-Nonverbals are anything that communicates but is not a word. The public knows them as body language. How we dress, how we walk, have meaning. And we use that to interpret what's in the mind of the person.
-My name is Joe Navarro. And for 25 years I was a special agent with the FBI. My job was to catch spies. Most of my career I spent within the National Security Division. A lot of it had to do with looking at specific targets. And then it was about well, how do we get in their heads and how do we neutralize them. Our security is based on nonverbals. We look at the person through the peephole. We look at who's behind us at the ATM machine. We know from the research that most of us select our mates based on nonverbals. So, we may think we're very sophisticated, but in fact, we are never in a state where we're not transmitting information. There's a lot of myths out there. The ones that stand out is if you cross your arms that it's a blocking behavior. That's just nonsense. Even when you don't like the person that is in front of you, this isn't to block them out, it's actually to self-soothe. Because in essence, it's a self-hug. When you're sitting at a movie and you're watching, you're going to cross your arms. You're waiting for somebody; you tend to do this. What's interesting is we do this behavior more in public than in private. The other one that really stands out is as we think about something, we may look in a certain way. As we process the information, we may look in another way. It's certainly not indicative of deception. And it really shouldn't be used that way. All we can say is the person is processing the information. The other misconceptions are that if the person clears her throat, touches her nose, or covers her mouth, they're lying. We do these behaviors as self-soothers. They're, they’re pacifying behaviors, scientifically and empirically. There's just no Pinocchio effect. And people who prattle that and say, well, we can detect deception because the person touches their nose or covers their mouth. That's just sheer nonsense. We humans are lousy at detecting deception.
-Espionage work is often nowhere near what we see in movies. And in one of the cases, we had information from another country saying, you have an American we think is actually a mole who somehow entered the United States, is able to pass as an American, buddies here working for a hostile intelligence service. Then just fortuitously he was video graphed coming out of a flower shop. We're looking at the video and everybody in the in our small unit, we were saying, well, there's not much there. You know, he's coming out of the shop getting in his car. And I said, stop the film right there. Just as he came out of the shop, he took the flowers. And most Americans tend to hold the flowers by the stock, so the flowers are up. This individual took them and grabbed the stock and then held the flowers so that they were facing down. And I said, that's how they carry flowers in Eastern Europe. Rather than confront him about, are you a spy, I decided to do what's called a presumptive. So, as I sat there with him, I said, would you like to know how we know? And he had this look on his face and, and I said, it was the flowers. And then he confessed.
Rob I Updated: January 6, 2026
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