Body Language Expert Answers Questions From Twitter | WIRED

hi i'm joe navarro for 25 years i chase spies for the fbi and today i'm answering questions on twitter this is body language support [Music] at mcfaul and it comes with a photograph i'd love to read at cia's analysis of the body language in in this photo one of them is in charge one of them is the subordinate and their body language clearly is detailing which is which because when you're in charge you can sit any style you like this is your domain when you are the supplicant when you are there asking for help your behaviors are more contrite your arms are more restricted your legs are restricted and we see all of that here at the ulterior kid asks are there secret handshake identifiers asking for a friend yes there are many groups out there that have all sorts of secret handshakes unfortunately what happens is and you run into this all the time you go to shake hands with somebody and they've interlocked their fingers in a weird way and all of a sudden you find their index finger right here on the inside of your wrist this is your erogenous zone this is for intimacy this leaves a very negative uh feeling or you get these uh social aardvarks who want to squeeze your hand to demonstrate that they're strong and virile and and so forth it just leaves a a bad feeling in our mouths so are there handshakes secret handshakes yeah try to avoid them at nike sandals poppy ass so a female leg shaking means what she just cold well a lot of times we see behaviors that are repetitive i tend to bounce my legs a lot some people will twist their ring some people will crack their knuckles some people will play with their hair all repetitive behaviors are self-soothing behaviors at bait my world asks how do we identify bad people bad people are identified by bad behaviors no one is bad until we we see demonstrable bad behaviors if they decide to assault somebody if they decide to cheat someone if they do things that are unethical uh immoral or illegal at courtney reenae asks do men not know what nonverbal cues and body language mean or do they just ignore it i'm a man some people are better at reading nonverbals than others is there a difference between men and women and their ability to read nonverbals the answer is yes and it's obvious and it's for biological reasons women bring babies into the world it is the mother who spends the most time with a child and can look at everything from the texture of the skin to how much humidity is in the eyes to the color of the lips that traditionally has been a female function now that doesn't mean that we cannot develop these these skills but from a pure biological uh perspective they have that advantage and that carries through throughout life but it's one that we men can also grow so at p ritton house that's a very complex question ordering shawarma today and the young lady wouldn't look at me in the eyes that's okay there's no responsibility to do that i believe she is syrian does she does eye contact means something important in other cultures eye contact is both cultural and personal in the united states for instance in new york we're allowed to stare at each other for 1.28 seconds in the middle east it's somewhere around between four and six seconds that's cultural you may find yourself in a place where it's personal and maybe you don't want to make eye contact i wouldn't put too much emphasis on eye contact other than we all have personal preferences lack of eye contact should not equate to anything other than this is what the person chooses from [Music] kimitsuka which who asks why do hand gestures have such an impact humans evolved to be very expressive with their hands a hundred thousand years ago we were all in the african savannah we were surrounded by predators hyenas lions lionesses these large felines and we had to communicate silently but effectively we used our facial gestures close up and we used our hand gestures to further communicate things such as direction anxiety fear approach me and so forth this is part of our paleo circuits we know this because when we study children who are born blind then they've never seen they use the very same hand gestures our hands attract attention in fact if you look at your hands no matter how dark your skin you always notice that the palms of the hands are very easy to to read we think that this has given us an advantage because when we reach out when we gesture and so forth even in low light it sends that powerful but silent signal the gestures hold our attention the gestures potentiate the message at prague asks what are power poses that i can use in zoom talks trying to improve my online presentation skills so we've talked about power poses in in other videos and as amy cuddy made famous in her her ted talks these have to do with expansive gestures where if you're sitting down maybe you spread your hands on the table if you were standing up you put your hands on your hips with elbows out even if you're relaxed and sitting with a group you put your hands behind your head elbows out these are territorial displays but when we are in a virtual environment all of that goes away because the camera can only see so much and so what you need to do is bring them here have them more in front of the camera you're using gestures that are formed so they look like for instance brackets or the letter c where you demark and you set boundaries and it serves not so much as a power pose but as a confidence pose and that's what really matters when you are on a small screen at madame ambassador and she asks do you agree that every myers-briggs personality type has a specific body language signature that's her question and my answer is no so great question from at sonia the freeze and she asks enjoy your power of body language book thank you going through it a second time and i'm wondering what the hell is up with close talkers our need for spatial distance is both cultural and personal and so because each one of us has different needs what i try to teach is to always start further apart so let's say you shake hands maybe you do a fist bump maybe you shake hands but you do it at a greater distance and then from that greater point you self-adjust maybe you move in closer or maybe you stay where you're at but we want to honor spatial differences simply for this reason anytime somebody violates our space no matter how benign it is we feel uncomfortable it causes what i call limbic hijacking it makes us hyper vigilant it makes us uncomfortable but here's the whammy it also limits the amount of time that we want this person to be near us or around us so if you want to increase what we call face time one of the things that you want to do is to have an appropriate space so that everybody feels comfortable that can be cultural but it can also be personal natalia mvp and she asks are microexpressions more pronounced when people are on zoom calls or are we better at noticing micro expressions because we keep staring into the screen so let's start with a couple of things number one let's try and get away from micro expressions because in fact they're just expressions if they were micro we probably wouldn't see them if they're fast that they occur very quickly then we say they are tachy kinesic as in the tachometer in your car it moves very fast they yield information but very quickly so we just referred to them as gestures so as to the question when you're on a zoom call what's going to determine your ability to observe behaviors actually has a lot to do with two things the camera that's being used by the other person and the lighting if there's grease or oils or dirt on the on the camera and it's a low resolution camera little lighting you're going to miss these little behaviors to the point that something that is easy to see live which is for instance the furrowing of the glabella this little area of the head if the camera is not right if the lighting isn't right you're going to miss these uh behaviors one other thing that we've found that's that's fascinating is that where you think that maybe having a neutral face on a virtual call is the best thing to do it actually works against you the brain looks at a face and says this is a happy person or this is unhappy or possibly a threat and what happens is when a face presents is neutral it registers negatively so what we try to teach people to do a lot of virtual calls is to at least not an acknowledgement smile use your eyebrows to express agreement or surprise but avoid a neutral face because when we query those participants and ask about that person who had a neutral face they're always rated negatively so we have a question from had malik one and he asked why does shaking your head mean no and nodding means yes you know there are behaviors that over time become a standardized because of social conventions we know that for the most part nodding the forward nod is perceived as accepting as positive as uh saying yes now there are cultures where this is not the norm and we see that for instance in bulgaria there are times when when somebody nods what it means is they disagree but for the most part what the research tells us is this as you go around the world you're pretty much going to find the same behaviors these things are universal and that's why they're so reliable so we have a question from anil bodwell and she asks how important is body posture when delivering speeches i remember when i was at university and professors always spoke behind a podium now look at ted talks there's no podium those days are over if you're still talking behind a podium it's almost anachronistic in essence a presentation now has taken on new form because now when we only have 15 minutes as we see with corporations that have gone from a one-hour presentation to 12 or 15 minutes when we go from presentation to a performance then yeah posture presence how we look all of that becomes important at aaron chase asks hey joe what do you think about teaching pre-teens and teens body language to help them stay safe and what are some of the things you teach them to watch out for i think we need to teach children at a very young age about body language in part because it helps them to navigate a complex world they go into classrooms where they may be running into children that they've never met before and if we can teach them some simple things as when you approach others approach them at angles not directly because they will perceive you as friendlier that if you teach them that if somebody a child is grabbing their clothing they're probably shy maybe they're introverted what a great opportunity to welcome them and be friendly with them so that they're less stressed why wait until you're 30 years old to learn these things why not learn them at at a very young age and especially now where there's so much emphasis on using media to communicate i would say most definitely you can begin to teach children at a very young age what to look for and they'll thank you for it in the end so thank you again thank you for your questions hope to get some more in the future you've been watching body language support

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Keywords: body langauge explained, body language, body language break down, body language broken down, body language expert, body language explained, body language tech support, body language wired, fbi agent, fbi agent body language, fbi agent wired, former fbi agent, innovation, ott tech support, science & technology, tech support twitter, twitter tech support, wired, wired body language, wired body language expert, wired fbi agent

Id: tL0vtPSl-yc

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 06 2022