The Gift of Arrogance

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"Harry taught me to trust my gut. 'People lie all the time,' he said, 'but your instinct will never fail you.'"

~Dexter Morgan from Showtime’s Dexter

You probably are wondering why I named this book The Gift of Arrogance. An essential quality for insight is confidence. Not just confidence like “Yay me I can do this” confidence. I mean like “Nobody else agrees with me but here is what I saw and this is my theory” confidence. Against all odds and challenges, you must believe in yourself. As I always tell people, words can deceive, but carefully watched actions can not.

The current empirical evidence says that people look for cues in the wrong places of the body. We listen to words to learn what people really think or feel, we watch the hands to see what they do, and we watch the face to see how people feel. Incidentally, in the brain there are two main areas that control facial expression. The cortical and subcortical regions. The cortical area controls voluntary facial expression, which proves to be very unreliable in reading people for obvious reasons. You only see what they want you to see. The face is actually the part of the body that is second most connected to the cortical area. The most connected are the hands. That means that the hands are also easily controlled, ergo they are also somewhat unreliable. The region of the brain that controls language, Broca’s area, is not connected to emotion. Therefore it is also a poor indicator of a person’s real desires and intentions. The face also has a connection to the subcortical region which is related to involuntary facial expression, however, most people are not adept at reading the expressions these produce. This part of the brain is responsible for both subtle expressions and microexpressions.

So what is reliable when reading people? I have always found that the smaller the expression (facial or otherwise) the more reliable. The same is true for expressions of short duration. The problem with this is sometimes it’s a milimeter’s movement for half a second that you are working with. You need to be able to look and have confidence in what you see.

The other areas that I find truly reliable are the paralinguistic features of the voice (after establishing a baseline) and immediate body language reactions to stimuli. The body movements that occur for half a second after a negative stimulus tend to be uninfluenced by cultural background. Therefore, they are highly reliable. Most of these are what Joe Navarro, former member of the FBI’s counter intelligence, refers to as pacifiers. Actions taken to soothe negative emotions. Paralinguistic features include anything in speech other than the words. This includes tone of voice, articulation of speech, speed of speech, and anything else observable in the voice. These are less universal and more based on each individual person, however due to the fact that emotions affect physiological processes (eg respiration) they tend to have a direct effect on the voice.

In conclusion, the way to be insightful is to have confidence, know the story, and stick to it. Otherwise, you may or may not be right, but if you don’t react it means nothing.