The Book of Tells (Peter Collett)[unlocked]

THE BOOK OF TELLS
don't even know themselves. Because certain tells are
controlled by involuntary processes in the brain they
are outside people's conscious control and therefore much
more accurate indicators of people's emotions than the
accounts that they might offer about their feelings. If you
ever have to choose between believing what someone has
to say about their feelings and what you can observe from
their involuntary tells, you should always opt for the latter.
In these instances the golden rule is always Trust the
tells', and not what people say about themselves, or what
other people say about them.
Some tells are easily recognized and widely understood
- for example, when someone blushes, everyone knows
that he or she is feeling embarrassed and self-conscious.
Other tells aren't understood. That's because they're not
recognized as tells, or because it's not clear what they
mean, or because they seldom even get noticed. Even
when people do notice other people's tells it doesn't mean
that they understand them. This is especially noticeable in
relations between the sexes. It's not unusual, for example,
for a woman to make a friendly overture towards a man,
and for the man to misinterpret her actions as a come-on.
Equally, when we fail to notice the tells that other people
produce, it doesn't mean that we aren't affected by them.
It's still possible for their tells to slip under our radar, so to
speak, and to influence us in ways that we don't fully
understand. Psychologists have discovered that marriages
are more likely to break down if one partner produces
facial expressions of contempt, even if the other person is
unaware that they're doing so. 13
Tells are like the constituents of a language. But it's a
very unusual language because, while we all speak it
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