in my actions and with my facial expression when I am really sad, I’m lying, too.
When somebody lies, there’s always a reward and/or a punishment involved, which is the reason for the lie. You lie to get a reward you wouldn’t get otherwise, or to avoid a punishment you’re about to be given. It could also be a combination of these: you lie to get a reward you’re not really entitled to, somebody’s appreciation for instance, but if the lie is discovered, you could be punished for it when the other person ends the relationship.
Contradictory Signs
The detectable signs of a lie are displayed when the reward or punishment involved isn’t trivial, so there is actually something at stake for the person lying, and she really cares if her lie is successful or not. Then the person trying to lie will also be emotionally invested in the lie, and it’s this commitment to the lie that gives rise to many of the signs a mind reader will be looking for. Identifying the signs is one thing, but then the problem of knowing what they mean still remains.
In any lie, there are two competing messages: the truth and the falsehood. The word “lie” focuses on the falsehood, but both are actually just as important. The ability to tell them apart is important, too. Since we are always giving off different messages in all of our communications, not just with our words, a lie is actually a more-or-less-successful attempt at controlling these messages. Just as can be the case with some facial expressions, a lie is an attempt at covering up or masking a certain message beneath another one. Being able to tell when somebody’s lying is a matter of paying attention to the elements of our communication that we’re not so good at controlling. A person who tells the truth expresses the same thing with her consciously controlled communication as she does with her unconscious expressions. But if we can detect some disharmony in what is expressed, between what the hands and the words are communicating, for instance, we may suspect that there are two different messages involved. We look for contradictory signs, unconscious signs that say something other than the consciously expressed message. The signs that are difficult for us to control express our true thoughts and feelings.
Evolutionary psychologist Robert Trivers has a solution to this problem for those who want to be able to lie freely. The trick is simply to convince yourself that your lie is true! Then, all the signs, conscious as well as unconscious, will genuinely be expressing a single message. It won’t catch up with you until it’s time to eat that last cookie you hid and swore you’d never stolen—since you no longer believe you took it.
The unconscious, contradictory signs a liar displays are called leakage. When somebody lies, or tries to keep feelings from us, there will be leakage in a number of different areas. But you have to be careful: some people don’t display any leakage at all, however much they lie. So you can’t interpret a lack of leakages as a guarantee that somebody is telling the truth. There are also some people who we believe are displaying leakage but who are actually just behaving normally. Because of this, it’s important to know that the signs you do detect are changes in somebody’s behavior, not just the way she always behaves. You should make a point of noticing several different kinds of leakage in somebody before deciding that she is or isn’t lying or holding back her emotions.
Once you’ve observed a number of contradictory signs in somebody, that could mean that he’s lying to you, but it could also mean that he actually feels some other emotion than the one he is trying to display. Often you won’t have any problems deciding what the situation is. The context in which the signs are observed make it clear to you.
You should also remember that even though you’ve noticed several of these signs, you don’t necessarily know what caused them. As you will soon see, they can be caused by completely different things other than the fact that the person is lying. You might see lots of leakage in somebody, but they could be due to something he just thought of that has nothing to do with your conversation. When you discover these signs in somebody, your next step is to consider the context and any other possible reasons there could be for the behavior, before you can confidently say that somebody is lying.
Why Are You Scratching Your Nose?
Contradictory Signs in Body Language
The most obvious of all of these contradictory signs is given by the body’s own autonomic nervous system. We have no ability to control it, even if we discover we are displaying signs through it. It’s very d
ifficult, if not impossible, to stop sweating or blushing on cue, or to avoid having your pupils dilate when you get a winning hand at the poker table. The problem is that the autonomic nervous system is only activated when the emotions are very strong. Fortunately, there are loads of other signs and leakage, which appear even when the emotions aren’t so strong.
The Face
It is often said that a face carries two messages: what we want to project and what we actually think. Sometimes they are one and the same, but they often aren’t. When we try to control the message we project, we do it in three ways:
Qualification We comment on the facial expression we have by adding another one to it. For instance, adding a smile to an otherwise miserable expression to show everybody that we’ll pull through.
Modulate We change the intensity of the expression to weaken or strengthen it. We do this by controlling the number of muscles involved (as we do when we display a partial facial expression), how much we use those muscles (as we do when we display a complete but low-intensity, that is, a slight, expression), and for how long we display the expression.
Falsification We can display an emotion when we’re not actually feeling anything (simulation). We can attempt to not reveal anything when we’re actually feeling something (neutralization). Or we can cover up the emotion we’re feeling with another emotion that we aren’t feeling (masking).
* * *
To be able to pretend to have an emotion in a convincing way, we need to know how to express it, that is, which muscles to use, and how to use them. Children and adolescents practice this by making faces in front of the mirror, but we tend to stop doing this as we grow older. For this reason, we sometimes have a bad idea of how we actually look when we’re expressing various things. Often we won’t have time to prepare, either, and will have to base the look on how it feels inside, and hope we’ll get close enough.
The Art of Reading Minds Page 12