Advise On Reading Body Language

Credit to FroogBoi

Yall. When you’re reading someone’s bodylanguage. Get a baseline first if you can yeah?

Recently I’m getting a lil frustrated seeing people read books on bodylangauge (and I do think it’s partially the books fault for not emphasizing this) and immediately think they can read anyone at any second and that there is no nuance what so ever there. I’ve been thinking back to when I saw folks just, with no critical thinking, point at someone clearly panicking and go yeah they’re lying!!!!! No other explanation what so ever for those behaviors.

Please do remember, when you’re reading someone’s bodylanguage you can’t get the full story in 5 minutes. Things that a book will tell you are tells for lying could be tells for anxiety, past abuse, just being nervous, or any number of things.

This is not to say bodylangue reading isn’t usefull in certain situations, but please do think more thoroughly about the things you see and consider other possible reasons for those behaviors before jumping to conclusions like it’s a pole vaulting competition.

Note from Damian

One thing to note that i don’t see explained nearly enough is that body language (or any other adjacent topic like micro expressions) are not MADE to tell if someone’s lying, just like they’re not made to tell if someone’s anxious, or upset, or excited. Body language does not inherently work for lie detecting, it’s just a language, a way of communicating, and just like in any other language you can use it to know when someone’s telling a lie by looking for inconsistencies and things that are out of place and associating them with a statement being a lie, but there’s no action that tells you when someone’s lying, just like in English there’s no phrase that points towards someone lying. Someone that learns body language may never use it to detect lies or even realise that’s a possible use, they may use it to gage the emotional state of people around them, or to gage the openness their clients have to different concepts, or to gage the anxiety levels their child is experiencing.

There is nothing about body language that is intrinsically connected to lie detection, the only thing body language (or micro expressions, or anything of the sort) is supposed to be is just another communication tool, with it’s own “accent” and “colloquialisms” and “sentence pacing” that is specific to each person. Never treat these tools as a way to detect lies, but rather as a way to gather information that can then be processed by you as the observer (or the deductionist) with the use of your whole repertoire of skills to reach a conclusion such as “this person is lying” or “this person is unhappy with this other person” or any other piece of processed information