With the breakthrough in neuroscience since the 1990 – 2000 called the “Decade of the Brain” Science has provided us a clearer representation of what the unspoken signs and signals mean, because we now know how the brain develops non-verbal cues. It is therefore important as a science to teach investigators & interrogators to understand what it means to be human being.
Body language is a part in sociology, psychology, anthropology, psychiatric, and human relationship. A good understanding of it helps investigators to avoid in certain cases a judgmental attitude in an investigation but to display a more sympathetic & understanding approach. On the other hand successful investigators have the ability to play many roles & wear different masks and this is possible if we learn to use body language effectively.
Body language is more natural and reliable than words; it therefore helps in arriving at a conclusion of guilt versus innocence by observing the pattern of physiological responding. But I do tell my participants that body language can be overstated, untrustworthy, lessened and so on and the tricky part, that is in some instance, we never really know if that part of body language is bona fide and spontaneous or manipulative. That’s why we need to stick to rules in interpreting and let your intuition guide.
Investigation is an art & science, it should be developed, and good investigators are not born. Medical science, to date, has not discovered the investigating gene. Instead this skill is a product of a genuine understanding and the observation of human nature and the use of other techniques.
As I tell investigators that their primary purpose is the achieving an outcome or purpose, arriving at the truth, through not only developing analytical skills but through observing others, and that body language skills helps not only in detecting deception from body signals or bodily cues, it helps to show concern for their feelings, anxieties, understand people and their behavior & knowing how liars do & do not give themselves away but at the same time it helps them to be other oriented and attentive to the body language of the other to help get what they want with the minimum resistance and in the most humanitarian way.
In my body language course, I teach NLP or Nuero Lilnguistic Programming techniques, the creating of rapport through matching and mirroring that is matching physiology through body posture, gesture, eyes movement, breathing pattern, including muscular relaxation and tension, the building of trust, understanding thinking preference and understanding the science of eye movement cues. In rapport words alone is not enough while words can create rapport it can also cause negative feelings or break rapport. The accompanying body language by the investigator is what total communication is all about; it helps getting the outcome.
The other thing I teach is how to determine thinking preference or preferred representation. Two “Visualizers” for example are likely to get along better then a visualizer and a kinesthetic person in an investigation or conversation. Likewise,
two people with an auditory preference, probably naturally good listeners, and with similar timing and clarity of speech, will get along fine. But you can also create rapport by being aware of a preference, and ‘mirroring’ the physiological characteristics of the other person, even if your own preferred representation system is different.
A suspect seated in an investigation is unlikely to be aware of this mirroring of their body posture, as it is an unconscious, natural way to express rapport. The mirroring might also include speech, pitch and tone of voice. Rapport is more likely to be due to a common way of sensing and thinking, rather than the content of thought or the subject of communication. But mirroring is also a skill that can be learned, and certainly one that expert investigators practice because the very act of mirroring can be telepathic you can sometimes just ‘read’ or know what your opponent is thinking which helps greatly in an investigation.
An important information for investigators is that spoken language is processed in your left side of your brain where else body language is processed in your right side of your brain. Rightly we use more right handed gestures that play to our left visual field and into our right brain, this understanding helps in an investigation especially in seating strategies.
Eye movements or eye accessing cues is another important technique where right or left handed people are wired up differently. It can help the investigator determine which thinking sense is been used to determine truthfulness.
Body language can be deciphered (decoded)
I teach my participants rules in interpreting body language because we can easily misinterpret, we confuse anxiety to deception, fear to surprise, contemplation to disagreement and so forth.
There is no such thing as reading a person like a book. You have to look out for a cluster or patterns of behavior. You have to understand the context as it is vital for understanding all messages, especially body language. You must look out for congruency of actions that is if the behaviors match the words. Lastly you must understand the culture of the person you interpret.
My experiences with the Government agencies & the Police Force.
In June 2004, I trained customs enforcement officers in Indonesia. I taught them the type of drugs used by observing the pupils of a suspect; As pupil dilation and its constriction depend on the type of drugs used. I did not know that soon after my training an African drug pusher was arrested in the Airport in Jakarta when one of my trainee apprehended him after seeing his drugged eyes and facial expression. I felt very pleased, when this was related to me by the Indonesian customs authorities.
In Malaysia I have participants who relate in class when they attend my advance course of the experiences they have in putting to use many of their new found knowledge. There was this Commander from the Malaysia Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) who applied his new skill in narrowing down suspects and eventually catching the culprit, his rousing story to the class not only encouraged participants to apply what they learn but has inspired me to continuously strive for excellence in my trainings.
My intermediate courses are 5 days long, my advance course is another 3 days where participants come back after a week or so to go through vigorous activities, workshops and group case studies.
One of the highlights of the seminar is when they learn to detect deception through interesting role-plays with group participation in detecting liars and smugglers. A workshop in which smugglers carry “Dangerous drugs” in a mock up play with a highly motivated situation where the group which apprehends the most ‘smugglers’ win prizes. A game that test ones ability to put to use all the body language cues learnt. In this workshop they first obtain a baseline of a person’s normal behavior and then carefully record changes during an alleged deception. Second they look for clusters of cues, three or more. No one change in behavior is a reliable or valid indicator of deception.
In the police force there is a joke, interrogators have what they call psychology & sikulogy (siku is elbow, the using of the elbow). If they can’t get the truth with psychology they may go for sikulogy. In body language I teach psychology not sikulogy.
I have taught the police force from year 2002. I always promote and still believe you need not be hard on suspects. Psychology is the art & science of mind over matter you can win through mind games rather then brute force. You would be surprised that some of the hardest criminal had been won over with a soft psychological approach. This course has benefited my participants not only in their work environment, but at home as well, as my participants have related the numerous other benefits of this course.
I am really privileged to have served and continue serving the numerous government agencies like the Royal Malaysia Police Special Branch & the Criminal Investigation Department, Malaysia Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA), The Royal Brunei Police Force, The Royal Malaysian Navy, The Armed Forces Intelligence Unit, The Immigration Department Malaysia, The Royal Customs Malaysia, The Royal Customs Brunei Darussalam, The Customs & Excise Department of the Republic of Indonesia where I have done the “Trainer the Trainer’s” course, The Anti Corruption Bureau Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia Anti Corruption Commission, (MACC), The Special Investigation Unit of Bank Negara Malaysia, National Anti-Drugs Agency (NADA), The Prisons Department Malaysia, Malaysia Airports Holdings Berhad, Petronas Berhad, Telecom Malaysia Berhad, The Malaysian Insurance Institute & various other corporate organizations inside & outside Malaysia including Singapore.
I thank the Police Force for having cooperated well with me, especially the Criminal Investigation Department Director, Datuk Seri Mohd Bakri bin Mohd Zinin, who has allowed me the use of their trainers and their instruments like the Digital Voice Stress Analyzer and the Polygraph instruments for my advance body language courses. The Police force recognizes my courses as an important part of promoting Human Rights values in the country.
This 4th – 8th May, 2009, I will be doing the 5 days intermediate course with the Malaysia Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA). Followed by the advance course from the 18th – 20th, May, 2009, to the same group of 24 participants.
Some general facts about body language & the usual signs that people give away in different situations.Body language isn’t really a language, experts call it nonverbal communication or to be precise nonlinguistic communication, it embraces all the ways we communicate without language, like eye contact, facial expressions, touch, hand gestures, body position including the legs.. It also includes space, timing, territory our appearance and dressing.
Sign language used by the deaf and dumb that is a language, and it is not a part that belongs to body language.
Language has its own secret system known only to the speaker and the user of the language. Body language has not any, it is more important & maybe more powerful than language itself.
Generally, it is the eyes and facial expressions that can tell a lot if we know when to look for it. As the German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) put it, “One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth”. To me the German Philosopher though not aware of the abundance of scientific discoveries we have today knew precisely what he was talking about.
I teach my participants never to falsely accuse a person under investigation because it produces nervous actions which can then lead to an Othello error (In Shakespeare’s play Othello misreads Desdemona’s distress as evidence of her infidelity. The Othello error occurs when a truth teller is falsely accused of lying based on body language cues such as anxiety or agitation) and neither to be suspicious because suspicious people’s tendency is to read truthful body language as deceptive.
Weird acting people are commonly thought to be deceptive even when they are completely truthful so we have to be careful not to reach unwise conclusions. One should also discount the many reasons like anxiety, fear, and extreme tense behavior by reading body language when determining deceptive behavior. Some signs are consistent indicators of deception like, speech hesitations, increase in vocal pitch, speech errors, pupil dilation, blinking, hand shrugs & self touching.
Several studies have shown that liars send more negative and emotional body language than truth-tellers. Likewise, certain body language behaviors like blinking and self touching could easily be a result of negative emotions.
Generally we are lousy lie detectors. Even body language experts rarely hit above 80%This is because we are truth bias because of our religious trainings, a belief that other people are generally telling the truth so as to avoid ourselves to seem disbelieving, bitter, and suspicious of others .
To be honest no one can produce a totally valid deception profile. Except, Dr. Desmond Morris, the British body language guru who believes and I tend to agree, that there is one, the facial twitch, which is called the micro momentary facial expression, which last less than one tenth of a second when a person tells you a lie. It is undetectable by the naked eye if you are not trained, but not a problem if you still it in the frame of a video, you may be able to see it. If you compare it with other truthful segments of the liar such fleeting expression are non-existent.
You cannot read a liar like a mystery novel and there is no definite way to detect deception. That does not mean you don’t need to attend my body language courses. I train one to look for a cluster of deception cues; three or more is useful, so that we can compare the set of allegedly deceptive behavior to the normal baseline set of truthful behaviors.
My participants learn to detect deception only by following these steps. First they obtain a baseline of a person’s normal behavior and then carefully record changes during an alleged deception. Second they look for clusters of cues, three or more. No one change in behavior is a reliable or valid indicator of deception.
I think this will be of interest to the general public
Generally the public don’t trust me simply because they think as a body language trainer I can read their body language. That’s not fair. Your postures and gestures are meaningful, but only as patterns, not as explicit symbols with a meaning. Your smile for example, cannot be reduced to a word like amused, happy, joyful, warm, polite or pleasant. Your smile can mean anyone of those things, or none of these things. So in truth your body language doesn’t have explicit dictionary definitions like words. Therefore it’s not correct to fear me as though I can read your private thoughts.
The Pointing Gesture used by Malaysians with the closed palm and the pointed thumb is a rude and very offensive gesture in Ghana. It is also a tense behavior in psycho physiology. I therefore advise Malaysians to instead use the open palm position to show direction which not only is a universal gesture that signifies submissiveness and politeness but also a gesture that is used to signify openness, freedom, and a relaxed positive behavior. Closed palm signifies closed body language, tension, compression, negativity, and a behavior which is counter productive, neither is it soothing nor comforting. So its best to avoid the closed palm and the pointed thumb shown as a direction pointer.
For those involved in domestic inquiry, this course on, “Understanding body language deception cues” or ‘Fraud detection” can be very useful.
Cal me at 012 672 1404
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