Former FBI Agent Breaks Down Interrogation Techniques | WIRED

so as an fbi agent one of the things that i would do to make people comfortable was i always made sure that they would sit next to the door you know on television you always see the suspect sitting in the corner of the room that is third grade interviewing graduate level interviewing is you sit them near the door why there's greater psychological comfort there my name is joe navarro and for 25 years i was a spy catcher with the fbi and i am a non-verbal communications expert so here's the truth about detecting deception or detecting

if somebody is lying there is no pinocchio effect it is sheer nonsense to assume that if somebody touches their nose clears their throat or touches their ear that they're being deceptive and i think this is the first time i'm revealing this on video what we look for are indicators of discomfort and distress we're not looking for deception because there is no single behavior indicative of deception [Music] one of my favorite stories that's in my book what everybody is saying is of a woman that was invited to the fbi office because she was part of an

investigation and during the first 20 minutes or so that we in the fbi used to calm the person down this individual instead of calming down became even more stressed and we hadn't even talked about the case she was biting her lip she was touching her her super sternal notch she was clutching at her neck jewelry a couple of times there she was wringing her hands and finally i said to her madam you look like you need to get something off your chest and she said thank you mr navarro because when i parked downstairs i only

had two tokens for the meter and the meter's about to run out so here were all these behaviors that maybe 30 years ago people would have looked at and said oh this is indicative of deception i mean she's touched her nose she's bitter lip no she was worried about getting a ticket because she didn't have enough coins when she parked downstairs and as it turns out somebody had stolen her id she had nothing to do with a crime whether we're dealing with the honest or the dishonest we may see behaviors that are indicative of psychological

discomfort the only thing that we can do is try to determine why we are seeing those behaviors but not assume that they're indicative of deception because the science just is not there one of the things that i would do to make people comfortable was to say look i'm an fbi agent we're conducting an investigation and obviously you're here for a reason my tone was always to go lower and slower to make sure that at a subconscious level they began to relax what we want is someone who is calmer so that we have better recall remember

when we create stress we're affecting their memory and this is why when we have stress we can't remember where the keys are so we want the person to calm down so we put them near the door and we don't sit too close to them because when we violate space it makes people nervous so we back away from them probably somewhere between four and five feet away which is really unusual because on television we're used to seeing people very up close and then rather than make a lot of eye contact which is very intimidating what i

would do is make less eye contact so that they would begin to relax and then i would do cathartic exhales so i would look at my notes and do something like this at a subconscious level the person listening to me will actually mirror that because humans gravitate towards homeostasis then i begin with very simple things i would say tell me about your name it gives them an opportunity to say well my father his grandmother was named this way and now the person is relating subconsciously to these positive things that have occurred in their life and

they're bringing it forward which also contributes to psychological comfort [Music] so are there times when we need to create psychological pressure that is a profound question i don't recommend it because once you create psychological pressure we know that it takes anywhere from a half hour to an hour to return that person back to normal or homeostasis after doing 13 000 interviews i can tell you i have never seen where escalating a situation has benefited anyone what it has done is it has derailed me as an interviewer to the point where i remember there was an

espionage interview i was doing on someone that was accused of espionage and it was a bizarre interview it was done standing up over three and a half hours on the loading dock of a lumber yard in georgia myself and the suspect were going back and forth and i was just getting more and more frustrated and the man was sticking to the same story and i was beginning to lose my patience i had to end the interview because at that point i wasn't thinking clearly and as it turns out this individual did not commit espionage his

repetition of the same story was consistent with what really happened he didn't do it and so this was one of those mid-career type situations where it validated that thinking once again that raising your voice creating stress is not beneficial at all what do you know about those stolen jewels when i came into law enforcement in 1975 i was going through the utah police academy and they were teaching back then that if somebody touched their nose touched their mouth or cough they were lying this is sheer and absolute nonsense and they were taught teaching this for

the for decades and even when i entered the fbi in 1979 there were still misconceptions about well if somebody asks for a drink of water or if they look up and to the left and then they look to the right that they're creating or uh inventing an answer and so forth and the fact of the matter is that is all garbage there were any number of things that we were falsely told we that were indicative of deception from facial touching to sniffing rubbing the insides of our mouths with our tongue and so forth here's the

downside to all of this i looked at the 261 dna exonerations that took place over the last few decades and this was the initial review of these individuals who had been convicted and were sentenced to be executed and dna later proved that they had nothing to do with the crime and here's what's sad in every single case not one not one police officer not one prosecutor could detect the truth but they all claimed to be able to detect deception the other thing we found that was interesting from those 261 dna exonerations fully 25 was willing

to admit to a crime just to stop the interview process that means that those interviews where there was a lot of psychological pressure applied where it took place over hours and hours and hours where there was a lot of threatening demeanor that eventually the people were willing to say you know what just to you know i'm going to admit it even though it's going to cost me my life 25 that's frightening so every time i hear somebody out there says i can tell that they're lying from their their body language i just say that's absolute

rubbish there is no science to support it all right ralph you want it the hard way i can fix that too you've got 20 years staring you right in the face what do you want me to say that i did it we're always dealing with a human brain whether we're dating whether we're dealing with family members or even in a forensic interview you know i tell the story of this individual in yuma arizona who immediately came under suspicion there was a body found and the person had been stabbed with an ice pick now the only

person that knew this was myself and the suspect we found out that the victim had been in an argument with this individual named ricky so you know i go and meet with ricky and uh ricky said i had nothing to do with it and i said well that's fine i said well ricky you tell me you didn't kill this gentleman but if you had would you have used a machete and he said no i said okay would you have used a gun no how about an axe no and i said ricky would you have used

an ice pick and when i used the word ice pick which obviously somebody with guilty knowledge would respond to his eyelids came down and he tucked his chin in blocking behavior protective behavior so i just looked at him and i said ricky come on you were seen having an argument with him and now he's dead and uh and eventually he confessed keep in mind that nonverbal communications per se are not admissible in court i mean i could say that the person looked distraught and defense counsel might ask well how would you know that how long

have you known the person what does distraught look like and i could say well i you know he closed his eyes and he lowered his chin and they could come back and say well that's not indicative of anything but this is how we use nonverbals to let me know that that which only the suspect knew affected him [Music] there's a certain amount of lying that we have to do to get along with each other so we say that lying is a tool for social survival and because of that we're actually pretty good at lying most

of us lie the research says anywhere from three to five times an hour i hardly talk to anyone in an hour so i don't think i find myself lying so much but i know that if you know i'm having a bad day and somebody says hey how are you i'll probably say yeah i'm okay when i'm not i think the most effective liars are the people who habitually lie one of the best liars i ever ran into was a woman who was a spy she could tell stories like no one i've ever known they were

so convincing you would ask her a question and she would just be so fluid in her answers and of course she's describing something that was taking place in germany so it's not something that we could go and check on the next day and she let us on for about a year the only thing that we can do to protect ourselves from deception is what is being said and what is the proof you begin to make an inquiry the story begins to fall apart or it causes a cognitive load you know oh so you you went

to uh to mexico which airport did you land that um i you know and then they struggle to come out with with an answer simple questions should evoke simple answers and when they create a cognitive load then it's not indicative of deception but it should certainly make you wonder is there something wrong here one of the things about this woman spy who was in fact convicted 25 years as soon as we were in germany and allowed to conduct the investigation we could immediately see that the story was falling apart you can either accept a story

as it's being told or you can make an effort to question it to see if you can verify it [Music] there's a lot of myths about body language but this one area this area of deception we've got to get away from this because this is no joke you can be sued for saying to somebody i think you're lying when it's based on non-verbals and you can certainly ruin somebody's life in fact i would say anybody that says i can help you to detect deception is actually deceiving you because there just simply is no science to

support it all we can say is we're seeing behaviors indicative of psychological discomfort and that is as far as you can go with that