Joe Navarro, FBI

As an FBI interrogator and world-authority on ‘non-verbal behavior’ (that’s tells to you), Joe Navarro has spent a lifetime detecting deception in hardened criminal masterminds and international terrorists. But when Bluff used our interrogation skills on him, we had him crying like a baby within minutes. That last statement, of course, is a lie, but you spotted that, right? Welcome to the circle of trust...

Joe, tell us a bit about your background and career. The unclassified bits, of course.

For 25 years I was a special agent for the FBI, but I’ve spent the last fifteen years working in something called the Behavioral Analysis Program, which is essentially designed to study the behavior of spies and terrorists, in much the same way as the criminal profilers study serialkillers. As part of that, I became the Bureau’s expert on non-verbal behavior and interviewing. So I’ve spent a long time studying the non-verbal behavior of many different people – what stresses them, how they manifest certain behavior in certain situations and, of course, how they behave when they’re being deceptive.

BLUFF: So what you call “non-verbal behavior” is essentially what we call “tells”…

In the poker world they’re called tells. But you can have gestures that are symbolic, like when someone gives you the bird, and there are some gestures which are simply part of our being, like when our eyelids flutter, and those are more universal. And then there are other things, like the way people dress, and why they keep their sunglasses on at one point and then take them
off at another. Why are they doing that? So yes, it’s rather simplistic to call them tells, but they’re certainly all means of communication.

Tell us about how your knowledge can be applied to the poker table. Is it purely about spotting bluffs?

First of all, if you’re going to play poker as a profession, it’s business, and if you’re at a poker table, your job is to collect intelligence on everybody else. What kind of information can we gather at the poker table? I started to observe that many of the same behavior patterns that I see when people are lying take place when people are bluffing. The most obvious one is what we call trying to “convince or convey.” In poker, the guy who all of a sudden is talking too much and being effusive, he’s trying to convince you of something, and that’s a change in behavior
that one should focus on. But it can be much subtler, such as the way players place their hands on the table. One of the things I’ve observed is that people who are very comfortable and are committed to something, their hands tend to move forward; they tend to be more expressive. Often you can see people are going to bet because their hands are so far into the table. It’s almost as though the table is seducing them into playing. So that’s useful for the player to see.

Are some personality-types are harder than others to decipher. Have you met or played against someone you’ve found to be unreadable?

There are a lot of people who are unreadable. In fact, one of the things that we concentrate on at Camp Hellmuth is how not to reveal behavior. A lot of people think, ”Well, if I cover my eyes with sunglasses, then I’ll be okay.” Well, you won’t. There are so many things that people do. It may be something as simple as touching the neck, stroking the face or biting the lip.

One of the hardest people to read is Chris “Jesus” Ferguson and he does something that I wouldn’t recommend to anybody – he holds his hand down in front of him. But no matter what he has, that hand is steady. Most people just cannot do that. And then there are some people who are just complete ciphers, but that’s not as big a problem as you might think. With players like that you just shrug and think, “Well, if I can’t read them, I’ll just play the cards.” There’s a rule in poker that says you play the hand and then you play the player. Well, if you can’t read the player, then stay away from him and just play the hand.

But most players give away a huge amount of information, which really leaves them at a disadvantage. In fact, after the first day of class at Camp Hellmuth, players went out that night to play, and they all felt that they had improved their game, simply by not giving away these exploitable tells.

Can you tell when politicians are lying on TV?

Some you can and some you can’t. It’s difficult because, first of all, politicians are used to being theatrical performers, and they’re so used to maneuvering around the truth. One of the things to look at is whether simple questions stress them. If you see a lot of lip-biting or neck-touching, it suggests that they’re stressed by the stimulus of the question, the chances are – the chances are – that they may be deceptive. Nothing, of course, is conclusive.

How long have you been a player yourself?

Really, just for the past year. And to tell you the truth, I only look at it as an opportunity to observe – as my own little laboratory. My father brought me up in a home where we weren’t allowed to gamble, and so the gambling aspect doesn’t interest me particularly. I play only as much as I need to make observations. I always want to get close enough to watch things like pupil-dilation and constriction and the wings of the nose to see how they dilate and how this affects the outcome of the hand. It’s tough to see that when you’re ten feet away, you have to be playing. But it’s how I conduct my research.

Tell us about the TV show you were on with Annie Duke.

The Discovery Channel wanted to look at the subject of deception and so they invited us on to see how good we really were at detecting it. I agreed to do it, just for fun. They had us versus a polygraph machine and a voice-stress analyser and we had to decide whether statements read out to us were truth or lies.

That’s where I met Annie for the first time and she was the one who put me on to poker. We started talking and we came to realize that we were making the same observations. We had different names for them, but they were effectively the same things. Guys in the intelligence community are trained to look at ten to fifteen people and detect unusual behavior, but that takes a lifetime to learn. Annie can look at a whole table of people and tell you what everybody’s doing at once. I find that remarkable.

Does that good-cop-bad-cop thing really work or is it just for the movies?

No, it doesn’t. I did a study, along with the Bureau of Prisons, which found that criminals actually laugh at the good-cop-bad-cop thing. They think it’s a joke and they have no respect for it. What they do respect is the guy that comes in all cool, calm and collected. That scares them the most. It’s almost like the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with that scary voice that’s non-emotive. That really gets them. The good-cop-bad-cop technique has actually been responsible for a lot of false confessions and miscarriages of justice. I’ve never used it – ever.

Are there special exercises we can all do to hone our observational skills?

Oh absolutely. It’s actually part of the course at the camp. I tell people to watch the feet, the hands, and the face, in that order. These are the most honest parts of the body. It’s actually a difficult task, because essentially you’re collecting intelligence on anything from six to nine players. Most people, when they start out, are exhausted from that. But the most difficult task is learning not to give off tells, because most people just aren’t aware of how much they actually transmit.

I treat this, not as a game, but as a business. And if you’re going to be in this business, you’re going to be professional. I don’t teach at the amateur level. Amateur is French for “lover of,” and if you’re just a lover of this stuff, you’re not going to do very well. I teach connoisseurs; people who really want to succeed. It’s no nonsense. I treat them just like the special agents I train. People are spending money to be trained and I want them to walk away knowing that they can use what they’ve learned.