MAKE YOUR MOVE
Former FBI agent Joe Navarro is a human lie detector. In his latest book, he reveals the body’s biggest tells
T HE secret spot that reveals your inner feelings? It’s your eyes, your neck, your hands, your chest — and, well, just about every other body part.
In his newly published book, “The Dictionary of Body Language: A Field Guide to Human Behavior” (William Morrow), former FBI agent Joe Navarro clues readers in on how to translate slight movements to bonafide emotions.
The 65-year-old, based in Tampa, Fla., made his bones by reading bad guys’ body language. Just by looking at a suspect, he could tell who was lying, feeling vulnerable or likely to commit a fiendish act. But it’s not all gut instinct: There’s a science to what Navarro does, he tells The Post. “The studying of body language draws from anthropology, psychology, neurobiology,” he says. “It’s a shortcut to what people are contemplating and feeling.”
Navarro’s study of physical subtleties dates back to his childhood, when he was an 8-yearold Cuban refugee in Miami. He didn’t yet speak English, so he relied on reading non-verbal signals to get the gist of what people were saying. He knew his third-grade teacher was annoyed when she placed a hand on each side of her waist and extended her elbows — a textbook display of territorialism. As a teenager, he noticed that girls who seemed interested in him tended to relax their facial muscles and have dilated pupils during their conversations. He majored in criminology at Brigham Young University, and was recruited by the FBI in 1978. As a special agent, he refined his hobby into a serious vocation. “Within six years, I became the go-to source on body language for the bureau,” Navarro says. In 1990, “they put me onto a secret, elite behavioral unit where we used various areas of expertise to get into the heads of people who had the potential to be national threats.” On an espionage case, for example, a defendant inadvertently gave up two of his collaborators through his eyes. Upon reading their names, “his pupils constricted and his eyes squinted,” Navarro says. “That’s what we do when we see something that can hurt us.” Noting his unintentional response, feds brought the suspects in for questioning; they confessed and were later convicted.
Since leaving the bureau in 2003, Navarro has gone public with his encyclopedic interpretations of human reflexes and tics, showing how we can all benefit from understanding physical lingo. Read on for his head-to-toe guide on what the body reveals — whether it wants to or not.