It’s a night out with your friends, and it appears to you that certain members of the group are secretly whispering to each other. They appear to be shielding their mouths with their hands as they pass comments out of the corners of their mouths. They are avoiding making eye contact with you around these moments. This happens repeatedly, and always among the same few friends. You catch the eye of one of them right after such an exchange and they quickly look down and away from you, their body shrinking back and in a little. Then you see your friends passing knowing looks to each other, maintaining prolonged eye contact, and then quickly glancing toward you. You try to catch them in the act, and a couple of times catch the eye of one of them in these moments. They respond with widening eyes, slight smirks and nervous giggles before loudly introducing new topics of conversation. What gives? Is it a conspiracy against you? You think with growing paranoia, What’s the big secret? Is it me? Nice friends I have, ganging up on me. They’re thick as thieves!
WHAT IS THE KEY SIGNAL that they are “thick as thieves” and conspiring against you, or at the very least keeping a secret from you? The behavior in this scene is classic blocking behavior. They don’t want to show their mouths or their eyes: Their hands conceal the conversation, and they look away from you and down when you try to engage. These defensive body language signs are the clincher for you that they are using their combined powers to close you out of the conversation, and they seem united together against you with their secretive communication.
To start the SCAN process, let’s first suspend judgment and be more descriptive of what is going on. You are with friends after all, and hopefully that implies you have mutual understanding, values and beliefs; that you like each other and have respect for each other, and place value on each other’s society. That said, what often happens is that we default to negatives when something is unclear; that is, when we are faced with insufficient data, we tend to think the worst. And the body language of blocking, covering mouths, avoiding eye contact and looking away, and physically shrinking away, all in tandem with the nervous laughter and refreshing the conversational focus would seem intended to shut you out, to conceal data from you. With insufficient data you think the worst and feel actively excluded. Your assumption that they are as thick as thieves and keeping something hidden, potentially about you, could be right on the money.
Canting Crew
Why does a conspiracy feel so bad to us? The word conspiratorial comes from the idea of a group “breathing together.” When our gang of friends seem to behave in a way that bonds them together and excludes us, it can feel very threatening. As if they are stealing away the air we breathe. Usage of the word thick to mean “closely allied with” dates from early nineteenth-century England, around the associations of thieves of that era who conversed with each other and plotted together using a conspiratorial and secretive language. Many who were seen as being on the fringes of society or involved in illegal acts in those times habitually used secret words and phrases to talk among themselves. East London’s Cockney rhyming slang is a derivation of this, where words are replaced with other words that rhyme and then are reduced, resulting in a singsong or “canting” way of speaking. (Not to be confused with the nonverbal cant of the head when it is tilted to one side.) For example, “Can you adam the porkies from the pot?” can translate as “Father is lying to us. Unbelievable!” How can this be possible? Let’s break it down: Adam refers to Adam and Eve, which rhymes with believe. Porkies is another word for pork pies, which rhymes with lies. Pot refers to pot and pan, which rhymes with old man, a sometimes colloquialism for father. More directly translated: “Can you believe the lies from Dad?”
Similarly, American gangs commonly use secret sign language, often known as “stacking” or “throwing up signs.” These signals are an easy way for members of a group to silently identify themselves to each other, mark out their territory or represent their crew on another gang’s turf. Using secret hand signals can help indicate who is in the group—or outside it. Whether the hand signals are new or traditional ones reappropriated, groups and gangs past and present use them to covertly communicate, often because they are operating on the margins of society, they hold extremist views and so are outside mainstream society, or they feel under threat by mainstream society and therefore require confidentiality.1
Powerful world leaders have also used hand gestures to solidify a brand experience around themselves and their politics; sometimes doing so has caught them up in conspiracy controversies about secrets or affiliations implied by such usage. For example, the hand gesture commonly taken in the United States to mean “A-OK”—the index finger and the thumb forming an O and the other three fingers held up and slightly fanned—was used with great frequency by Donald Trump during the early days of his presidency, and it became aligned with extremist viewpoints that Trump and his administration espoused. This A-OK symbol is classified by social scientists as an “emblem,” meaning you can switch out the verbal “A-OK” for the hand gesture and be equally communicating the same thing, though it’s important to note that this symbol (and others) has negative or obscene connotations in many cultures and countries outside North America.2 Trump’s use of it in the United States was widely seen as a shout-out to the American white supremacist community, who commandeered the emblem as a secret signal within the group. Trump’s continued use of the gesture was also recognized, though less widely and mainly by conspiracy theorists, as his openly acknowledging membership of a secret society.3
While it may be that something is up that you are not part of, is it something good or something bad? Your friends are avoiding meeting your gaze, in fact diverting their eyes from you, which could cause you, on the receiving end of this behavior, to quickly jump to the conclusion that you are being lied to. Additionally, and as you’ve seen in earlier chapters, blocking signals—here the shielding of the eyes or mouth, avoiding eye contact—could lead us to the assumption that someone is lying to us. However, while these actions may well result in someone or something environmental or psychological getting shut out, contrary to popular folklore, the truth is they do not necessarily go hand in hand with lies and deceit. And even if you detect an additional handful of other gestures associated with lying, like shifty eyes, blinking or (alternatively) a fixed stare, shuffling feet, breathlessness and sweating, you still need to carefully weigh the nonverbal against the verbal when attempting to determine if you are being lied to. And in the heat of the moment, how right will you be? You have roughly a fifty-fifty chance of being right that deceit is at play. So now what?
We need to be most descriptive here specifically of the context. You are out with your group of friends, and suddenly you are made to feel excluded by a subgroup of the party. There are more of them than you, and they know something you don’t. You are not only outnumbered and excluded but also suddenly feeling less intelligent than the others, all of which will seriously erode your feeling of social power within the group. While you would normally feel comfortable among your trusted friends, it is easy in this situation to feel vulnerable and uncomfortably paranoid about whether they are for you or against you.
So while your assumption about your friends’ concealment of something looks to be correct given the blocking gestures you see, your lack of knowledge about what they are concealing, plus your perceived shift in social power, equals catastrophization in your mind. Your thoughts can run away from you, increasingly demonizing the culprits—they now seem like thieves.
In such a moment, stop and take stock of your day. Ask what else could be going on for you personally? What biases, insecurities or negative feelings might be running through your mind already that could be swaying your judgment toward the negative? Also, what else could be happening with your friends? Sit back for a moment and think about whether you know anything about the whisperers that may be causing them to behave in that way. Did they come from another event together? Are they going on to another engagement? Do they work together? Are there other points of connection they have that don’t involve you that could be the subject of their whisperings? Alternatively, are there any major group events coming up that include all of you, such as a birthday, or a work event that they wouldn’t necessarily share the details of with you? It is worth investing a few seconds: you may remember or realize some mitigating circumstance that helps form a new judgment and put your mind at rest.
But if this doesn’t happen and you really feel no wiser as the moments pass, how can you test your assumption that you are negatively implicated in some way, that they’re hiding something from you, that they are talking about you and it is bad for you? The decision you make about how to act here will likely be shaped by the power of the social group and your perception of how you fit in. Are you all of a similar status in the group? Are these really great friends, or are some of them acquaintances, friends of your friends? Are you all on equal footing? Whatever the case, you will need to assert yourself if you are to find out what’s up, what’s the secret, or you’ll have a miserable and paranoid night. This can be done by asking them what is going on. However, this may come across as suspicion, aggression, accusation and insecurity. Better yet, harness your negative thoughts; in other words, continue to suspend judgment while you lightly and politely ask what you are missing out on.
Your friends may tell you the answer, or say they’ll tell you later, which could mean the subject matter is sensitive in some way, or they are looking at you and concealing information at the same time because they need to share it with you, but perhaps not at that noisy venue. Of course, the other outcome is that you get no answer from them, that they carry on with the shared behavior. You get no joy out of prying, and you end the evening wondering why you are hanging out with this crowd in the first place. At least you know how you can feel in their presence, and how they can and will use their power over you. You can continue to try to get to the bottom of their behavior, but perhaps with just one of them while the two of you are on your own, taking away the social power of the gang against you. Alternatively, you can decide to “suck it up” or ignore it. Or you can find new friends.
BODY LANGUAGE MYTHBUSTER
You Can Spot a Criminal by Their Face
At one time, people believed you could tell a criminal just by looking at their face. Fortunately, this destructive myth is much less popular today than it was during the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, when it was rooted in criminal anthropology, which is the combined study of the human species and the study of criminals. This represented the beginnings of offender profiling and was based on perceived links between the nature of a crime and the personality of the offender, deemed at that time as being detectable through physical appearance.
In the late 1800s, Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso put forward the idea that criminals were born with inferior physiological differences. His theory was that crime was located completely within the individual and utterly divorced from the surrounding social conditions and structures. Lombroso and his followers performed autopsies on criminals and declared they had discovered similarities between the physiologies of the bodies and those of other primates.
Lombroso outlined fourteen physiognomic characteristics that he and his followers believed to be common to all criminals. We won’t waste the ink on listing these, as they represent the hateful stereotyping, misogyny, bigotry and racism inherent in his work and of the time. Certainly his ideas gained popularity in support of dangerous and extremist ideas such as eugenics and genocide. Their proponents recognized what they saw as genetic flaws to justify sterilization and death. Unfortunately, even today some follow the tenets of Lombroso’s theory.
During Lombroso’s life, British scientist Charles Buckman Goring was also working in the same area. He concluded that there were no noticeable physiological differences between law-abiding people and those who committed crimes. Maurice Parmelee, seen as the founder of modern criminology in America, also rejected the theory of anthropological criminology, in 1911, which led to its eventual withdrawal from the field of accepted criminology research.
QUICK SCAN
S: When there is insufficient data to make a judgment, your primitive brain will default to a negative one. When you are unsure, suspending judgment on your initial negative instinctual reactions can therefore be very powerful in developing a more positive truth.
C: The social context in this scenario is your group of trusted friends. Their unexpected behavior that seems conspiratorial against you erodes your feeling of social power within the group.
A: When you ask what other events are happening or what relationships you may not directly be a part of, you may uncover more information that helps you form a less negatively biased idea of the feelings and intentions of others.
N: If you have not learned or recalled a reason for their blocking behavior, something to put your mind at rest that you are not negatively implicated in some way, and so have not formed a new judgment, the decision you make about how to act may change how you fit into this group going forward.