In this episode, I talk again about fake behavior expert Jack Brown, whose pseudoscientific behavior analysis work I devoted a past episode to. Jack Brown got some recent attention in a Raw Story article for an analysis he wrote about how Trump’s body language at a press conference showed that Trump was lying.
Topics discussed include: the silliness of Brown’s work and why it’s silly; tips for recognizing fake behavior experts; how this stuff connects to toxic political polarization; a reading of Brown’s recent analysis with comments.
A transcript is below.
Episode links:
Related resources:
- Jack Brown’s Substack post about Trump’s behavior
- My first Jack Brown episode
- Episode with Tim Levine about the difficulty in detecting lies
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about human behavior and psychology. You can learn more about it at PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
Occasionally on this podcast I’ve talked about fake behavior experts. I had a whole episode about Dr. Jack Brown, an ophthalmologist who transformed himself into a body language expert, or at least a pretend version of one – he plays one on the internet, like a lot of people do these days. There’s a lot of money in pretending you can confidently decode behavior – that you are some reader of souls.
I hadn’t thought about him for a little while but yesterday I got an email from an anonymous account, a Jack Brown fan, expressing anger at me for my criticisms of Brown. This got me curious to see what he was up to, and I saw that he had just gotten a lot of attention due to being featured in an article on RawStory.com titled “’Trump is lying’: Expert finds ‘deception’ in ‘crucial segment’ of ex-president’s speech.” It was full of Jack Brown’s usual nonsense; confidently saying this minor behavior means this, this other minor, ambiguous behavior means that. His usual bit.
Raw Story is a very low quality news site, so it’s not surprising they’d be willing to run with information from such a silly source; I first became familiar with how bad their articles were when I saw them back in 2021 write a piece about a video that many people believed showed a black man being racially harassed, but which was pretty obviously fake, at least to me, and was a few days after they wrote that piece shown conclusively to be staged.
In this episode I wanted to read Jack Brown’s analysis, as it’s interesting to see how much bullshit he’s spreading.
If you haven’t already listened to it, I’d recommend checking out the episode focusing on Jack Brown, as it gives a good rundown on why his stuff is so silly, and why it’s so harmful. You might also enjoy a previous talk I had with Tim Levine, who talks about why it’s so difficult to find reliable indicators of deception.
Here’s a few pointers for how you can stay skeptical when it comes to so-called behavior experts:
- One of the main ways you can tell a behavior bullshitter is that they speak as if the small non-verbal things they find are highly reliable. Any behavior expert worth their salt will tell you, “This behavior makes x a bit more likely but it’s far from reliable.” What Jack Brown is akin to someone promoting a lie detector reading as a fact; saying “this means that; I know this conclusively.” Having highly certain takes about behavior is a major clue that you’re dealing with a bullshitter.
- Also, any behavior expert worth their salt will do some due diligence explaining where their ideas come from, whether it’s from studies or something else. Jack Brown doesn’t interest himself in that at all. He spouts off all sorts of silly ideas and doesn’t tell you where they come from. Some of these ideas I’ve never heard of and can find nothing about online – and some of which I’ve asked real behavior academics about and they’ve never heard of either. And this is purposeful; because there is no legitimate science or research behind most of the stuff Jack Brown says. It’s akin to the random assortment of ideas in a neuro-linguistic programming course. For example, in this Trump analysis one, he talks about having a confident read based on how Trump points his index finger. When I emailed a behavior academic about this, he emailed me back, “Trump’s lying because of his index finger? This guy is getting worse.”
- Another thing behavior bullshitters do is they like to make confident pronouncements, but only about things where they won’t be held to account if they’re wrong. For example, it’s common for Jack Brown, and other behavior bullshitters, to talk about theoretical things that we’ll never know the truth for; for example, like whether Trump really dislikes or likes Nikki Haley. It’s also easy to make a confident prediction for a situation where the truth is almost certainly known (for example, a suspected killer’s interview footage when it’s pretty universally believed they’re guilty). They’re smart in sticking to ambiguous or near-certain things because that’s safer.
And Jack Brown is also interesting because his popularity is related to toxic political polarization. Our fear and anger and contempt, these various negative emotions that polarization leads so many of us to have, makes us overly gullible when it comes to information that aligns with our biases and narratives. Jack Brown creates a lot of content where he claims to expose the dastardly nature of Trump and other Republicans, and this gets him a lot of attention from people who already believe those things. That’s what so sad and irresponsible about Brown’s work; he’s just amplifying their contempt and rage in a pseudoscientific way. Some of his stuff is just extremely irresponsible; for example, his claims that his behavioral analysis of Trump’s pupils show that Trump is likely a drug addict, or his claims to have analyzed the January 6th pipe bombing suspect footage and thinks it’s likely to be Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In my books on polarization, I talk about how extreme polarization gives more power to the more polarized and polarizing. Jack Brown is a good example of that, just as I think Trump is. People who are willing to act in highly insulting, demeaning ways towards the “other side” get more attention, and gain more power, which all helps create a self-reinforcing cycle of polarization.
I also talk about how I think the focus on misinformation is often quite faulty and wrong. Toxic polarization is the root cause of our misinformation problem; our contempt and fear lead to increased demand for wrong information. Liberals with contempt and fear towards Republicans are more likely to fall for Jack Brown’s misleading silliness, because it aligns with their emotions and narratives.
When it comes to Raw Story’s decision to publish Jack Brown’s thoughts, we can see it as similar to their decision to publish the story about the racial harassment video, which later turned out to be fake. Both are catering to the demands of a liberal audience; they know that giving them what they want to see, things that support what they already believe, will get clicks. This is why I think all the efforts and money put into combatting misinformation have been, for the most part, a waste. Where there is great demand for misinformation, someone will be creating it.
If you’re liberal and wonder something like: but who cares about this? We know Trump is a liar, so who cares about the random thoughts of Jack Brown? I think you should care because these are the kinds of things that amplify our divides and help create the very things you’re upset by. Trump voters see many people believing this stuff and spreading it and think “These liberals mock us for being anti-science but look at the nonsense they believe.” We should all care about bullshit and bad, biased information; we should all try to push back on it where and when we find it, even when it’s on quote “our side.” Because these things seem to be getting worse; our fear and animosity has led to many people simply not being critical, not caring about the quality of their information. People turn a blind eye to bad things on quote “their side” because they think it doesn’t matter compared to the other, bigger things. But these are the instincts that push us further into division, and further into extreme, divergent narratives.
Okay I’m going to read Jack Brown’s piece on his Substack, which is titled Body Language and Behavior Analysis No. 4760: Donald Trump’s re Nikki Haley at Bedminster ‘Press Conference’.
I’m recording this on video and am going to screenshare this, so if you want to watch that, it’ll be on my YouTube. I’m not going to get into debunking everything he says; again, if you want to read more specific debunking, check out the first Jack Brown piece. I’m more just interesting in documenting this nonsense; I think people with any sort of behavioral knowledge will find it amusing and entertaining, just to see the wackiness he’s spreading. His piece analyzes a 7 second clip of Trump speaking.
[I read Jack Brown’s analysis with following comments:]
On index finger: just a quick note here from me, Zach: I’m not sure what Jack Brown is talking about here. This is more outlandish than a lot of the stuff he writes. I think he’s prone to just making up his own patterns and meanings. He’s done nothing but gained a large audience from all his bullshit so far; he probably thinks why stop; let’s keep going.
On tongue jut: the tongue jut thing is known for being a thing, but again, like most behaviors, to act as if you can be anywhere near certain about what it means is silly.
I searched online for “predatory tongue jut” and the only person I saw using it was Jack Brown.
Okay that was Jack Brown’s piece that got a lot of attention recently. One practical thing you can do to combat this stuff is, if you see people sharing takes from Jack Brown online, or a similar behavior bullshitter, share this episode or my last episode about Jack Brown with them, and urge them to be more skeptical about such things. Urge them to consider how such things are helping create the toxic, polarized landscape that gives more strength to polarized and unreasonable leaders and political activists.
Okay thanks for listening.