I was interviewed yesterday about the TSA and your security for a public radio show, Weekend America, running this weekend, probably mid-afternoon Saturday, but check your local listings at:  http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/. 

The question host Bill Radke put to me was, “We hear that the TSA has a week-long training program in non-verbal communications designed to root out people who are intending to do harm.  How would such a program work?”  

My reply was that it’s better than racial profiling, but not much.  Basically, you train people to recognize the little physical signs of nervousness, attempts to conceal strong emotion, and other anomalies.  Anyone triggering alarms would be pulled aside for a secondary screening. 

So what’s the problem?  My Mom doesn’t fly very often, she’s 79, she gets pretty nervous, and she would certainly try to hide it.  She’s a perfect candidate for secondary screening, which would scare the life out of her.  

So I don’t like the idea much.  

But there’s lots more to be said.  We are all unconscious experts in reading body language (to a greater or lesser degree depending on our narcissism, preoccupations, general street smarts, and so on).  The problem comes when you try to become a conscious expert.  We ‘read’ body language unconsciously in a deeper, older, faster part of the brain (some call it the limbic brain) than conscious thought.  So when you think consciously about it, you’re slow. 

You can, with some work, learn to read micro-expressions and some of the physical signs, but the body sends out a myriad little twitches, adjustments, movements, motion, and so on that is overwhelming for the conscious mind to react to in a timely way.  And it’s not like in the movies where, miraculously, the hero has a video to review and all the time in the world to review it. 

Also, we’re much better at detecting anomalies in people we know, than the intent of strangers.  That’s because we build up a database of information about familiar people, and we very quickly notice something different.  When your spouse comes home, bursting with news about a promotion, if you’re even a reasonably attentive partner, you know before she opens her mouth that she’s got an announcement to make. 

That’s the point of our unconscious expertise – it’s fast enough.  It responds to all the physical signals by decoding intent at amazing speed. 

My wife and I were riding the subway the other day, and a person walked on, holding an old-fashioned boom box.  He was dressed in scrubs, but we both noted instantly that he was walking oddly.  Something about him raised alarms in the car – other people eyed him and moved closer to each other, and away from him.  He proceeded to sit down and give us all a very odd physical display.  He stretched ostentatiously.  He did chin-ups on the hand straps.  He stretched out his legs, rubbing them, taking up enough space for 3 people.  He prowled the car, looking out of the door at each stop, leaving his boom box where it was.  His display was at once sexual and threatening.  We all breathed a sigh of relief when he finally got off – with the boom box. 

The point is that we knew instantly that the guy was odd, and perhaps dangerous, but that was not based on lots of conscious thought.  It was an instantaneous, intuitive reaction.  Lots of conscious attention subsequent to that made us no wiser.   We didn’t know what the man intended, just that he was scary.  But it’s highly unlikely he was a terrorist. 

The TSA is in the same position – only worse.  It has to screen thousands of people daily – strangers, like our man in the train.  Lots of training in conscious ways of looking for nervousness is going to turn up plenty of oddballs, psychos, moms, and overstressed ‘type A’ consultants worried about missing their planes.  But is it going to turn up terrorists? 

Surely, they’re trained in suppressing those signals as part of their terrorism training.  And what is their underlying emotion, anyway?  If they’re true believers, intent upon going to their deaths, couldn’t their underlying emotion be excited, even happy, to be doing what they’ve trained to do? 

I wish the TSA lots of luck, of course, but I hope they don’t rely too much on reading body language to detect terrorists.  

A better approach would be to replace the two stupid security questions with two new ones:  Are you carrying anything dangerous to others on the flight?  And, Do you intend anyone harm?  Then, train people to look for mis-matches between the content of their answers and their body language.  As I’ve written before, the ‘two conversations’ of content and body language are either aligned, or not.  When they’re aligned, you can be a successful communicator.  When they’re not aligned, we believe the body language every time – and we’re very quick to pick up on mis-matches.