Chapter 1. Motivation as a Behavioral Predictor

For example, knowing how to read people may improve your capacity for compassion, boost your communication skills, improve your negotiation abilities, help you set better boundaries, and the unexpected side effect: help you understand yourself better. (Location 125)

In America, eye contact is generally encouraged because it is considered a sign of honesty and intelligence. However, in places like Japan, eye contact is discouraged because it’s thought to be disrespectful. (Location 152)

If you’re unaware of how you may be projecting your own needs, fears, assumptions, and biases onto others, your observations and conclusions about others will not amount to much. In fact, you may have simply discovered a roundabout way of learning about yourself and the cognitive and emotional baggage you’re bringing to the table. (Location 168)

Takeaways

Most of the communication that takes place between people is non-verbal in nature. What people say is often a poor indicator of what they want to convey, which makes people-reading a valuable life skill with almost endless benefits. Although we’re all blessed with different aptitudes, it’s possible to develop this skill in ourselves, as long as we can be honest about where we’re starting from. (Location 236)

No matter which theory of model we use to help us analyze and interpret our observations, we need to consider context and how it factors in. One sign in isolation rarely leads to accurate judgments; you need to consider them in clusters. The culture people come from is another important factor that helps contextualize your analysis appropriately. (Location 240)

Behavior is meaningless in a void; we need to establish a baseline so that we know how to interpret what we see. This means that you need to ascertain what someone is normally like to detect deviances from that to draw accurate interpretations of when they’re happy, excited, upset, etc. (Location 243)

Finally, we become great people-readers when we understand ourselves. We need to know what biases, expectations, values, and unconscious drives we bring to the table so we are able to see things as neutrally and objectively as possible. We must refrain from letting pessimism cloud our judgments because its often easier to arrive at the more negative conclusion when an alternate, more positive one is equally likely. (Location 245)

Jung didn’t care about “positivity” and self-improvement in the sense that’s popular today. He thought that psychological health and wellness came from acknowledging and accepting yourself—all of yourself—rather than in pushing the unwanted parts of yourself further and further away. (Location 291)

In the same way that it takes energy to constantly keep a beach ball submerged underwater, it takes energy to deny the shadow. But eventually, the ball pops up. (Location 311)

By using Jung’s theory of the shadow, you can achieve a few key insights when it comes to understanding people. (Location 314)

Shadow projection is when a person unconsciously attributes his own shadow traits to another person. For example, someone who feels intellectually inferior may find themselves calling everyone and everything “stupid” or haughtily criticizing the efforts of others. (Location 331)

The pleasure principle was first raised in public consciousness by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, though researchers as far back as Aristotle in ancient Greece noted how easily we could be manipulated and motivated by pleasure and pain. (Location 427)

The pleasure principle asserts that the human mind does everything it can to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. (Location 429)

While everyone wants pleasure as much as they can get it, their motivation to avoid pain is actually far stronger. (Location 444)

Our perceptions of pleasure and pain are more powerful drivers than the actual things. (Location 453)

Emotion beats logic. When it comes to the pleasure principle, your feelings tend to overshadow rational thought. (Location 480)

Survival overrides everything. When our survival instinct gets activated, everything else in our psychological and emotional makeup turns off. If a life-threatening situation (or a perceived life-threatening situation) arises in our existence, the brain closes down everything else and turns us into a machine whose thoughts and actions are all oriented toward the will to survive. (Location 488)

The next time you meet someone new or are trying to get a read on someone, consider looking at their actions in terms of the motivation of pleasure or pain. Ask yourself what good thing they gain by behaving as they do, or what bad thing they avoid—or both. (Location 509)

Maslow’s pyramid can be viewed as a visual example of how motivation changes and increases after we get what we need at each stage in our lives, which typically coincides with where we are on the hierarchy itself. (Location 527)

When psychology professor Abraham Maslow came along in the 1940s, his theory boiled everything down to one revolutionary idea: human beings are a product of a set of basic human needs, the deprivation of which is the primary cause of most psychological problems. Fulfilling these needs is what drives us on a daily basis. (Location 529)

In your pursuit of truth and clear thought, your ego will rear its ugly head like the enraged porcupine. It has set up a series of tactical barriers to keep you from learning something that might upset your belief system, and it is only after you can rein in your ego that you are open to learning. After all, you can’t defend yourself and listen at the same time. (Location 644)

Defense mechanisms are the specific ways we protect our ego, pride, and self-esteem. These methods keep us whole when times are tough. The origin of the term comes from Sigmund Freud. (Location 647)

In the same way that projection and displacement take the negative emotions and place them elsewhere, sublimation takes that emotion and channels it through a different, more acceptable outlet. (Location 719)

Defense mechanisms are the ways that we avoid responsibility and negative feelings, and they include denial, rationalization, projection, sublimation, regression, displacement, repression, and reaction formation, to name a few. (Location 740)

Chapter 2. The Body, the Face, and Clusters

The general principle is pretty obvious: bodies expand when they are comfortable, happy, or dominant. They contract when unhappy, fearful, or threatened. Bodies move toward what they like and away from what they don’t like. Leaning toward a person can show agreement, comfort, flirtation, ease, and interest. Likewise, crossing the arms, turning away, leaning back, and using tightly crossed legs as a barrier show a person’s unconscious attempt to get away from or protect themselves from something unwanted. (Location 963)

In very general terms, look for the following whole body patterns: Crossing, closing in, or shutting off – could signal guardedness, suspicion, shyness Expanding, opening, loosening – signals friendliness, comfort, trust, relaxation Forward, pointed, directed – may speak to dominance, control, persuasiveness Preening, touching, stroking – shows romantic intentions Striking, abruptness, force, loudness – signal energy or violence, sometimes fear Repeating, agreement, mirroring – shows respect, friendliness, admiration, submission (Location 1143)

We use two types of facial expressions: micro- and macroexpressions. Macroexpressions are larger, slower, and more obvious. They are also routinely faked and consciously created. Microexpressions are the opposite of all of those things: incredibly quick, almost unperceivable, and unconscious. Psychologist Paul Ekman identified a host of microexpressions for each of the six basic emotions and in particular has also identified microexpressions to indicate nervousness, lying, or deception. (Location 1165)

the only true way to analyze body language is to first know exactly what someone is like when they are normal. (Location 1171)

To put everything together, we need to read the body as a whole, and look for general clusters of behavior that work together to communicate a unified message. (Location 1173)

Chapter 3. Personality Science and Typology

The Big Five

It’s a theory that dates back to 1949, in research published by D.W. Fiske. (Location 1210)

Goldberg (1981), and McCrae and Costa (1987). Instead of evaluating you as a whole based on your experiences and motivations, this theory reduces you down to five traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. (Location 1212)

According to this theory, it’s how much of each and where we land in the range between the extremes that determine our unique personality. (Location 1216)

Introverts aren’t shy; they simply prefer solitude to socializing or calm to chaos. (Location 1258)

Jung and the MBTI

As mentioned, there are four general dichotomies or traits:   For personality, the spectrum is extroverted (E) to introverted (I). For perception, the spectrum is sensing (S) to intuition (N). For judging, the spectrum is thinking (T) to feeling (F). For implementation, the spectrum is judging (J) to perceiving (P). (Location 1321)

The idea is that everyone can measure themselves along these four spectrums, and certain patterns will emerge so that you are able to discover your personality type. (Location 1328)

We start our journey into analyzing people like a psychologist by first taking a look at the various personality tests and seeing what we can glean from them. It turns out, quite a bit, although they can’t be said to be definitive measures or categories of people. Mostly, they provide different scales and perspectives through which to view people differently. (Location 1527)

The Big Five personality traits are one of the first attempts to classify people based on specific traits rather than as a whole. You can remember the traits easily with the acronym OCEAN: openness to experience (trying new things), conscientiousness (being cautious and careful), extroversion (drawing energy from others and social situations), agreeableness (warm and sympathetic), and neuroticism (anxious and high-strung). Next, the MBTI, though helpful as a guideline, can sometimes suffer from people treating it like a horoscope and reading into their type what they wish to see about themselves. The MBTI functions on four distinct traits and how much of each trait you are or are not. The traits are generally introverted/extroverted (your general attitude toward others), intuitive/feeling (how you perceive information), thinking/feeling (how you process information), and perceiving/judging (how you implement information). Thus, this creates sixteen distinct personality types. (Location 1530)

The Keirsey temperaments are a way of organizing the same information gleaned from the MBTI. Here, there are four distinct temperaments, each with two types of roles instead of sixteen personality types. The four temperaments are guardian, artisan, idealistic, and rational. Keirsey estimated that up to eighty percent of the population fell into the first two temperaments. Finally, the Enneagram is the final personality test we cover in this chapter. It is composed of nine general types of personalities: reformer, helper, achiever, individualist, investigator, loyalist, enthusiast, challenger, and peacemaker. Each type is composed of a specific set of traits, and in this way, it functions more similarly to Keirsey’s temperaments. (Location 1541)

Chapter 4. Lie Detection 101 (and Caveats)

Chapter 5. Using the Power of Observation

Summary Guide

traits (Location 1326)