Dr. Jack Brown, a so-called “behavior expert”, is spreading bad information

In September of 2023, I did a podcast episode about Jack Brown, which contains more information. Listen to that here.

Dr. Jack Brown claims to be a “body language expert”. His Twitter is @DrGJackBrown and his website is www.bodylanguagesuccess.com. His Twitter bio reads “Body Language & Emotional Intelligence Expert, Speaker, Physician, Lecturer.” As of October 2022, he has 175,000 Twitter followers, which is where he does most of his work. On Twitter, he gets a lot of likes and retweets of his takes analyzing physical behavior of various leaders and celebrities and suspects, from interviews and speeches and such.

I’m someone who takes the study of behavior pretty seriously — I have a pretty popular psychology/behavior podcast, including this episode where I talk about Jack Brown — and I can confidently say: Jack Brown is a bullshitter and and a bad-information spreader. I’d say “liar” and “scammer” as well, but you can never really know with these kinds of things whether someone is purposefully deceiving others or maybe has drank the Koolaid a bit and is self-deceiving.

And I’ll also say: for my podcast and in my own work, I’ve talked to many serious behavior researchers and experts who agree that Jack Brown is an irresponsible spreader of bad behavior information. There are many “behavior experts” who fall into this “behavior bullshit” category, and Jack Brown is just one of them.

There are just so many things we could dig into with Jack Brown, as his Twitter feed is a constant stream of bad information and strangely confident statements, but let’s start with one of the more easily debunked concepts Brown talks about: the idea that eye movement direction indicates deception or truth-telling.

Eye movement quadrant ideas

The eye-direction-as-information idea posits that someone’s eyes going to different quadrants (like lower right, or upper left) when they’re talking can mean certain things. Here’s an example of this idea from this MythBusters article about eye direction quadrants:

But as you may have guessed by now, this idea has been debunked. Several studies by Richard Wiseman et al found, to quote: “No significant differences were discovered. Taken together the results of the three studies fail to support the claims of NLP.”

What’s NLP, you may be asking? The eye-movement-as-indicator-of-deception idea got its start in the NeuroLinguistic Programming world, aka NLP. If you don’t know about that whole thing, NLP is a pretty shady and scammy world of people who charge a lot of money for their seminars and trainings to teach you amazing skills, with reading people and gaining rapport being part of that skill set. Some of the more controversial and suspect self-help “experts” and life coaches got their start in the NLP world (Tony Robbins is an NLP guy). To be clear: there are some good and interesting ideas taught by NLP trainers (nobody would take their classes if there weren’t a few) but that’s only because NLP is simply a hodgepodge of a bunch of different ideas thrown together to give the perception that the trainer has some special mastery of the world. (If you want to learn more about NLP, the NLP wikipedia article is good start. Maybe interesting to some: I know a good amount about NLP because I once worked six months for a fairly well known NLP guy; I mainly took the job because I knew it’d be weird, so I have a lot of stories about that world.)

Some defenders of the eye-movements-indicate-deception idea (mostly NLP types and pseudo-behavior-experts like Jack Brown or their students), if questioned, would probably say something like “yeah that’s just one study and I and others have shown that it’s very powerful,” but the simple fact is that it was never a reputable idea to begin with, it was born alongside a bunch of other questionable, arbitrary ideas, so the proof of the idea is more on the people claiming it’s true than it is on anyone to disprove it.

Here are a few examples of Jack Brown promoting the eye movements/quadrant stuff. It’s pretty rampant.

 

There are many more of these; if you’re interested, you could do a search on Twitter for: drgjackbrown “eye” “left”, or drgjackbrown “eye” “right”. (Although I wouldn’t be surprised if, with more people aware of this, Brown stops this kind of analysis and deletes many of these.)

That alone should be sufficient and if I were reading this, I’d have read enough to know that Jack Brown is spreading bullshit. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg; even without that, there is so much bad information, it’s hard to know where to start. Brown’s analyses are full of overly confident takes on very ambiguous situations, the kinds of situations any real behavior expert would be loathe to express an opinion on without many, many caveats, because for most real-world spots, there could simply be so many factors. His long threads (you could find any of them as an example but here’s a recent one on Bill Gates) are the behavioral analysis equivalent of squeezing water from a stone.

Not only that, he confidently uses speculative ideas, the eye-movements ideas being just one of them. He will occasionally say, “Of course, this isn’t conclusive, but it does heavily suggest…”, because that is always a solid and legitimate way for any analyst of high-variance data to defend themselves, and people like Jack Brown known they should occasionally sprinkle that in for defense purposes (and as someone who writes about poker tells, I often say that; more on my work will be at bottom). But a quick skim of Jack’s feed will show you the high amount of overly confident and near-certain takes he has for so many spots.

Simply put: you can tell the faux-experts from the real experts in this way: the real experts will seldom offer confident opinions about body language, maybe just a handful of thoughts about an interview, and they will offer frequent caveats. Basically, the real experts are aware of the complexity of these situations and know they have a service to not mislead or not exaggerate the reliability of this kind of information.

Main problem: indicators of anxiety can be present for many reasons

If I had to boil down the general philosophical problem with the approach of Jack Brown and similar fake behavior-experts it would be their analysis of indicators of anxiety. Anxiety can be present for a number of reasons, whether that’s because the person is guilty/lying and hiding something, or whether they’re nervous because they’re doing a high-stakes interview/talk, or because they are a generally nervous person, or because they have nervous-looking tics/mannerisms even though they’re not nervous, or maybe even because they ate some bad shrimp right before they went on camera and are not feeling so great.

I could go on, but you get the general idea. Much of Brown’s work is about drawing attention to these common, ambiguous spots. I’ll put one example below. Think for a moment about how easy this would be to do for pretty much any interview of anyone.

 

Confidently purporting to know intent and thoughts 

All of these speculative ideas wouldn’t be so problematic if he didn’t so often reach confident conclusions with them. But Jack Brown not only tells us theoretically useful things, he also purports to know exactly what’s going on in people’s heads. This is probably the worst thing about him, because giving speculative ideas with occasional caveats is one thing, but think about how much he is influencing naive people’s opinions with these creepily confident and irresponsible takes.

Below is another one I just noticed (I could do this all day). The image of Trump’s pupil sizes isn’t that conclusive, but even assuming Trump’s pupils have different dilations, this could be due to many reasons. This article states that different sized pupil dilation is present in up to 30% of the population. It can also be an indicator of various conditions. I didn’t search much but I didn’t even see drug use mentioned prominently as a cause of this.

I don’t have time to do a really long analysis, but hopefully the things I’ve included here will be sufficient for most people.

Strategies of fake experts 

Here are a few things I’ve noticed that are frequent strategies of fake behavior-experts, and I think some of these are more generally strategies of anyone trying to deceptively gain influence.

They will tend to mainly do analysis of spots where:

• It’s a spot where the truth won’t be known for a long time (Bill Gates and his relationship with Epstein is a good example). This allows them to go out on a limb without much risk.
• It’s a spot where they’re fairly certain the person is guilty. (Chris Watts was a good example; many behavior experts immediately weighed in on his behavior because it was pretty certain he did it, whereas if it was less certain, they’d be less likely to.)

Another common strategy that really works is to post a lot of us-versus-them stuff, like Jack’s vitriolic and confident takes about Trump and the GOP. Whether Jack is doing that consciously or not, it is definitely a strategy for gaining influence in highly polarized societies, where us-versus-them behavior is cheered on. (This is why social media accounts that use #resist and #trumptrain and similar hashtags and that share a lot of angry us-versus-them content can easily get so many followers.)

It’s a problem

Hopefully you can see why this stuff is so bad. People like Jack Brown are spreading bad information to their audience, and their audience walks away with false ideas that they spread to others.

Think of how many people walked away from looking at Brown’s Bill Gates analysis and will spread the word “I saw a very well known behavior expert say that there were many signs Bill Gates was being deceptive so he probably was doing creepy things with Epstein.”

When we talk about the problem with social media and misinformation, Jack Brown is a perfect representation of this problem. He’s also a perfect representation of social media effects because I think he’d be noticed by hardly anyone if not for social media; Twitter allowed him to reach some modicum of influence and fame with his overconfident takes and pandering to his politically similar group. His rise to having that much influence and respect would be much less likely to occur even a few years ago. And it’s also interesting from the angle of how social media incentivizes bad behavior; we’ve seen many examples of how people can be tempted into bad and extreme behavior because it makes them money. The internet makes it easier than ever to immediate indulge our worst instincts when we are tempted by fame and fortune.

I should also add that not all behavior experts are like this. Some are respectable and try their best to communicate nuance. One I could name is Joe Navarro (Navarro’s website). From what I’ve seen of Navarro’s analysis of real world situations, he gives a lot of caveats, his stuff is based on good information, and he’s quite careful with how he speaks about things.

What to do about this? 

Are there any practical takeaways here? I have a few ideas:

• Be more skeptical of everything, especially online. I often say that our current high-political-polarization problem isn’t so much that many people aren’t consuming the “right” information/news, it’s that many people simply aren’t skeptical enough of all stuff. If more people applied skepticism in equal amounts, and used the same skepticism they applied to, for example, CNN, as they did to, for example, Fox News, and vice versa, we’d all be a lot better off. A lot of the work I’ve done about online deception has one goal: to make people more skeptical of all information and all online accounts, especially if you don’t yet see a reason to trust it. And you should be especially skeptical when you read something from “your side,” because that is when your critical thinking skills are most disabled.
• When you know someone seems to be getting too much respect for no good reason, and you think it’s possible their followers just simply aren’t aware of the truth, you can find pieces like this one about them (or make them yourself) and share those pieces with their fans/followers. For example, you could reply to Jack Brown’s twitter posts with links to this post (and for best results, do that respectfully and calmly, maybe with a message about how we all need to be more skeptical online). Many people who believe this stuff simply never encounter a reason to question the stuff, but they will if given an opportunity.

Other thoughts on poker tells and police interrogations and more

To put this into context of my poker tells work: I go out of my way to point out that reliable poker tells are fairly infrequent (only a handful during an 8-hour session might change a decision). I often point out that many behaviors, even when they contain information, are often not very reliable but just a bit reliable, that they can vary a lot. And I frequently point out certain tells that may be generally reliable but also vary a lot depending on player, and why it can be important to study a player a bit before acting on some of the less generally reliable tells. And I frequently point out that some players will be very hard to get information from. And I frequently emphasize how much more important strategy is compared to tells and tell people to focus on strategy a lot before learning tells. In other words, lots of caveats.

And I have sometimes had people asking for my take on real world physical behavior stuff and my general response is: poker is such a formalized game with frequently recurring situations that allow us to study those similar spots over and over again. Poker, and games and sports in general, because they have these oft-repeating similar spots and because the people in those spots can have such polarized emotions or moods (relaxation versus anxiety, or lack-of-mental-focus versus high-mental-focus), give us the opportunity to draw a good amount of fairly low-noise information from behavior. The same is not true for real-world situations, like interviews and press conferences and such, where there are simply so many factors involved, and someone could be thinking about so many things, and there are so many theoretical reasons someone might seem anxious.

A few related things I feel I should point out:

• Interrogations are a different sort of situation to themselves because, similar to games, they can contain oft-repeated scenarios that the cops are familiar with, and because the people involved can have highly polarized emotions. So I have more respect for interrogation behavior analysis (one interview for my podcast was of David Zulawski, a well known interrogation/interview expert), but note that the people in that area who are respected, like Zulawski, will go out of their way to point out a lot of caveats, and the better ones will also make sure people they’re training understand: these clues should never make you confident someone is guilty, they can just be signs to follow up on something, a clue that something might be there. There has been a lot of rightful criticism of police doing training about reading physical behavior (an Intercept article about this, and here’s another article), but to me there’s not a big problem with someone teaching something a bit on speculative side (like statement analysis, described below) as long as it’s well communicated that it is quite speculative and high-variance and is more just an added tool for knowing how to adjust an interview or give ideas for further investigation. In other words, I think it’s possible for people to get too hung up on the fact that something isn’t proven, because I know from experience (my poker tells work and my many interviews of how people read people for my podcast) there are many ways people are using information in their jobs that have no studies or proof associated with them, but are still nonetheless real and practically useful, and many of those things will probably be shown later with studies. In other words: the caveating and skepticism is important to communicate when teaching those methods to avoid the worst uses of that.
• While I think body language and facial analysis is quite weak for non-interrogation interviews and most real-world situations, I am a big believer in the power of statement analysis, with the caveats I mention in the above bulletpoint. There is just so much more information to be gleaned in people’s statements, because people just aren’t good liars so their attempts at deception can be fairly transparent sometimes, and because people are uncomfortable making direct lies so that has various effects. If you’d like to learn more about that, check out this interview I did with Mark McClish, who’s a law enforcement officer and trainer and wrote two very interesting books on analyzing statements in real crime/legal cases. His work also happens to be the inspiration for my Verbal Poker Tells book. I tell people: if you are interested in analyzing real world behavior, you should exert your energy on the statement analysis, not on the physical behavior; the payoff is just so much bigger and you will use statement analysis in your own life frequently.
• Related to poker tells: some of the pseudo “behavior experts” and some legitimate ones occasionally try to dip their feet into the poker tells world, and they will usually fail quite badly, because poker (and any game) has its own interesting and unique situations, and the general behavioral ideas that most behavior experts (and “experts”) traffic in, that come largely from the world of general interactions or interrogation ideas, simply don’t map over to poker, or many other competitive games/sports. If you want to learn more about that, I have this piece here about what behavior experts get wrong about poker tells.