Hi, class. This is William.
In this video, I want to
talk about listening with our eyes.
In other words, reading body language.
Now, you've probably seen a lot of
websites and books that tell you,
here are 14 signs that he's lying to you.
Sometimes these websites can actually be
dangerous because they imply
that a single individual cue,
such as scratching the nose or
looking to the right, indicates deception.
It leaves out important core concepts
to reading body language.
Now, there are two in particular.
Two very important concepts to always
consider anytime you're trying
to read someone's body language.
The first one is something called the baseline.
The baseline is what is normal for them.
For example, if someone normally
looks you when the eyes say 60,
70% of the time that they're talking to you,
but then when they're telling you this story,
the amount of eye contact
significantly changes, that's interesting.
It's interesting because we're
looking for how the body language
changes from the baseline
when the catalyst is introduced.
The catalyst here is like,
if you're reading somebody at a poker game,
the catalyst would be when they look at their cards,
it's whatever caused the change.
We're looking for how their body language
is different than normal when that occurs.
The second one is something called clustering.
We're not looking for an individual cue to tell us that
somebody is being deceptive or
that they're hostile or closed off,
rather, we're looking for a sentence.
We're looking for multiple cues
that confirm the same thing.
For example, kinesics specialists
tell us that there are
approximately 17 cues that indicate deceptive behavior.
Now, if somebody engages in one of these cues,
that's too easily a coincidence.
However, if they engage in eight or nine of these cues,
that cluster of cues indicating the same thing,
that's reason to be suspicious.
Now, there are a lot of different
elements of body language,
and there are a number of good books out there.
For example, a book that I
would highly recommend to anyone who is
interested in learning how to read
body language better is
a book called "What every body is saying" by Joe Davaro.
I'll be posting a link to this with
information as an Internet resource.
For our purposes here,
I want to introduce how different elements
of body language work together.
So we're going to focus on three elements,
the eyes, gravity, and pacification.
The first element we're going to
be talking about are the eyes.
Our eyes are drawn to what interests us.
This will tell you what or who someone is
engaged with and gives an indication when they disengage.
Now, we have anecdotal evidence of this.
For example, if you introduce a friend to a group
of friends and your friend continually
looks at the same person,
we conclude that they're interested in that person.
If a child is on stage and feeling stage fright,
their eyes will often be drawn
to their parents or to the teacher.
What they're interested in is affirmation.
They're feeling scrutinized and wanting to feel secure.
If somebody is afraid of heights,
it's very difficult for
them to not look down to the ground.
The ground represents a sense of safety, of security.
It tells us what they're engaged with.
Salesmen use this oftentimes to great effect.
If they're pointing out elements on a package,
if they notice your eyes continue to be
drawn to the same feature of their product,
they know that that's a major selling point.
If, however, your eyes tend to ignore something,
that indicates to them that
you're not particularly interested in that.
If they have multiple items to sell,
they'll oftentimes lay the items out in front of you,
and as they're listening to you,
talk about whatever it is you need
fixed or what you're looking for.
In addition to listening to your words,
they'll be watching your eyes.
If your eyes continue to look at
the second item in the list,
the second item laid down,
then they know that they're no longer
selling you items one, three, four and five.
They're looking to sell you Number 2.
After a little while, they might
say something like, well,
I got to tell you I think any one of
these items would probably help you with that problem,
and they're all 49, 95.
However, they'll walk over and they hold up Number 2,
the one that you were looking at, and they'll say,
this is our best seller. This is the one that I use.
I can use any of them, and this
I found to be the most effective.
In fact, it gets great reviews.
This feeds our confirmation bias.
Our mind loves being right,
and here we are being told that we picked the right one,
and then to add a sense of urgency, they'll say,
and while all of these are 49,
95, this one happens to be on sale today.
Today is the last day of the sale,
but if you buy today, you can get it for half price.
$25. Oh, the luck.
The one that we wanted happens to be on sale,
but we need to hurry up and buy
it because the sale ends today.
Our eyes actually told the salesman everything that
he or she needed to know in order to close the sale.
The next element is gravity.
Our eyes will tell the person what we're engaged in.
Gravity will tell somebody how we feel about it.
When we like what we're
engaged with or what we just learned,
our body will show signs of defining gravity.
Our rib cage might raise,
we sit up or stand up a little bit straighter,
our neck will straighten out,
eyebrows and cheekbones will be raised.
If we're walking, there suddenly develops
almost a bounce to our step
as if gravity can't hold us down.
Conversely, when we disapprove with the catalyst,
now all of a sudden gravity seems to weigh heavily on us.
Our cheekbones might sink,
our rib cage fall, we might slouch over.
If we're walking, sometimes gravity weighs on us so much,
we can't even lift our feet fully off the ground,
and they'll drag along the ground.
Eyes tell us what the person is engaged in,
and gravity will indicate how do they feel about it.
The third one is pacification.
Pacification will show us how strong that feeling is.
Part of our brain called
the limbic system is in charge of emotion and survival.
As our emotion is getting stronger and stronger,
the limbic system is getting stimulated.
If it becomes overstimulated,
the limbic system has the power to
short circuit the prefrontal cortex,
the part of your brain in charge of
executive functioning, and takeover.
Now, in order to stop this,
the prefrontal cortex will
oftentimes try to pacify the limbic system.
So pacification cues indicate
that the limbic system is being overstimulated,
therefore the emotion is getting very strong.
While there are a number of different types
of pacification cues,
I want to just cover a few examples.
Now, we're all familiar that when
a baby wants to pacify him or herself,
they oftentimes will suck their thumb.
Well, adults, we generally don't suck our thumb,
at least in public, so we
actually run the tongue along the inside of our mouth.
That is effectively pacifying the limbic system,
and acts similar to how
a baby sucking their thumb reacts.
The second one is there
certain parts of the body
that are particularly vulnerable.
For example, if you feel at the lower end of
your neck just in
the middle of your neck above the rib cage,
you can feel a very vulnerable location,
a spot on your throat that
a direct attack could
potentially lead to fatal consequences,
and there's no bone protecting that area.
As a result of that, the limbic system
is particularly frightened of this location,
so the prefrontal cortex will block it.
Sometimes they'll have the hand
adjust a tie that was fine,
they'll scratch their neck,
crossing their arm over that location,
or sometimes they'll simply
put their hand over it, blocking it.
This reassures the limbic system that our survival
is not in danger and therefore can calm it down.
The third one is stimulating
both sides of the brain nearly simultaneously.
Now, that sounds probably strange,
but there are a variety of ways we can do this.
One way that's sometimes used in
therapy is the eyes darting back and forth side to side.
This rapid eye movement pacifies the limbic system.
In therapy, someone might
be sitting straight with their head forward,
and then lights on each side of them flash on and off.
Their eyes go back and
forth to the light each time it turns on.
As their eyes go back and forth right to left,
it stimulates both sides of the brain and
restores the prefrontal cortex calming the limbic system.
Oftentimes we use tactile sensation.
Since our eyes darting back and
forth might look a little awkward,
sometimes we'll say rub our hands together.
If you touch the right side of your body,
the sensation crosses the body's meridian
to the left side of your brain.
If you touch the left side of your body,
it crosses the body's meridian
to the right side of your brain.
Rubbing our hands together,
tapping both legs, rubbing our arms together,
rubbing the back of your neck.
These are different ways to accomplish that purpose.
Again, there are a number of different cues that
people use to pacify the limbic system.
But three of them is
running the tongue along the inside of our mouth,
covering vulnerable areas,
and stimulating both sides of the brain.
That concludes our video on non verbal listening.
As always, if you have any questions
or concerns about the course,
please don't hesitate to contact me.
My email address and other contact information is
available on the syllabus as well as
on our course Moodle page. Thank you.