The best way to know what someone thinks is to ask them

Ali Ilyas is back

Muzamil opens by apologising for missing the previous week after a slight Covid scare. His test was negative. Ali is back by popular demand, and the subject is body language. Muzamil has heard that someone who looks down is lying. Yet when a police officer walks up aggressively, an honest person looks down too. Do people really react in set ways in set situations?

Why people want to read others

Ali says yes, though the field mixes science, confusion and pseudo-science. He has noticed why people want to learn it. It feels like a shortcut to knowing a person. It also brings a sense of power, because you feel you know something about the other person. And it is an indirect way of communicating. If you decide someone’s body language means he is upset, you can step aside and skip the difficult conversation.

Every time Ali goes live on Instagram, people ask for tips and tricks. “No one can tell you how to spot a liar,” he says.

He takes apart a myth from neuro-linguistic programming: that looking to one side means you are lying. That claim was disproved. He mentions a program built by a computer scientist at the University of Buffalo that picked up deceit with 80% accuracy. It first recorded a baseline from simple questions, then looked for changes. Ali says people read each other the same way. Crossed arms do not always mean defensiveness. He might sit that way because the chair has no armrests. Someone who keeps rubbing an arm might be in pain. “It’s a very inexact art that has some level of science behind it,” he says.

Culture, discipline and posture

Muzamil recalls a Junaid Akram episode that showed Pakistani officials slouching across from upright delegates of another country. He adds a story from a 23rd March parade with Pakistani, Chinese and Saudi contingents. Stepping away to the washroom, he saw the Chinese soldiers still marching in perfect step behind the stands, where no one was watching. For him that showed discipline that did not depend on an audience.

Ali reads the photo as a cultural difference. In many countries, leaders are trained in posture and public speaking and have PR teams. He then asks what the photo really reveals about those people. Not much, he suggests.

Seven universal micro-expressions

Ali turns to what does hold up. The psychologist Paul Ekman travelled to a remote island, which Ali believes was Papua New Guinea. The people there had little exposure to Western media, so Ekman could test whether disgust, anger and sadness look the same everywhere. He found seven micro-expressions that are universal.

A micro-expression lasts about a fifth of a second. It is a true signal of what a person feels inside. In disgust, the nose crunches and the eyebrows go down. In surprise, the eyebrows go up for a moment. If they stay up too long, the surprise may be faked. The show Lie to Me was based on Ekman, who trains police officers and sells online courses for 400 to 500 dollars.

Ali adds a warning. Nervousness is natural. A person in an interrogation room will be anxious whether or not they are lying. Muzamil says most Pakistanis feel the same when the police stop their car. Body language can show how confident or comfortable someone feels. Accuracy only improves once you know how that person normally behaves. After nine or ten podcasts together, Ali says, he would probably notice if Muzamil felt off one day, even without knowing why.

Truth default theory

Ali then brings in truth default theory. It says most people sit in a truth default position. We believe that what we are told is true. Many of us think we can catch a lie, and research says we cannot. Police officers who believe they are better lie catchers turn out to be the same as everyone else. They are only more confident, and that causes leading questions and false confessions.

Ali says people who are betrayed often ask why they missed the signs. Hindsight is clear. When you like someone, you will stay in the truth default position. A society without it could not function, he says, because no one could trust anyone.

Muzamil connects this to Pakistan. A country that went through hard times in the last century raised generations who do not trust people outside their own group. He says that to scale, Pakistan will need experts who trust each other, and family members with no expertise cannot fill that role on a board. He sees partnerships in business and creative work break apart because each side expects to be cheated. Where survival is harder, people look after their families first.

Ali calls this a good research idea for psychology students. He believes people stay in the truth default position in personal relationships everywhere. The open question is whether the same holds at work, and whether growing up through terrorism, partition and national trauma makes people more skeptical. He knows of no research on it.

He adds a point about trust. “Vulnerability always comes with a risk,” he says. When you are vulnerable with someone, you also give them the power to hurt you. “You don’t get betrayed by your enemies, you expect it,” he says. “You get betrayed by your friends.” Muzamil applies this to conspiracy theories that blame outside plots. An enemy will act like an enemy, he says. The real betrayal comes from our own people who take the money. Ali calls such theories a lazy way of thinking. The two connect this to Covid myths about 5G, and agree that misinformation is real-time deception.

Can a psychologist read you?

Muzamil asks Ali to read him on camera. Ali refuses and explains why. Therapists are asked this all the time. Therapy training is not mainly about reading people. You build a baseline over many sessions and use clinical judgment. If a client has made steady eye contact for five sessions and stops in the sixth, Ali asks about it. That question starts a conversation.

He once put up a post asking for the best way to tell what someone is thinking. The answer on the next slide was to ask them. “Body language is the gate that can help you enter good communication if you read it well,” Ali says. On its own, he adds, it is not enough to tell much about a person, and judging people from it is presumptuous.

Muzamil compares this to people who tell him how to get more likes after six months on social media, though he has made content for ten years. Ali says everyone feels they understand humans because they meet humans. When people learn he is a psychologist, they ask him to read them.

Comfort, conversation and consumers

Muzamil tries again and asks Ali for anything he has read from their sessions. Ali gives his answer. The whole point of connecting, through words or body language, is to create comfort authentically. “You feel comfortable with me,” he says. “There you go.”

Muzamil notes that they had met only once before they started recording. Ali explains how the comfort grew. Their early episodes were more formal, and the first was a controversial one. Over time came familiarity, areas of agreement, short talks off camera and a sense of working toward the same goal. Most of all, Ali says, he feels valued. If Muzamil cut him off and said he did not know anything, they might not have recorded ten episodes. Respectful disagreement matters too.

Muzamil says this is the difference between a podcast and an interview. A podcast is a conversation between two people with their own views. In an interview, the guest is treated as an authority who hands down rulings. Early viewers complained that he cut in too often, and he kept the format anyway.

He then explains why he thinks podcasts will grow within 18 months. Audiences move in stages. First comes curiosity, when people get the internet and search for what society forbids. Next comes entertainment: pranks, roasts and vlogs. Then people tire of it and want value. Muzamil estimates that about 3% of Pakistan’s 70 million internet users, roughly 2.1 million people, come for podcasts today. He expects the mass audience to move toward informative content as it tires of daily pranks. For now, he says, anyone podcasting in Pakistan does it for a purpose. People who say it is about fame or money do not understand the consumer. Ali brings it back to comfort. He is willing to sit and listen, and neither is copying the other’s body language to win favour.

Ask, reflect and make yourself

The two then look at the market for videos on how to tell if someone likes you. They have millions of views, and most of them sell a detached way of reading people. The advice they land on is to ask. People avoid it because they find communicating hard. Muzamil says the same about meetings. People are taken seriously when they speak naturally in the language they are comfortable in. He cites Siddique Jaan, a journalist who speaks Urdu confidently in large government meetings.

Muzamil shares a habit. After meeting new people a few times, including employees he hired, he asks them for one good and one bad thing about him. Ali remembers Muzamil doing this to him the first time they met. Muzamil says friends carry a bias, while new people give a more objective view. Several people told him they liked how respectful he is in conversation, which he learned from his parents’ use of the respectful “aap” in Urdu. He also asks people how their first impression compares with today. “The Muzamil of 2010 and of 2020 were not the same person,” he says.

Ali links this to an idea he likes. “What constitutes the true self is as much a process of invention as it is a process of discovery,” he quotes. You find yourself, and you also make yourself, by choosing your values and acting on them. Passion works the same way, he adds: you create it too. Muzamil agrees. You try many things and learn where your interest lies. Ali points out that asking for criticism takes courage. Muzamil explains why he avoids asking close friends: their feedback hits harder, and from new people it is just data.

Ali closes with an image from Bojack Horseman: when you see someone through rose-coloured glasses, red flags stop looking like warnings. People who love us may find it hardest to give us the criticism we need. This one runs close to an hour, after listeners complained that the last episode with Ali lasted 30 minutes. Next week, they plan to go deeper into active listening.