THE EYES
We spend most of our time in conversations making eye-contact. In fact, experts have even suggested that you make eye contact 50% of the time while speaking and 70% of the time while listening. That’s a lot of eye contact.
I’ll dispense with the old trope about the eyes being ‘windows to the soul’ and such. Let’s break down the results-based techniques for seeing behind the mask, and I’ll show you how much the human body reveals during a conversation.
Since we are making eye contact most of the time, even if we’re addressing a group of people, it’s essential that we pay attention to them. They reveal so much information that if you only studied the behavior of the human eye, you’d still be privy to more information than anyone else in the room.
BLINK RATE
How often we blink reveals a lot about our internal state of mind.
In most conversations, the typical blink rate in conversations is somewhere around nine times per minute. Blink rate at twelve-per-minute is normal for most of us and can go up to 20 or so without much happening.
In conversations and situations that are stressful, our blink rate can be upwards of seventy times in a minute! For instance, when I took the Math portion of my SAT exams, my blink rate was probably in the high seventies.
When we are calm, focused, interested, or relaxed, our blink rate can decrease to as little as three times per minute. When you watched a movie that really captivated your focus and attention, your blink rate was probably very slow. When you had a conversation with someone that was interesting or fascinating, your blink rate was probably the same as it was during the good movie you watched.
The interesting point about this is that we aren’t aware of this shift in behavior. It’s never in our conscious awareness, and it’s extremely difficult to control.
Since this is an unconscious behavior that occurs without our awareness, it’s a reliable indicator of stress, discomfort, interest, and focus.
Almost all the behaviors you’ll be learning about are like this—unconscious, hard to control and occur outside our normal awareness.
The good news is that you don’t have to count blinks per minute. If you’d like to, here’s the formula to do so. And this works even if you’re speaking to large groups of people, or the situation is one-on-one:
As you make eye contact, whether it is with people in the audience or the single person in front of you, count how many times you see them blink in a roughly fifteen-second timespan. Multiply the blinks times 4, and you will have the person’s blink rate. If you’re speaking to a large group of people, you’ll be making eye contact with several of them. As your eyes move from person to person, count how many blinks you see in that fifteen-second window, and do the same thing; multiply the blinks you saw times four. You’ll have an average blink rate of the entire audience. You’ll know immediately if they are interested and focused, or stressed and bored. This invaluable information can direct your speeches, training, lectures, sales…you name it.
If you don’t want to spend your time in conversations counting blinks like a behavior nerd, here’s what I recommend. When you start a conversation, observe the person’s blink rate and simply make a determination, whether it is fast, average, or slow. With this information in mind, as the conversation progresses, you’ll be able to notice changes in the blink rate.
While you’re speaking with someone, if you mention something that captivates their focus and interest, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to see the shift from average or fast to slow. It’s easier to spot than you think.
If you’re in a conversation and you see the blink rate speed up, you’ve received an immediate indicator of stress or disagreement. Depending on the context, you’ll be able to identify a stress-point. For instance, you’re in a business negotiation, and as you mention a detail about the contracts someone signed, you see their blink rate spike from 12 per minute to somewhere around 60 per minute. That contract, and the mention of it, is causing a negative reaction. This vital information is an insight you’ve gained immediately at that moment. Of course, you would have to have knowledge of the contract to determine the context of the behavior, whether it is a stress reaction or some kind of fear about losing the negotiation.
I train legal teams for what is now called ‘Trial Consulting.’ One of the many indicators I teach to legal teams, whether it’s for deposition, jury selection, or cross-examination, is blink rate. If you’re an attorney speaking to a jury, and you want to get them completely focused on a story or narrative, you need to be looking for slow blink rates. The jurors who exhibit no change in blink rate will show you that you need to do a little more work in getting them on board. If you wanted the jury to experience a stressful/emotional recount of a crime, you’d be looking for jurors who exhibited faster blink rates. This indicator alone could spell the difference in a courtroom between embarrassment and success. You’d know the jurors who were on your side and the ones you needed to ‘work on.’
In any conversation you have, start noticing this behavioral indicator. As the conversation begins, make note of the person’s blink rate. Is it normal, fast, or slow? Most of the time, your goal will be to not only cause the person to exhibit a slow blink rate but to identify what causes changes in their blink rate. Did it speed up? Then your immediate goal is to identify what caused the change and act on it. In sales, you can pre-empt objections. For legal teams, you can immediately shift course to whatever subject or topic caused the jurors blink rates to lower earlier in the conversation, or you can discuss something right away that makes them agree with you before proceeding.
Identifying the blink rate is much easier than you think. If you bring up a few videos of celebrities getting grilled on sensitive issues, you’ll see how easy it is to spot the immediate shifts in the blink rate.
I am obsessive about notes and records. I have stacks of journals locked away with research and notes in them. When I would perform an analysis of an interrogation or interview, I would use a simple symbol code to take notes on what I observed. One of the requirements, especially if I was taking notes live in an interview, was that I could not allow the note-taking system to be deciphered.
I call these Compass Notes. They earned this name because I built a non-decodable system for building a human behavior profile without them knowing what my notes said. A person’s entire secret behavioral profile, including their hidden fears and insecurities, all fit within a small circle that I called a Behavior Compass. We will get to this toward the end of the book, but it looks like this:
For the blink rate, the notes look like this:
1. Add a simple ‘Br’ to a place inside the Behavior Compass
2. I observe the blink rate as the conversation begins
3. If the blink rate is normal, I will simply put a hyphen ‘-’ next to ‘Br’
4. If it is fast, I’ll add an up arrow
5. If it is slow, I’ll add a down arrow
6. When a change occurs (faster or slower), I will add that arrow to my notes
7. If I was able to determine what caused the change, I will circle the arrow
GESTURAL HEMISPHERIC TENDENCY (GHT)
There is a lot of information circulating the interwebs and cop television shows that is inaccurate. Even popular TV shows like CSI have fallen victim to this belief. In this technique, if a person looked a specific way, someone could tell if they were accessing certain types of memories, fabricated memories, and even outright deception.
This was proven to be unreliable, but eventually, experts agreed there were certain behavioral habits regarding eye-movements that were reliable.
Our eyes move to access our memories, and they move when we think of certain types of memories in specific ways. If you asked someone about a car crash, they experienced or an ex-spouse they disdain, you’re likely to see their eyes move a certain way when they speak, say, to the left.
If you asked them about a fantastic vacation or a really good movie they saw, you’ll see the eyes typically move in the other direction. Not only will they access positive and negative memories using different directional glances, but they will also almost always use that same-side hand to gesture as they speak about the positive or negative events.
If you’re in sales, and a person is recounting to you how they just got back from an amazing trip they took to Belize, and looks to their right, they will also likely gesture with that hand when they speak about it. If you were to ask them why they didn’t like the previous company they were dealing with, they would look in the opposite direction as they recall all of the reasons, they are unhappy with the other company.
Everyone is different, and I’ve never seen a strong correlation between where someone looks and whether they are right or left-handed.
Within the first 60 seconds of a conversation, you’ll be able to identify which side of the body the person uses to discuss positive information. All of us move our eyes to send our mental ‘file clerk’ into the brain to retrieve information.
This method is a great technique to reveal a person’s mental preferences for which side of the body they use and access to get positive and negative recall of information, but let’s unpack how to turn this into a behavioral tactic.
It’s a rainy morning. You’re the lead salesperson at a car dealership, and you’ve just been introduced to a new customer who’s interested in buying a pickup truck. You ask him about his life, and he begins recounting the horrible experience he had last time he bought a truck. As he starts to recount the horrible experience, his eyes move to his left, and he begins a series of small gestures with his left hand. You’ve immediately identified that he is what is called ‘right-positive’ by nothing more than elimination. If the left side is for accessing negative information, the right side will be what he uses for positive information.
As you begin to close the deal, you can now lean to your right (his left side) and gesture with your right hand (also on his left side) while you describe the benefits of owning this new pickup truck. You’ve physically moved a bit to his right side and forced his body and eyes to start moving in the direction of his positive memories and associations.
To simplify this, they look a certain way when they recall positive information, then you move that way and gesture that way as you close the sale.
If I’m speaking with someone and I see them look to their right as they talk about anything that they view as positive, fun, enjoyable, interesting, or good, I’m going to move that direction when it’s time to close the deal.
The bonus of identifying GHT is that you also know which side they associate with and access to retrieve negative information. If you would like to make a subject or topic viewed in a more negative light, all you need to do is move in that direction. For instance, you could be talking about a competitor. If you’re in psychotherapy and dealing with a patient who needs to change their behavior, you can describe the consequences of not changing their behavior while adjusting your posture and leaning in the negatively associated direction.
GHT is a powerful tool. You can go online today, and almost any video with people in it will show you how easily you can profile GHT.
Compass Notes:
To take notes in meetings about GHT, I will simply write ‘ght’ followed by ‘lp’ or ‘rp’; those standing for left-positive and right-positive.
My notes on GHT might look like this: ght-lp. It’s simple, and no one will be able to comprehend the notes.
EYE HOME
Whenever you speak with someone, you’ll notice that accessing their memories and thoughts will cause them to look a certain direction. Think of the human face like a clock for a moment. If your customer has spent an hour answering your questions and every time you asked them for information, their eyes went to the right (their three o’clock) , that would be their ‘Eye Home’.
Eye home is where we typically look to access memories and recall information. Sometimes, distinct types of information can cause people to look in different directions on their ‘clock’.
I didn’t believe much in this until I sat with a good friend and world-leading behavior expert, Greg Hartley. The man has written ten books on behavior analysis and body language, so when he spoke, I listened. Here’s how you can prove this to yourself right now:
Think of the sixth word of your favorite song. Your eyes moved, didn’t they? Awesome! That proves you’re human. Now, think of the closest shopping center to your home. What is the third store from the right when you’re standing at the front? Your eyes moved again to recall this memory. Since one of them was a word-bank memory, and the other was most likely a visual memory, your eyes may have moved in different directions to retrieve information for each of these memories.
How’s all this important?
When you asked your client all those questions, and you determined their ‘Eye Home’ was at three o’clock, you were able to quickly form what is called a baseline. A baseline is simply how someone behaves under normal conditions and circumstances.
If you know this client’s Eye Home is at three o’clock, and then when you ask them what their credit score is, their eyes dart over to nine o’clock before they answer, you’ve seen something no one else will ever notice. You’ve seen a change in behavior. This deviation from their baseline is indicative of potential deception, doubt, or fabrication.
Take a look at this fictitious transcript from a jury-selection panel:
Attorney: “Can you please tell us your name?”
Juror: “Matilda Thompson.” (eyes don’t move because this information isn’t hard for her to recall. It doesn’t cause her to need her ‘file clerk’ to go back and pull data from memory.)
Attorney: “Thank you. And have you lived in this area a long time?”
Juror: (looks to her nine o’clock position before answering) “I’d say it’s been about nine years, yes.”
Attorney: “How would you describe your feelings about the police here in the city?”
Juror: (eyes dart to the nine o’clock position before answering) “I think they do a great job, actually. I’ve never had any issues with them, personally.”
Attorney: “Thank you. Could you tell us about your job? Says here you work in customer service.”
Juror: “Yes. What would you like to know?”
Attorney: “Could you tell us how many people you deal with on a normal day?”
Juror: (eyes jut over to nine o’clock position before answering) “Oh, I would have to say about forty or fifty people come through the office every day.”
Attorney: “Thanks. I have a more personal question for you here if that’s okay, Miss Thompson. Have you ever been a victim of domestic violence?”
Juror: (eyes move to three o’clock position, then downward before answering) “Uh, no. No. I haven’t.”
In this imaginary case, the attorney missed a crucial indicator. This woman’s potentially deceptive comment about domestic violence could cost him (and his client) the case.
Eye Home is important to establish early in a conversation, as we are making eye contact with people, and our eyes move a lot while we speak. When you can establish where someone generally looks for information, you will be able to spot the moments that this doesn’t add up.
If someone’s Eye Home is two o’clock, for example, keep in mind that it may be in a different location if you’re asking them about something that requires a lot of visual memory or emotional memory.
They may look in a different direction for visual information. As the conversation progresses, continue to collect data points for where you see their eyes move. After only a few moments of speaking, you’ll be able to establish their baseline and will be prepared to spot critical deviations from it.
One note of caution:
Strong emotional memories make our eyes move downward. I’ve seen this across all cultures. If you’re speaking with someone about an emotional event or asking them to recall emotional memories, you’ll see this downward eye movement regularly.
Compass Notes:
From the center of the Behavior Compass, I will simply draw a small arrow to show which direction the person looks to access memories. Their Eye Home will be established on the Compass in a way I can come back to it for future meetings or conversations.
SHUTTER SPEED
Blink-rate identifies how often the eyes blink, Shutter Speed identifies how fast they blink.
Shutter speed refers to the speed of a camera shutter. In behavior profiling, it refers to the speed of the eyelid. When we blink, we reveal more than just blink rate. Changes in the speed of the eyelid can indicate lots of information.
Shutter speed is a measurement of fear.
Think of an animal that has a reputation for being fearful. A chihuahua might come to mind. In mammals, because of evolution, our eyelids will speed up to minimize the amount of time that we can’t see an approaching predator. The greater the degree of fear an animal is experiencing, the more the animal is concerned with an approaching predator.
In an attempt to keep the eyes, open as much as possible, the eyelids involuntarily speed up. Speed, when it comes to behavior, almost always equals fear.
In humans, if we experience fear about something, our eyelids will do the same thing as the chihuahua; they will close and open more quickly. In a conversation, if you see a change in shutter speed, it can indicate either the presence of or reduction of fear.
As fear takes hold in the body, you will see an immediate increase in how fast the eyelids are closing and opening.
Side Note:
You’ve got a new understanding that fear causes the body to move faster, not just the eyelids. With this in mind, think about the mammalian brain in the person you’re speaking to. It’s unconsciously reading your behavior. To communicate well, we should be sending the right signals to this part of the brain. A good rule of thumb to follow is to never move faster than you would if you were in a swimming pool. This keeps any of the unconscious fear signals from broadcasting during a conversation.
PUPIL DILATION
In conversation, we spend most of our time making eye contact. How often do you notice the size of pupils? Probably not often. Our pupils change in response to lighting conditions, but they also respond to visual stimuli, emotional reactions, and arousal.
Since we aren’t aware of the size of our own pupils, and the constriction or dilation of them is outside our conscious control, this makes it an exceptionally reliable unconscious behavior.
If we are having conversations in a location where the lights aren’t changing, we can assume that the movement (the constriction and dilation) of the pupils is a psychological response instead of a physical one.
First, our pupils respond rapidly to threats. If someone were to burst into the room as you’re reading this and start shouting, your pupils would dilate (get bigger) as much as possible. Our bodies do this in response to threats because of our history. If we are about to be attacked, our pupils enlarge to let in the maximum amount of light, allowing us to see everything better to facilitate fighting or an escape from the potential threat.
The pupils also respond to psychological stimuli.
When we are attracted to someone, for example, our pupils will dilate as we look at them. When I teach interrogation courses, I show police officers how to display photos to suspects in order to observe the pupillary response to them. If a suspect’s pupils dilate while observing a photo of a bloody crime scene, for example, I’ve got a good idea of how this person feels about the results of the crime.
When we see or hear something that we really like, our pupils will dilate. Things we dislike will cause our pupils to constrict.
Scientist Eckhard Hess pioneered the art of what he termed ‘pupillometry.’ He performed a series of experiments that gave us this foundational body of knowledge about pupil dilation and animal imprinting.
When babies are first born, their pupils will dilate when they look at their parents. As humans, when we look at a person with dilated pupils, we are more likely to find them attractive. If you’re out in the bright sun, however, don’t be discouraged if the pupils you see are constricted and small. Anytime the lighting is bright, we can ignore pupil sizes in conversations, as the bright light overrides the ability to see any fluctuations in the pupils of whomever you’re speaking with.
In sales, you might see a pupil dilation response to something you’re showing to a customer. This is noteworthy. Likewise, you might see pupil constriction in response to something, exposing their immediate disagreement.
Not all pupils are equally visible. People with lighter colored irises will be a lot easier to spot. This nonverbal behavior is something that I recommend trying in conversations to get the hang of. Not only will you be able to do it automatically after just a few days of practice, but you’ll also be able to make much faster assessments of someone’s agreement or disagreement.
CONFIRMATION GLANCES
A confirmation glance is something we all tend to do occasionally. Some people do it more often than others.
When you are speaking with more than one person, you can see confirmation glances when a person briefly looks at the third party for ‘confirmation.’ This typically occurs just before or just after they speak. They will be making eye contact with you as you ask a question or make a remark and will briefly look at the other party just before they speak.
This glance lets you know that they are confirming their opinion with the other party or that they are nonverbally checking for approval of the other party. If you see the glance before they speak, it’s likely that the person they looked at is the decision-maker and can be persuaded.
If you see them look at the other party after they speak, you can assume the person they looked at is still the decision-maker but also has the final say.
The confirmation glance is simply a way to determine who’s in charge, who makes the decisions, and who you will ultimately need to persuade to adopt your ideas.
When I teach law firms about this behavior, I show them how this works in the courtroom. A witness on the stand may glance at someone in the courtroom after they speak, and it could mean a major red flag or that you need to speak with this other person. In juries, the jurors will typically select ‘decision-makers’ before the end of the first day. You will see the juror’s confirmation glances go toward decision-makers any time a fact or turning point in the case is discussed in the courtroom.
In interrogations, a confirmation glance has new meaning as well. If an interrogator is interviewing two suspects, and one of them looks at the other before speaking, this behavior flags potential deception. If there are two interviewers and one suspect, deception potential is seen when the confirmation glance takes place after the person gives an answer. For example, interviewer A asks the suspect a question. The suspect answers, then makes a brief glance at the other interrogator/interviewer afterward to ensure their story is believed by both parties.
This behavior is culturally universal and can be seen anywhere humans talk to each other. Try watching a celebrity get interviewed on a show and see whether their glances tend toward the host or to the audience, and you’ll know which one they want to please the most.
THE EYEBROW FLASH
Make an angry facial expression.
Did you feel what your eyebrows did? They pulled downward and together. As primates, we communicated with our bodies and faces for millennia. If we wanted to show another primate that we were non-threatening, friendly, and open, we would make a movement with our face above the tall grass to prevent conflict.
The eyebrow flash shows on our face as the opposite of anger. Our eyebrows go upward and apart. Think back to the last time you met someone you were excited to see. Those millions of years of genetic memories activated to show that you were friendly. As you greeted them with enthusiasm or introduced yourself, your eyebrows ‘flashed’ upward to show them you were not a threat.
This isn’t something we do consciously. So many of us are completely unaware of the behavior of our eyebrows. As an experiment, try introducing yourself to someone today and perform an eyebrow flash. There’s about a ninety percent chance the person you do this to will return the same eyebrow flash. The only difference is that their body did it completely unconsciously! We tend to exhibit a lot of the same behaviors that primates do unconsciously.
We’ve all seen the articles or the online videos that tell us that our bodies play a role in our psychology. Some say if we make facial expressions of happiness, we actually start to make happiness chemicals in the brain. If we sit up straight when we feel down, our mood will start to shift. On an internal level, we are all pretty aware of this. The movement of our bodies can create moods. Moods create movement (body language), and movement creates moods. The theory works in reverse. But what does it have to do with the eyebrow flash?
In the first few minutes of conversation, you’re already able to apply everything you’ve learned up to this chapter. You can profile all the movements of the eye, and you have The Laws of Behavior to use as a lens to see through. But in the first few seconds of an interaction, you can perform an eyebrow flash.
When someone returns the eyebrow flash unconsciously, they’ve begun to exhibit behaviors of compliance, non-threatening, and open body language. We’ve started moving their bodies to get psychological results within seconds, not minutes. This is the first step to something I developed for intelligence work and our persuasion courses called ‘behavioral entrainment’ – wherein we guide the person into a gradually increasing number of compliant behaviors as the conversation progresses. You’ll learn more about this in the coming chapters.
Compass Notes:
The Eyebrow Flash can be denoted by a simple ‘Ef’ followed by a checkmark to denote the person responded to your Eyebrow Flash at the beginning of the conversation. To annotate that they responded with an Eyebrow Flash to a particular topic, your Compass Notes may look like this: ‘Ef-interest rate’
SUMMARY
The eyes communicate (reveal) so much information, but only if you have the skill to identify it. Since we’ve been using our eyes to communicate for millennia, they know what they are doing so much that they are on autopilot.
If you studied nothing more than the eyes and made this your only skill, you’d still be better than 95% of people in the world.
Keep in mind, reading people is not just about seeing these behaviors. It’s about watching for changes and identifying the cause of that change. Next, let’s look at the face, since we are already making eye contact all the time, and I’ll show you a few things you might have never seen or heard of before that expose a lot more than most people are comfortable with.