Book SummaryWhat Every Body Is Saying, by Joe Navarro and Marvin Karlins

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of What Every Body Is Saying

Have you ever wished you could tell what someone was really thinking? In What Every Body Is Saying, former FBI agent Joe Navarro provides expert insights into how to decipher body language. He argues that by practicing good observation skills and learning to decode universal patterns of behavior, you can master the language of nonverbal communication, gain access to people’s true thoughts and feelings, and detect signs of deception.

Joe Navarro is a leading authority on behavioral assessment, the bestselling author of 13 books,...

What Every Body Is Saying Summary Why Your Body Doesn’t Lie

According to Navarro, body language cues are more accurate indicators of a person’s emotions than their words. This is because we’ve developed immediate and automatic physical responses to stimuli in our environments throughout our evolutionary history. In response to many things, whether it be a cute puppy or a rude coworker, our bodies react more quickly than our conscious thoughts do, making those reactions honest reflections of how we feel.

(Shortform note: In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman refers to these automatic responses as “emotional hijackings.” He provides additional insight as to why body language cues are so honest, explaining that we automatically judge whether anything we see is good or bad within milliseconds. He adds that even when you briefly glimpse a photo of something you’re scared of, your body starts to activate its threat response and immediately initiates physical reactions like sweating.)

The Limbic System Controls Your Body’s Reactions

The part of your brain that controls these automatic emotional responses...

What Every Body Is Saying Summary How to Read Body Language

Now that you’ve learned that our basic emotional reactions (freeze, flight, or fight) are pre-programmed into our bodies, let’s look at how you can observe and interpret these reactions to make sense of body language. In this section, we’ll explore Navarro’s strategy in five steps.

Step 1: Strengthen Your Observation Skills

Navarro writes that the first step of reading body language is to become a good observer. Research has proven that people aren’t typically aware of their surroundings and that most of us fail to notice obvious things in our visual environment, such as other people’s clothing or the color of the building we’re in.

(Shortform note: Being a good observer isn’t easy. According to psychologists, most of us suffer from inattentional blindness, or the failure to notice things in the world around us. This phenomenon has been famously illustrated by the Invisible Gorilla experiment conducted at Harvard University, which had participants pass a basketball and keep track of the number of passes. However, during the experiment,...

What Every Body Is Saying Summary How to Differentiate Between Secure and Insecure Behaviors

Now that you know the five steps to reading body language, let’s look at how you can apply them to identify whether someone is feeling secure or insecure. Since our limbic systems induce strong responses (freeze, flight, or fight) to things that make us uncomfortable, most unconscious behaviors reflect either feelings of security or insecurity.

When we see something we dislike—whether it be a person, a word, or a situation, our bodies display signs of the freeze, flight, or fight responses. When we see something we like, we won’t experience a threat response—we’ll be open, expressive, and eager to interact. With that in mind, you can gauge how secure someone feels by observing the direction in which their body moves, their posture and range of movement, and the presence of self-comforting behaviors following a threat response.

How Our Likes and Dislikes Form

According to Navarro, some things we dislike are strong enough to trigger our threat responses, but what determines what we like or dislike? Researchers explain that [we develop our unique likes and dislikes based on the experiences we have through a process called respondent...

What Every Body Is Saying Summary How to Read Facial Cues

Now that we've explored how different behaviors of the human body reflect security or insecurity, let’s discuss how and why you should approach facial cues differently. As Navarro explains, unlike other parts of our bodies, we’ve trained our faces to mask how we truly feel. This means that when reading facial expressions, you must use careful judgment and look for subtle cues. He contends that lying is an adaptation that many of us have formed since childhood—we’ve learned to hide displeasure and feign agreement to maintain relationships and avoid conflict.

(Shortform note: In The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene agrees with Navarro’s claim that masking our emotions is a social adaptation and says that you should wear a pleasant mask to form good impressions. He argues that complete honesty would cause us to offend others and make us vulnerable to being judged or taken advantage of. To preserve our mental and social health, we commonly mask negative emotions like aggression or vindictiveness that would provoke negative responses from...

What Every Body Is Saying Summary How to Detect Deception

According to Navarro, body language can reveal signs of possible deception. He explains that people who are lying tend to exhibit more insecure behaviors because deception takes mental effort and often causes stress, which can trigger some limbic responses that we can identify.

(Shortform note: Neuroscientists explain why lying is more stressful and mentally taxing: it requires you to use your brain’s executive function and, more specifically, your working memory. This is because you need to predict the directions the conversation might go and determine what you need to say to maintain your lie. One study showed that lying increased both mental workload and reaction time.)

However, no behavioral cue can directly indicate whether or not a person is lying. Research has shown that even the most experienced behavioral analysis experts have, at best, a 60% chance of correctly guessing whether someone’s lying. For this reason, he cautions you to be careful when using body language alone to accuse someone of deception.

(Shortform note: Other researchers echo Navarro’s warning, adding that...

Shortform Exercise: Interpret an Uncertain Interaction

According to Navarro, learning to read nonverbal cues can give us a better understanding of what other people are feeling or thinking. Let’s practice applying his strategies to your own interactions.

Consider a recent interaction with someone that left you uncertain about how they felt about you or the situation. Describe the context of this interaction. Where were you? What were you talking about?