This episode is about what I refer to as “behavior bullshit.” There are many self-proclaimed behavior experts spreading bad, misleading, and irresponsible concepts about human behavior, and some of these people are quite popular. This episode focuses on Jack Brown (Twitter: @drgjackbrown), one of the more egregious offenders amongst behavior bullshitters. Other topics discussed include: eye-quadrant behavior analysis (for example, someone looking to upper right); NLP (neuro-linguistic programming); some common inaccuracies contained in behavior bullshit; the use of ambiguous language to make one’s background seem impressive; and more.
If you like this episode, check out an examination of self-proclaimed behavior expert Chase Hughes.
Episode links:
Resources mentioned in or related to this episode:
- The piece this was based on: my examination of Jack Brown’s irresponsible behavior work
- Jack Brown’s websites: bodylanguageeq.com, bodylanguagesuccess.com
- Links to some of Brown’s tweets discussed: Thread about Jan 6 pipe bomb footage analysis, Thread with analysis of Bill Gates’ behavior; Thread about Trump being high on drugs
- Jack Brown appearing on Anderson Cooper show
- Debunking of eye-direction-quadrant concepts
- Jack Brown’s LinkedIn page
- Jack Brown’s Medium blog
- Some of my episodes that are especially related: Can behavior be used to detect lies?, The rewards and difficulties of studying behavior
- Reddit thread about skepticism of many behavior experts
TRANSCRIPT
Zach: This is the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast about better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com.
A couple years ago I wrote a piece about Jack Brown. He is what I refer to as a behavior bullshitter: one of the many people in the behavior analysis space who are, to put it bluntly, full of shit.
This piece I wrote about Jack Brown is one of the more popular things I’ve written: I put it on the blog on my poker tells site, which is at www.readingpokertells.com, and it’s the most viewed page on that site over the last couple years. And this is probably for a couple reasons: for one thing, there’s not that much information out Jack Brown – most of the information about him comes from his website and Twitter – and probably also because there are a lot of people who see him making confident proclamations on Twitter about various behaviors and wonder “who the hell is this guy?” and google his name.
Behavior bullshitting seems to be a pretty lucrative field. There are many people in this space: people who rack up a lot of views with their analysis of various videos of interviews, speeches, and interrogations. People are really hungry for this content: reading people is an exciting idea; the idea that we can see behind people’s deceptions and ambiguous behaviors and language and see the truth – it’s an exciting prospect. And there are some people who really are drawn to the idea of having secret knowledge, and this ties into some of the draw of conspiracy theories – having that secret knowledge can make us feel special, can make us feel like we’re in the know and part of a special and elite club.
One of the more irresponsible and ridiculous things Jack Brown has done on Twitter is his analysis of some January 6th footage that shows an anonymous person planting planting pipe bombs the day before the January 6th Capital riot. That person has never been caught. Jack Brown has many times strongly implied that the pipe bomber was likely Marjorie Taylor Greene. This is a popular conspiracy theory in some very online liberal circles; you can find a lot of people who have written about this idea.
One article from the-independent.com had an article titled “Marjorie Taylor Greene addresses online conspiracy theory linking her to Jan 6 pipe bomber” The subtitle of that piece was: “While Ms Taylor Greene seems to take issue with conspiracy theories that she is the subject of, she is known to have pushed several herself.”
Jack Brown seems to be somewhat smart, and he avoids directly saying he thinks it’s her, as he probably knows he could get into some trouble for that. But he all but says he thinks it’s her. He will still occasionally mention his so-called analysis, saying, in regards to the unknown pipe bomber, and I quote “we all know who’s highest on this suspect list”.
Brown’s so-called analysis of the pipe bomb footage, and of Marjorie Taylor Green’s statements about that event, is representative for him, just for how irresponsible and over-reaching it all is.
I’ll post some links to his more prominent tweet thread about this on my site if you want to see the whole thing, but I’ll talk about a couple things he tweeted, just so you can get the idea.
Brown quote-tweets a tweet by Marjorie Taylor Green where she expresses a view that the pipe bomber isn’t being investigated enough. Brown says “In this tweet, Marjorie Taylor Greene is displaying a version of “Who farted?”, i.e., When a child (or childish person) expels flatulence, they believe if they’re the one who verbalizes an open question as to its origin, that they will be above suspicion.” end-quote
This is pretty much what Brown does with all his analysis: it’s just childish analysis, basically interpreting whoever he wants to negatively analyze through the worst-possible filter. Obviously it’s possible for Greene, or anyone, to tweet what they did, without being the pipe bomber, and without having any guilt. For one thing, Greene might think, or want to imply, that the pipe bomber was not conservative but was actually a far left person. The point is: we just don’t know, and it’s absurd to pretend as if that gives us any great insight.
In other tweets in that thread, Brown says this “In addition, Marjorie Taylor Greene displayed a classic fear expression during Rep. Jim Banks’s recent testimony in the very moment he mentioned a bombing event that occurred in the Capitol building in the early 1980s.” end quote
This is also text-book Jack Brown: taking the most minor, ambiguous, and common behavior, and speaking about it as if it has huge, reliable meaning. That is the bread and butter of behavior bullshit: claiming to find deep meaning in things that simply don’t contain any reliable meaning, or, if there is some slightly reliable pattern there, are so miniscully reliable as to be meaningless.
Jack Brown is frequently doing stuff like this; it’s really hard to even know where to start because there is just so much irresponsible badness. And it really pays off. You can find all sorts of people asking for Brown’s takes on all sorts of things. And you can find all sorts of people sharing Jack Brown’s takes with other people. For example, a Jack Brown fan might be found telling someone, “Did you see the evidence that Marjorie Taylor Greene was the January 6th pipe bomber? This behavior expert Jack Brown said so; it’s very legitimate.” or saying something like “Did you see Jack Brown’s behavioral analysis of Bill Gates: it shows he likely was doing bad things with Jeffrey Epstein.”
It’s just all so irresponsible and sad, and angering.
And there are a lot of other people in the behavior analysis space who do this kind of stuff. Some are more responsible than others. Some mainly just make a lot of ambiguous, theoretical statements to keep their audiences entertained, to keep them watching, and that focus on light entertainment is much less bad than what Jack Brown is doing.
I’ve talked to quite a few people who actually study behavior and are serious academics in these areas, and they also have a lot of frustration with all these behavior bullshitters. There’s frustration at them being willing to bullshit and exaggerate for clicks and attention, and there’s frustration at them lessening mainstream interest in actual behavior analysis, which is much more nuanced and as a result can seem more boring, at least when compared to highly confident and exciting analysis.
As you may know if you’ve followed my work, one of my main claims to fame is my work on poker tells. And poker is such a trivial and unimportant field compared to real-world political and criminal stuff, but still I’ve seen it as so important to speak carefully about behavior analysis, and to not overstate, and to draw attention to ambiguity and uncertainty whenever I can. That just seems the right thing to do, if one cares at all about one’s audience. For this reason, it can be very frustrating to see people speaking about much more important things, things that have the potential to affect people’s lives, in so cavalier and attention-seeking a way.
Finally, if you are someone interested in behavior and want to learn more about it, go check out the people I’ve interviewed for my podcast: I’ve interviewed some interesting people in various lines of research and careers on real-world applications of this stuff. For example, you might like checking out the talk with Tim Levine, who talks about the lack of evidence that behavior analysis can reliably be used for lie detection. Or see the talk with Alan Crawley, who talks about the benefits and challenges of studying behavior. If you are interested in this, go check out the entry for this episode on my site behavior-podcast.com and I’ll have some links to those related past episodes there.
Okay, here’s the piece I wrote about Jack Brown, edited a bit for audio production, and with some updates thrown in.