After hearing Joe Navarro speak and then reading his book What Every Body is Saying, I decided to seek him out to ask him some pointed questions about what he has learned about non-verbal communication through his 25 years as a counterintelligence special agent with the FBI. This is the second in a four part series that started with Detecting Deception. For today, I'm going to focus on something that Joe calls: GUILTY KNOWLEDGE.

[JDavis] We now understand that it's nearly impossible to tell if someone is lying. What then, is the next best alternative?

I learned to look for INDICATORS OF STRESS. If a question causes someone stress or bothers them, dig in to find out why. As you learn to identify these indicators, you'll realize that not everything has the
same weight during questioning.

Here's an example (using a crime suspect): If I’m questioning them about a case where someone was murdered a machete, I could ask them lots of different questions about a knife, a blade or a sharp object. What I've found is that they probably won’t react with the same level of guilty discomfort as if I were to ask them specifically about a machete.

[JDavis] What is the most likely indicator of discomfort that someone would show non-verbally?

For decades I kept seeing a very interesting thing happening during interrogation but this one action never showed up in research. I finally realized that researchers don’t sit in front of terrorists. They sit in front of students who are being asked to deal with made up situations.

What I observed over time was that when people were really under stress or there was insecurity, people would touch their neck. Men do it more robustly and women delicately. By studying it I realized that we rarely touch our necks UNLESS we’re uncomfortable. We so infrequently touch our neck unless there is a specific issue that we feel guilty about.

[JDavis] Could this "guilty discomfort" manifest itself through verbal cues as well?

Absolutely! I call this DIS-POSESSION. Remember, for people with "guilty knowledge", words have weight. Here's how it works:

Interviewer (to a suspect): Do you own a Smith & Wesson Handgun?

Suspect: Yes I do.

Interviewer: Where do you keep it?

Suspect: I keep my gun in a locked safe in my bedroom closet.

Interviewer: Were you aware that I'm investigating a murder in your neighborhood in which the

murder weapon was a Smith & Wesson Handgun?

Suspect: No, I wasn't aware of that.

Interviewer: Can you tell me where your gun is right now?

Suspect: I'm not sure where the gun is.

The subtle difference here is that as soon as the gun that the Suspect owns is tied to this murder, and because the Suspect has "guilty knowledge", you'll notice that he dis-possessed the weapon - changing it from "my gun" to "the gun". If that "guilty knowledge" wasn't present, you would have heard the Suspect continue to take ownership by most likely using the statement, "I'm not sure where my gun is."

This happens all the time between parents - If a father shows up after work and his wife needs to share that their daughter has spilled juice on his favorite chair, she’ll say, “Guess what YOUR Daughter did?”. By not saying “Our daughter”, she’s dis-possessing herself due to guilty knowledge. The minute you hear distancing, you know something is wrong. It’s NEVER positive. For further clarification, if a mother had something she was proud of she'd likely say, “guess what OUR son did? He won first place!”

One last example of this in real life: Bill Clinton referred to Monica Lewinsky as... "That Woman"

In Part 3 I'll share Joe's tips on what he calls "The Most Honest Part Of Our Body."

For twenty-five years, Joe Navarro was an FBI counterintelligence special agent and supervisor specializing in nonverbal communications. A frequent lecturer, he serves on the adjunct faculty at Saint Leo University and the FBI. You can learn more about Joe through his website or by following him on Twitter.