How to Read People
Reading people is not as hard as you might think. And, no matter what we’ve been warned about not “judging a book by its covers,” we all do it. So, why not do it right?
Learn how to read people like the experts do. All you have to do is know what you’re looking for and keep an open mind. Judging someone prematurely is the quickest way to blind ourselves to the real signs of what a person’s thinking or feeling.
Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, Ph.D., co-author of Reading People: How to Understand People and Predict Their Behavior—Anytime, Anyplace
She “reads” potential jurors by how they look, move, answer questions, and otherwise interact with the world around them. In all her experience, she has narrowed down the art of reading people to the three most important questions that best predict a specific person’s behavior in any given situation:
1. How compassionate is the person generally?
2. How much love and support did the person have as a child?
3. How satisfied is the person with his/her own life?
The answer to these three key questions will get you pretty far when you have to decide, among various strangers, who to let closer into your life—such as new dating partners, friends, bosses, employees, babysitters, doctors, lawyers, car mechanics, and so on. Asking a few pointed questions early on in any relationship can save you a lot of grief down the road. Here’s what you need to know.
HOW TO READ PEOPLE
A. LEVEL OF COMPASSION
Dimitrius has found that the more compassionate a person seems, “the more they tend to be generous, fair, sincere, affectionate, gentle, family-oriented, forgiving, and understanding of human frailty. They are inclined to give other people the benefit of the doubt and are more inquisitive and patient than people who lack compassion. They may have a harder time coming to a decision than those who are less compassionate, but only because of their desire to do the right thing. They don’t want to hurt anyone, so they are unlikely to be dishonest. They tend to believe that what goes around comes around.”
At the other end of the compassion spectrum, she had this to say about people who seem to have very little of it: “[They] tend to be more critical, intolerant, unforgiving, harsh, punitive, and self-centered. They are also frequently more analytical, more likely to scan the facts and make a quick decision. By the same token, they tend to be more judgmental, impetuous, and inclined to act before all the information is in. Their motto frequently seems to be ‘What’s in it for me?’”
B. CHILDHOOD HAPPINESS
Dimitrius lumps all of a person’s childhood circumstances under the general heading of “socioeconomic background.” For example, she explains that even a very poor farmer family in Ohio that provides enough love and support to all of their fourteen children is part of those kids’ positive socioeconomic background.
She writes, “Generally, a person’s socioeconomic background will have a significant impact on his outlook and behavior. People who have had to scratch and claw for everything they have, whether financial or emotional, may develop a siege mentality and retain it all their lives, no matter how much money or success they eventually achieve. They may become hardened and lack confidence; they may be insecure, unkind, inconsiderate, stingy, intolerant, defensive, and unwilling to reveal much of themselves. Because they had to fight so hard to survive, they tend to be more watchful and to believe the ends justify the means. On the positive side, those who have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps also tend to be focused, hardworking, and dedicated to achieving their objectives.”
“People who have always had their needs fulfilled, on the other hand, tend to be more confident, secure, kind, generous, tolerant, forgiving, and open. But, if everything has been handed to them, they also may lack drive and intensity and be rather materialistic and egocentric. [¶] If we experience prejudice as children, we may become suspicious and defensive. If we live with constant criticism, we are more likely to become judgmental and intolerant. If we are treated with kindness and compassion, we will probably become caring. If we had to struggle to make ends meet, we may become less giving. And, it doesn’t matter whether we’re tall or short, black or white, male or female, young or old. That is why socioeconomic background is always a key predictive trait.”
If you did not have a loving, supportive childhood, read how you can overcome the negative consequences of that as an adult in “Fan Your Inner Flame Till It Burns Bright” and “Change Your Mindset to Change Your Life.”
C. SATISFACTION WITH LIFE
First, it’s important to keep in mind that a person’s goals are relative. If someone always wanted to be a doctor but “only” became a nurse, then they may be very unsatisfied with their life and feel like a failure. However, if another person always dreamed of becoming a nurse, then they may be very pleased with life and feel like a success. The same holds true for money. To one person, a $100,000 annual salary is unimaginable wealth; but, to another, that’s a far cry from their dream of becoming the next Donald Trump or even Bill Gates. So, you have to know what their expectations were before you can assess their level of satisfaction with life.
Dimitrius writes, “Over the years, after paying particularly close attention to this characteristic, I have found that people who have achieved their goals tend to believe in personal accountability and responsibility. They tend to be more compassionate, supportive, at peace with themselves and others, and optimistic. They also tend to be more forgiving, hardworking, and industrious.”
At the opposite end of this spectrum: “Those who have not achieved their goals often have a victim mentality. They can be quick to place blame on others and may be bitter, angry, negative, pessimistic, and vengeful. Usually, they are less industrious and more critical and cynical than achievers. [¶] … And it’s usually not difficult to find out how satisfied someone is. A few simple questions, such as ‘What did you want to be when you were in high school?’ or ‘How do you like your job?’ or ‘If you could change your life, what would you do?’ will usually prompt responses that make it clear whether someone has achieved personal success.”
To test your level of satisfaction with life, see “20 Questions for Your Diary.”
CONCLUSION
Now you have the tools to better predict the thoughts and actions of the people you are thinking about letting into your life. Of course, there are always exceptions to every rule. As always, use your best judgment and trust your gut instinct!
If you would like to read more about Dimitrius’ Reading People, click here
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[For “Fan Your Inner Flame Till It Burns Bright,” click here.]
[For “Change Your Mindset to Change Your Life,” click here.]
[For “What Would You Do If You Couldn’t Fail?,” click here.]
[For “How to Set and Achieve Goals in 5 Simple Steps,” click here.]
[For “10 Reasons to Keep a Diary,” click here.]
[For “20 Questions for Your Diary,” click here.]
[For “Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself,” click here.]
[For “How to Interpret Dreams,” click here.]
[For “4 Signs that a Marriage Will End in Divorce,” click here.]
[For “Help with Codependency,” click here.]
[For “7 Questions Personality Test,” click here.]
[For “Does Your Drink Show Your Personality?,” click here.]
[For “What Kind of Ump Are You?,” click here.]
[For “High-Maintenance Personalities,” click here.]
[For “How to Be an Extrovert,” click here.]
[For “Big 5 Personality Test,” click here.]
[For “All About You!,” click here.]
[For “Jealous Much? … Make It Work for You!,” click here.]
August 8th, 2008 at 2:09 am
Hi Shanel,
I enjoyed your article “How to Read People”. From last 4-5 yrs. I am trying to develop the capability in my self to read the face and try to analyze what the other person has in his/her mind. For this I usually analyze their facial expression, their voice, their eye contact etc.
This may be too early for me because I don’t have much experience of life. However I realized one thing that every person in this world thinks in a diffrent way. Simply saying every person has a lock inside his thought and every lock has a unique key. Somehow I was not able to understand how to break these locks or how to get the keys.
Your this article has added extra thoughts in my mind. You have so much on your site. Some of the articles are really very knowldgeful and unique.
Thanks.
With reagards.
Gaurav Bhatnagar
August 8th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Hi Gaurav! Thank you for your comment and positive feedback! Also, thank you for sharing about your own quest to read people and your insights about that.
You might be interested in the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
(2005) by Malcolm Caldwell. In it, he talks about two amazing scientists Silvan Tomkins, the teacher, and Paul Ekman, the student: “Paul Ekman first encountered Tomkins in the early 1960s. Ekman was then a young psychologist just out of graduate school, and he was interested in studying faces. Was there a common set of rules, he wondered, that governed the facial expressions that human beings made? Silvan Tomkins said that there was. But most psychologists said that there wasn’t. The conventional wisdom at the time held that expressions were culturally determined — that is, we simply used our faces according to a set of learned social conventions. Ekman didn’t know which view was right, so, to help him decide, he traveled to Japan, Brazil, and Argentina — and even to remote tribes in the jungles of the Far East — carrying photographs of men and women making a variety of distinctive faces. To his amazement, everywhere he went, people agreed on what those expressions meant. Tomkins, he realized, was right.
“Not long afterwards, Tomkins visited Ekman at his laboratory in San Francisco. Ekman had tracked down a hundred thousand feet of film that had been shot by the virologist Carleton Gajdusek in the remote jungles of Papau New Guinea. Some of the footage was of a tribe called the South Fore, who were a peaceful and friendly people. The rest was of the Kukukuku, a hostile and murderous tribe with a homosexual ritual in which preadolescent boys were required to serve as courtesans for the male elders of the tribe. For six months, Ekman and his collaborator, Wallace Friesen, had been sorting through the footage, cutting extraneous scenes, focusing just on close-ups of the faces of the tribesmen in order to compare the facial expressions of the two groups.
“As Ekman set up the projector, Tomkins waited in the back. He had been told nothing about the tribes involved; all identifying context had been edited out. Tomkins looked on intently, peering through his glasses. At the end of the film, he approached the screen and pointed to the faces of the South Fore. ‘These are a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very peaceful,’ he said. Then he pointed to the faces of the Kukukuku. ‘This other group is violent, and there is lots of evident to suggest homosexuality.’ Even today, a third of a century later, Ekman cannot get over what Tomkins did. ‘My God! I vividly remember saying, ‘Silvan, how on earth are you doing that?’ Ekman recalls. ‘And he went up to the screen, and, while we played the film backward in slow motion, he pointed out the particular bulges and wrinkles in the faces that he was using to make his judgment. That’s when I realized, ‘I’ve got to unpack the face.’ It was a gold mine of information that everyone had ignored. This guy could see it, and if he could see it, maybe everyone else could, too.’
“Ekman decided, then and there, to create a taxonomy of facial expressions. They combed through medical textbooks that outlined the facial muscles, and they identified every distinct muscular movement that the face could make. There were forty-three such movements. Ekman and Friesen called them action units. Then they sat across from each other, for days on end, and began manipulating each action unit in turn, first locating the muscle in their minds and then concentrating on isolating it, watching each other closely as they did, checking their movements in a mirror, making notes on how the wrinkle patterns on their faces would change with each muscle movement, and videotaping the movement for their records. On the few occasions when they couldn’t make a particular movement, they went next door to the UCSF anatomy department, where a surgeon they knew would stick them with a needle and electrically stimulate the recalcitrant muscle. ‘That wasn’t pleasant at all,’ Ekman recalls.
“When each of those action units had been mastered, Ekman and Friesan began working action units in combination, layering one movement on top of another. The entire process took several years. ‘There are three hundred combinations of two muscles,’ Ekman says. ‘If you add in a third, you get over four thousand. We took it up to five muscles, which is over ten thousand visible facial configurations.’ Most of those ten thousand facial expressions don’t mean anything, of course. They are the kind of nonsense faces that children make. But, by working through each action-unit combination, Ekman and Friesen identified about three thousand that did seem to mean something, until they had catalogued the essential repertoire of human facial displays of emotion.”
I discuss more from Gladwell’s book in “4 Signs that a Marriage Will End in Divorce.”
August 8th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Hi Shanel,
Thanks for your response.
Reagrds
Gaurav Bhatnagar