Stop Missing Non-Verbals
Stop missing non-verbals
This article was inspired by a cluster of nonverbal indicators I observed during a recent interview. In general, the case had to do with a suspect that was accused of having sexual contact with a ten year old child. I asked the suspect something like, “Why is she saying that you touched her vagina?” He said “I don’t know,” but what he did showed that he had a problem with that answer. He combed his hair to one side, lifted up his feet in a stepping motion, and then pinched his nose with thumb and pointer finger. The way he responded left me feeling absolutely certain he had been lying about not touching her that way. I used the certainty to get a confession. I was able to seize on this information because of three reasons: 1. I had established his baseline during rapport building 2. I was successful in being neutral and 3. I went slow enough to get everything out of the response that I could. I’ll discuss these issues more below.
According to Reid, the majority of communication happens outside of the spoken word. Reid states that communication happens in three channels: the verbal (what is said), the paralinguistic (how it is said), and the nonverbal (what is done when it is said). My journey through interviewing has been: to listen almost exclusively to what is said with no particular emphasis on context, to listen to what is said and when it is said, and now to listen to what is said when it is said and in the context of physical actions that take place when it is said. It’s this third step that has expanded my vision and confidence the most. Slowly, I have been able to expand my bandwidth to understand more and more of the message. My goal is to share my process with you in the hopes that you all can get to the truth faster, because the crimes won’t wait for you to be good at this and the interviews keep coming.
Before we can get in to non-verbal communication, we have to revisit our old friend rapport. It wasn’t until recently that I began to fully understand how to maximize the rapport building process. If you’ll look back at some of my earlier posts, you’ll see me write something like, “I know I’m done with the exclusive focus on rapport building when I laugh with the suspect.” While I still believe this is true, I realized that I was being mentally lazy during the rapport building process. I was using rapport mostly to help the suspect relax and trust me rather than focusing on establishing a baseline. It is good to build trust, but it is vital to establish a baseline.
When I establish the suspect’s baseline during rapport, I am looking for the following:
Which way do their eyes move when they are recalling truthful information?
Hint: you can prompt this by asking something like “where did you and your wife go on your first date?” “What’s the last movie you saw in the theaters?” “What did you have for lunch yesterday?”
How much detail do they provide about the subjects they discuss?
How do their hands move when they talk?
How does their body move when they talk?
Do they have any verbal tics (ie “you know what I’m saying?” “Like…” and other words or phrases that are used over and over)?
Although we don’t necessarily know when a person is lying, we can assume that most people will tell the truth about non-threatening questions, especially the ones that the investigator could be presumed to know. Rapport building is by its very nature non-threatening (other than they whole “being in a police station” thing). I usually start the interview by saying something like, “Before we get started, tell me a little bit about yourself.” People will usually tell you about their work, family, and hobbies. Try to get them to engage in some longer narrative responses as well as the shorter factual type of answers. The investigator will gather these presumably truthful responses to compare against the later responses of unknown veracity.
While the person tells you about themselves, you must be watching and listening to how they say it as well as what they say. Do they move their hands a lot? Do they rock back and forth in their chair? Which way are their eyes moving? You are looking for patterns rather than single events. If they shoulder shrug once but not again, it might not have meant anything. If they look up and left every time they are thinking about likely true historical information, that is probably a reliable indication that their eyes will move that way when they are accessing their memory banks (it’s when they access their creativity banks that you might start to suspect deception). Look for the patterns.
It is easy to be overwhelmed by all of the information coming in at you at once. Break it down into smaller chunks by creating an order of operations for yourself. A good order of operations can be: eyes, shoulders, hands, feet, and other. Ask questions during rapport building where you focus almost exclusively on the eyes. Then ask questions where you focus on their shoulders and so on. For the “other” category ask questions while maintaining a neutral survey of their whole body and voice. Is there anything else that jumps out at you? Remember, you are not restricted to how many questions you can ask in an interview.
A great way to maximize your ability to see and catalog the suspects actions during rapport building is to talk as little as possible. Dr. Stephen A. Rhoads, who teaches a course called Subconscious Communication for Interviewing & Interrogation, turned me on to the idea of what he calls “continuers.” These are one or two word responses to answers that let the interviewee know that you aren’t satisfied with their answer and expect more. Good ones are: And?, Because?, Oh?, and Really? Continuers put the stress of a response onto the other person and free your mind to observe the suspect’s baseline actions rather than think of another question.
If you have established a good baseline, you should be able to walk out of the interview and describe to your partner how the person talks. “When this suspect talks, they sit loosely in their chair. Their ankles are crossed, and their hands rest in their lap. They keep eye contact with me most of the time. When they think about a historical event, their eyes move up and to their left. Several times I saw them chew their lower lip while thinking.”
If you can’t articulate what you are seeing, you’re relying on ‘gut instincts.’
Some of us like to think we are good judges of character. We rely on our passive mind to inform us about things, which gives us a gut reaction. We don’t know why but we just trust this person or don’t trust that person. We don’t take this lazy approach in the tactical side of work. How do you think it would go over if you got into a shooting on the job and you told your sergeant, “I don’t know why I shot him. He just looked mean.” When you strap on a gun belt, you know that you have to be able to articulate threats as exactly as possible. “While responding to an armed robbery, a subject matching the description of the suspect emerged from the store with a silver in color handgun in their right hand. When I confronted them, the suspect lifted his right hand in my direction…” If you are going to be a professional interviewer, you need to be able to put in words what you are seeing about the suspect’s nonverbal actions. If you can’t articulate what you are seeing, you’re relying on ‘gut instincts.’
So now you’ve established the suspect’s baseline. You can articulate the suspect’s verbal tics, nonverbal actions, and paralinguistic tendencies. Now it’s time to start your fact finding mission. As you move into fact finding, every deviation from the baseline should be noted. In order to be good at this, you will have to stay neutral.
What do I mean by staying neutral? I mean to say that in polite society, we tend to assume that the person we are speaking with is being honest with us. Therefore, we tend to go into communication with a positive bias. They have a weird shoulder shrug? They comb their hair with their fingers? They suddenly pick up the phone and start to text? We either don’t see these things at all or we explain them away: they are just uncomfortable, it’s probably a personal tic, they might be waiting to hear back from the babysitter. In the interview room, we cannot afford to provide the person with a positive bias. We don’t have any idea if the person is planning to tell us the truth and if so about which things. Therefore, we cannot allow ourselves to explain away behavior changes during a suspect interview.
Deviations from the baseline are significant, especially when they occur in and around significant questions. If you ask the person if they want to use the bathroom and they clear their throat to answer, it doesn’t tell you anything useful. If you ask a person if they robbed the convenience store last night and they clear their throat before answering, you must compare this to the person’s baseline responses. Do they clear their throat every few minutes? Or have you talked to the person for an hour and a half and this is the first time? If it’s the latter, their nonverbal actions have just given you an indication of deception.
When you see these deviations, slow down! If you have identified them correctly and the person is lying directly or by omission, they want to move on to the next topic as quickly as possible. You will do them a favor by asking another question right away. Don’t. Write your notes without talking. Notate what caught your attention. Also, if the person starts to chatter on about a topic they are more comfortable addressing, hold your hand up and ask them to wait while you catch up on your notes. This will make them sit on their lie for longer without having directly confronted them.
As part of slowing down, keep in mind that the full response to a question may last beyond the length of their verbal response. In the exchange that inspired this article, the nonverbal indicators of deception - hair grooming, feet shifting, nose pinch - happened after the verbal response was done. If I had immediately asked him another question, I’d have had to wonder if his nonverbal responses were related to my new question or my old question. Nobody is impressed with how fast you can ask questions.
Anybody with kids will recognize this scene from Zootopia. In it, Officer Judy Hops needs information from the DMV, but the DMV is all staffed by sloths. She is going out of her mind waiting for the sloth to give her the information. The way Officer Judy Hops feels then is how a suspect probably feels after having lied to a police detective. They are jumpy. They just want to get on with it. It’s this anxiety that a deceptive suspect feels that lays the groundwork for confessions. In a piece of good news for ethical interviewing, the honest suspect may feel annoyed at how long you are taking to ask questions, but they should not feel the anxious discomfort. We don’t want to cause undue discomfort to honest people, but if dishonest people have to be uncomfortable due to their lies, well, I can live with that.
So, as you go forward into the work week, remember to establish your baseline, look for deviations from the baseline later, and go slow enough to get the full benefit of your question. Ask yourself, can I explain why I believe the person is being deceptive? If you are watching your partners on a recording, help them out by bookmarking significant questions and responses (especially the ones deviating from the norm) on the recording. Take the time to work on these things. People are relying on you to be good at your job. Avoiding interviews or doing them poorly lets down the people who need you most.