Chapter 3: Understanding the Language of the Hands
After a lengthy explanation that brings to attention the way hands not only communicate language, but also emotion, Hadnagy notes that people may sometimes subconsciously give away their own emotional state and discomfort (not necessarily because they’re lying, discomfort for any reason).
He hasn’t mentioned it quite yet, but he’s going to soon, and often, so I will here write down what we’ll call ‘The Golden Rule of Reading People:’ Just because you know what a person is feeling or thinking, does not necessarily mean you know why.
This is all-important, and pretty much the only reason for which I’d recommend buying this book without hesitation: to be continually reminded of it.
So: Write it down.
Whether someone is becoming uncomfortable when you ask them to clarify on a story element, or you see hints of anger come across their face when mentioning their deceased father, or when you see them playing with their jewelry (‘manipulating’ an object): You’ve established that the behavior has moved away from the base-line. Nothing more.
As Hadnagy mentioned in chapter one: hands display emotions by four means of communication: emblems, gestures, illustrators, and manipulators. (You can Google this.)
Next, he mentions how Ekman and Wallace developed a sytem of understanding this type of body language, comprised of these three parts: Origin, Coding, and Usage. (You can Google this.)
This entire next section is him explaining where those four means of communication originate and how they are used. While doing this, he further expands the topic with subdivisions and elaborates on more general definitions. The other important take-away is this: Different cultures have different usages for the same gestures.
I have to give credit where credit is due: though there are way too many images to illustrate very simple points, at least the illustrations here still provide a tangible benefit for the reader, allowing them to quickly internalize the information. It also provides the reader with a nice little confidence boost that may take shape in the forms ‘Cool, I already knew that one!’ and ‘I will definitely look out for those!’ (And then congratulating themselves whenever they manage to find a fitting example, even when analyzing a memory.) Even if Hadnagy isn’t quite yet instructing them to look for them, the reader is already priming himself for it at this point.
Off-topic:
Is that a strength of the book? Not really, no. Because what I just did is assuming at best – there could’ve been summaries, key take-aways and exercises to ensure the reader does internalize and apply the knowledge, yet they aren’t there.Since the book lacks any other clear aim, a training/instruction manual and accompanying template, or a text-book format, would’ve served the already limited and old content quite well.
This is a point I’ll make right now in general so I won’t have to reprise it at every point where it’s relevant: On a training course website, this content and set-up could’ve worked, but of course then the content would’ve been insufficient and incomplete at best. As a book, it is insufficient entirely. One could set you up to learn this entire book in less than half an hour, with a better retention rate, more practical usage advice, better analysis, and training resources that didn’t already exist prior to the site’s inception.
I’m flabbergasted that this doesn’t already exist – I am surprised that Hadnagy didn’t yet take the opportunity to make such a training website and make his SE.org Framework an understandable and intuitive learning experience. But I digress.
Back on topic:
The upcoming few sections are the ones with the set of images I described much earlier, at the start of this review. The first section here is about ‘High-confidence Hand Displays,’ which are steeples, thumb displays, ventral displays and genital displays. It makes some extra key points that I won’t all list, but one of them is using ‘open palms’ to seem open.
A quick tip: Roll up your sleeves, and wear V-Neck shirts or unbutton your blouse (no tie), if you want to seem open.
Another quick tip: Use gestures with open palms, having the effect of inviting in the person you’re talking to.
Then, there’s the Low-Confidence and Stress Hand Displays, which are ‘inverse’ thumb displays, hand wringing (a ‘manipulator’), and closed hands.
Next section before last comes down to: ‘Practice using and noticing these various forms of hand communication.‘ and ‘Perfect practice makes perfect.‘
His summary remarks that to get in-group, you have to use similar gestures to the ones that group or ‘tribe’ uses. Good point. It also remarks that you should probably practice these things ‘in the wild’ first, rather than going into an engagement looking for those things. That’s a fine point as well. Most importantly, it tells you to not look for individual instances, markers or ‘hot-spots,’ but rather to see how the base-lines change and then decipher these emotional changes.
Over-all, there was nothing in this chapter that most of you didn’t know already. (If you don’t know some of these things, use the keywords of this review to Google them, or check my ‘Recommended reading’ section later in the review.)
More than this, it doesn’t seem to be a very complete run-down of all the different aspects of hand communication and the presentations thereof, either. Though I understand that it would be impractical to list all of these in this chapter, as it would interrupt the flow and pacing of the book, nothing stopped them from adding them to the end of this otherwise pretty short book or linking a more complete list.
Chapter 4: The Torso, Legs, and Feet
We move on to the torso, legs and feet. They all have several crucial key-points, all leading back to the main focus of all of this: observing if there’s a change in comfort level, or base-line.
Example: Happy people generally stand on the balls of their feet, nervous people get jittery. If a happy person suddenly stops jumping for joy, or if a person suddenly starts twitching his leg when you mention his best friend, then you’ve hit a ‘hotspot.’ They’ve become discomforted (or the inverse), and now you can decipher why and use that knowledge.
Remember: A change in base-line only tells you that they’ve gone from feeling comfortable to feeling uncomfortable, or the other way around. It doesn’t tell you why.
Leg key points: Feet and legs point in the way a person wants to go, indicating his disinterest. Widening one’s stance indicates one might feel threatened and his trying to establish dominance. Crossing our legs can act as a non-verbal barrier for someone we don’t like.
I almost feel bad about listing these in such a way, as if I’m somehow plagiarizing Hadnagy’s work by doing so, but again, there’s really nothing in here that we don’t already know, and it could’ve been put in table or on a website with greater efficiency and effectiveness, respectively.
‘Torso and arms,’ the next section, contains probably the most useful non-verbal marker we can know, as social engineers and as people:
We tend to lean into things we like and away from things we don’t like. It shows where our real interests lie, including which people we feel most comfortable with/are most interested in.
And that was it, really. I will refrain from continually concluding with ‘nothing we don’t already know.’ When something novel arrives, I’ll tell you. Serviceable chapter, nothing that required a book, however.
Continue Reading – [009] Chapters 5 through 7