 The other day, my lovely girlfriend and I sat down to watch the new Netflix documentary about Chris Watts' American murder. As we watched, I felt extremely frustrated about something that's been bothering me for a long time. What Chris Watts did was terrible and I'm glad he's spending the rest of his life in prison. Each of us can think of a hundred thousand different ways Chris Watts could have left his marriage without murdering his wife and two children. But the acts of Chris Watts aren't what I'm here to talk about today because many people have already done that. What's frustrated me for months now is the promotion of the pseudoscience of body language reading that's exploded since the charges were brought against Chris Watts. Much like the bad science around polygraph tests, the pseudoscience around body language has even less evidence. With the millions of views that body language videos get, I'm sure many people will try to argue that body language reading actually works. But I ask you to wait until the end of this video to see if your opinion has changed. As a skeptic, I've been annoyed that channels like Derrick Van Schaik received hundreds of thousands to millions of views using this pseudoscience. And now YouTube is promoting a new quote unquote body language expert called Believing Bruce. For a long time, I figured it wasn't a big deal if people believe these so-called body language experts. But now I've realized that there are real life consequences to people not understanding that body language is a pseudoscience. The Derrick Van Schaik body language video about Chris Watts has over 31 million views and is monetized. So he's made a pretty penny off of this video. But him profiting off this pseudoscience isn't the main issue. What troubled me was when I found out that human resources personnel are being shown this video as a form of training. My friend's relative is the regional HR manager for a huge company. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to disclose the company name. But I promise that you know of this company. This company has over tens of thousands of employees across the country. And HR is responsible for investigating accusations of sexual assault, racism and other situations in order to keep the workplace safe and prevent massive lawsuits. These are serious matters. And entire HR departments are being trained on body language via YouTube from a guy with zero credentials. Then I started thinking about how many other people watch these body language videos and think that they can detect when a significant other, a friend or a family member is lying to them. How many interpersonal conflicts are a result of people believing in this unscientific practice? Can you even imagine a friendship or intimate relationship ending over the pseudoscience of body language? Although I won't be able to convince all of you that body language is a pseudoscience, I'm hoping that at least a few of you realize that there is no strong evidence that body language reading works. Pulling from books like Not Born Yesterday by cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier, How Emotions Are Made by Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett and Everything Is Obvious Wants You Know The Answer by Professor Duncan Watts, I'm going to teach you about the lack of scientific evidence around body language. After we analyze the bad science around body language, I'll conclude with my theory as to why the idea of body language reading is so appealing and what we can do as an alternative. But before we get started, if you're new to the Rewired Soul, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. Here we practice critical thinking and skepticism to learn more about the world. And if you're interested in any of the books I referenced in this video, my affiliate links are down in the description below. Who won the Trump-Biden trainwreck of a presidential debate? We're going to break down their body language to find out. The science around body language is non-existent. But there's one peer-reviewed study that's often cited that proves how terrible we are at reading body language. And it was conducted by psychologist Paul Ekman. In fact, cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier has a whole chapter about how we're awful at reading body language in his book Not Born Yesterday. In his book, Mercier references the work of the famous psychologist Paul Ekman who has done extensive research into expression and gesture and their role in emotion and deception. In the video that you see playing, which is linked down in the description below, Ekman gives an overview of his research into expression, gesture, emotion, and deception. What you'll find is that not only is this subject much more nuanced than simply saying each movement or expression means something, what becomes obvious is that these YouTubers have not done the proper research into the subject. In her book How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett explains all of the misconceptions around emotions. Not only does she explain why body language doesn't work, she explains the biological and cultural factors that make it so difficult to read emotions. For example, some cultures are taught to not show certain emotions and in some households we're raised to hide our emotions. And as anyone with depression can tell you, some of us are even great at faking happiness. Meanwhile, nobody knows that we're actually suffering inside. To date, one of my favorite books is Everything Is Obvious once you know the answer by Duncan Watts. Hindsight bias is something that we all fall victim to and it makes us believe that we knew what was going to happen all along even though we didn't have nearly enough information. When you watch videos from body language channels like Derek van Schaik, you'll see these videos on Chris Watts are riddled with hindsight bias. Chris Watts was arrested on August 16th, 2018 and Derek van Schaik's video came out on December 15th, 2018. If you don't believe me about hindsight bias, I want you to ask yourself why someone like Derek van Schaik didn't know Chris Watts was guilty prior to when the arrest happened. Derek is just a run-of-the-mill grifter on YouTube but if body language was a legitimate science, you'd think each police department would be far more accurate with arrests and convictions. Aside from hindsight bias, body language channels like Derek manipulate their audience by using confirmation bias. They find out what the popular narrative is and then they point to the pseudoscience of body language to confirm what people already believe. This is the second biggest problem with people believing in the pseudoscience because they accuse innocent people of lying when it fits the narrative. What do I mean? Recently, Derek's made two videos about Ellen DeGeneres which have gained a total of over 700,000 views. And of course, the body language fits the popular narrative. While in my opinion, Ellen isn't that great of a person, right now I'm simply pointing out a pattern of behavior. The real issue is when you look at Derek's video on James Charles that has over one million views. In this video, he used body language to quote unquote prove James Charles was lying after Tati Westbrook's original video came out. For anyone who remembers this massive story from 2019, the video Derek used to call James a liar was a quick video James did while out of the country when everything blew up. Later, when he returned home, James made a more thorough video proving without a doubt that he was telling the truth. One year later, Tati even made a video apologizing to James for these false accusations. Unfortunately, not only has Derek not apologized for accusing James of lying by using this pseudoscience, but nobody is holding him accountable either. I know the word witch hunt gets thrown around loosely these days, but how is this pseudoscience any different? People like Derek have convinced other people that the way a person's hands or eyes move proves their guilt or innocence. And when we find out they were wrong, these channels still continue these unscientific practices. Okay, very interesting body language Joe Biden did right there. First, let's talk about his outfit. But look at Joe Biden's necktie. Notice there's no new additional colors in the necktie matching his shirt and his jacket, which actually matches what Joe Biden wants to do in the debate. Yes, channels like Derek Vanshake and Believe in Bruce are promoting a pseudoscience that can have real world consequences. But I think it's more important to discuss why we fall for it. My theory is that we fall for body language channels for the same reason that we fall for all sorts of other forms of pseudoscience. We want control. Which world would you rather live in? One where we could tell if someone's lying based on their body language, or one where Chris Watts almost got away with murdering his children and wife. We want to believe that liars will get caught. And we want to believe there are skills that we can use to catch liars. While this would be a great world to live in, believing in this pseudoscience leads to the indictment of many innocent people. Think about the regional HR manager I told you about earlier. What if they thought a black man was lying about workplace racism based on his body language? Or what if a woman was falsely accused of stealing from her job and was fired due to her body language in an interview with HR? A more serious example is the work of the Innocence Project, which is a nonprofit that was created to reverse the charges of those who were wrongly convicted. Since it began, the Innocence Project has helped 375 people be exonerated by DNA testing. And 21 of those people were on death row. Think about how many of these people were wrongly convicted because of how a jury read their body language. I'm sure some of you feel that watching these body language videos is just a fun hobby. And that might be true for you. If these videos are just a source of entertainment for you, do your thing. But for those who take this pseudoscience seriously, I hope I've convinced you to do some more research and become more skeptical about the subject. Personally, I find it extremely unethical for these channels to get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views, while accusing people of lying with this pseudoscientific technique. All right, everybody. Thank you for making it all the way through another video essay. So check it out. I'll level with you real quick. I could make a 30 minute hour to an hour long video all about the pseudoscience around body language. I was debating on whether or not I should take one of their videos and break it down piece by piece and point out all the absurdity and the pseudoscience and what the real science says and all those other things. But this was like, this has been on my mind for months. I'm like, you know what? I just wanna get a video out there. I need to get it out of my brain. Some of you creators know what I'm talking about. I just need to get it out there. So I did this. But if you guys enjoy it or let me know down in the comments, like I'm more than happy to go deeper into this stuff like those books that I referenced, feel free to check them out, all right? Emotions, body language, lying, all these things are very complex. Like I said, I know we want to believe that we live in a world where we could just detect liars and justice is going to be served. But it's a little bit more difficult than that. And these random people on YouTube are not going to tell us who is or isn't lying. But like I said, nobody's holding them accountable. Nobody is holding them accountable when they falsely accuse somebody of lying. And my concern is not only are businesses using this to teach people about body language reading, but we have normal people thinking that they can spot people lying in their lives based on what these people are saying. Like, oh, I saw your eyes dark this way. Oh, your feet are pointed this way and this and this. You know what I mean? So there are some body language signals that we can infer some things from, but they are nowhere near, nowhere near 100% accurate. And chances are, if you're subscribed to my channel, you're a critical thinker, you try to be skeptical, and all those other things. So we got to think through these things. We got to be aware of our own biases, the fallacies that we fall into and all that other kind of stuff, all right? But anyways, if you want me to dive deeper into this, if this is something that you'd like me to break down even further, let me know down in the comments below. But anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up if you're new. Make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And a huge, huge thank you to everybody who supports the channel over on Patreon or everybody who supports our channel by using the affiliate links down below for the books that I recommend or getting merch from the rewiresoul.com shop. Any of that stuff, you're all awesome, all right? Thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time.