People will subconsciously tell you exactly who they are if you watch and listen carefully

[lowandbeno]

Do you agree?

I have to. Or at least I seem to be able to suss someone out who comes across as amazing and innocent

I've got 2 extreme examples.

One of which is a mum with a fabrication disorder. She was quite clever about it in fairness but I saw it coming a mile off, something eerie about her from the off when we all met up for drinks

Another example is a serial killer I met years ago when they were studying. Something was very unnerving but on the face of it, this person was nice as pie, genuinely friendly if approached and not at all rude to me/anyone that I saw. But I did see subtle manipulation that nobody else did

Do you agree you can really tell exactly who someone is by watching closely and subconsciously tapping into certain body language aspects of them

I think it depends a lot on the type of person you are, some people are more sensitive. A friend of mine has history of ending up with charming but unpleasant men, to me it’s obvious they are not good but for her it takes a while to realise

Some people can but I don't think everyone is aware enough to catch it.

My DH is absolutely spot on brilliant at it. I never doubt his first impressions.

I've had one such experience with someone that everyone in my circle was really enamoured with. I saw through it right from the beginning, without being able to pin down exactly what it was. I just knew that something was very off.

It depends on the people themselves and who you are.

Your examples are quite extreme. Lov level manipulative people are far more difficult to detect.

I bet you, in your 2nd example, if everyone else was head over heels into this person as a friend and let them join your friendship group, spending lots of time together, you'd be questioning yourself.

I think people choose not to believe it a lot of the time

I think that the kind of people who pride themselves on this tend to suffer from confirmation bias. So it’s always ‘I was the one who knew there was something off about the serial killer’, never ‘I was always dubious about Brenda’s continual illnesses, and I felt terrible when she was finally diagnosed and successfully treated for a rare condition’.

Yep, you're right

I did ignore it! And I became friends with them on a casual sort of way

I told myself I was being ridiculous

That's true too

Human brains have a lot of very sophisticated heuristic and other analytical shit going on under the surface that allows them to predict things, make decisions, and otherwise deal with the world in a way that's far more complicated, and far better able to deal with ambiguous input, than our conscious, plodding, logical thought processes are usually capable of. And our brains often deliver the resulting judgements and recommendations in ways that seem like odd little uneasy feelings, or hunches, or other seemingly illogical overall vibes. So I can see how a combination of things that fly under the radar of our conscious, analytical minds might come together to give you this kind of awareness.

HOWEVER.

I suspect there is also an imperial fuckload of confirmation bias going on here.

How many times have you had an eerie feeling about something/someone and it turned out to be nothing? You won't be able to tell me, because if/when that happens, your brain won't consider that sequence of events to be important enough to even notice, let alone remember or tally up.

And how many times has someone turned out to be dodgy and you didn't get a funny feeling about them? Same problem again — that's not interesting, notable or important to a normal, healthy human brain in the way that it's notable and important when you had a funny feeling and the person indeed turned out to be a bad 'un.

This isn't a dig at you, it's healthy, normal human psychology.

@TipulophobiaIsReal yes this is very true, all of it

I have to say though, people with fabrication disorder, imposed on another or themselves is always so bloody easy to spot

I have met 3 of them personally and the penny dropped very quickly.

Professionally I have come across maybe 40ish of them. Low level and to the extreme. All fitting a similar profile and body language, twinkle in their eyes at medical attention and procedures

I'm autistic and have a long history of not being able to read/judge/suss out people. So they could be presenting the most obvious examples and I would still miss it.

I am often surprised at how others are taken in by people who I immediately dislike or suspect. Not saying I have super powers, I'm just a cynical misanthrope, partly by nature but mostly by experience. I see people telling egregious lies, manipulating, boasting, exaggerating and bluffing and then see others eating it up and think - how can you not see through them? But maybe i miss the subtler ones and eat up crap from others??

I don't remember being shocked by any revelations, that's to say I don't think someone I've genuinely liked/trusted has done something bad (beyond the pale bad) but like pp says, the brain and memory are a funny thing and no one is immune to confirmation bias or wanting to be proved right.

I'm autistic too; like you, I have difficulty reading people, and I've been caught out and/or taken advantage of plenty of times.

I think that's why I'm so interested in the almost subconscious, seemingly instinctive processing of interactions, behaviour and personality that the average person apparently has going on without even knowing they're doing it. To a large extent, I have to substitute for that function using the conscious, logical, slower, less nuanced, more cognitively--taxing type of thinking that would typically be used for problems that humans don't have a built-in system for. Like, I dunno, calculus or something.

But funnily enough, I've found that just occasionally, not having that subconscious, almost instinctive system for understanding other humans has allowed me to detect dodginess that goes unnoticed by most other people.

For example, I was once in a long-term psychotherapy group run by a highly-qualified psychotherapist with excellent social skills, who used all kinds of interpersonal, empathic skills and techniques to manipulate group members individually, and group dynamics as a whole. She seemed to be able to bypass people's defences with the way she talked, and, for example, could get them to come to particular conclusions they wouldn't normally have arrived at by themselves, or change the way they perceived or felt about other people.

But for me, this didn't work. The ways she was speaking, the things she was doing, were things I've had to learn to consciously notice and understand, and I could see that she was using them in an atypical way, in a relationship where they wouldn't usually happen. I could see that she was doing things that upset or soothed or distracted people by connecting with them in an instinctive empathic and emotional way that doesn't naturally happen for me, and that meant their brains didn't throw up the alarm signals that mine did when she spoke in non-sequiturs, made devious arguments, slipped in verbal sleight-of-hand, and — basically — slipped things under people's radar that, if they'd been written down in black and white in front of them and presented solely to their conscious minds, would've been more obvious for the self-serving manipulation they were.

@TipulophobiaIsReal that's really interesting, thank you.

Can anyone recommend any good books/resources for learning how to understand people's subtle signals better?

I'm have always struggled to 'read' people. It doesn't come naturally to me at all. But I'm fascinated by it, and am training myself to notice things. (God, I worry that other, more socially skilled, people notice me trying so hard to notice...)

I have never read it, but someone on a different thread from ages ago recommended 'the gift of fear'

I've been quite good at spotting wrong uns throughout my life. Though my skills failed me when my best friend was having an affair with my husband so obviously my radar was fatally broken in that instance.
I worked with people with forensic mental health histories for 20 years so some of it is training and or experience I suppose but it's just mainly being alert to subtle behaviours and listening to your instincts about people. Lots of people dismiss their reactions to people but maybe we should listen to them more.