The questions swirling around South Carolina Democratic Senate candidate Alvin Greene are almost as funny as they are bizarre. Is he intellectually disabled? On drugs? A product of a disinterested Democratic electorate?
Here’s an even better one: Is he full of shit?
Patti Wood, a body language expert, thinks Greene’s story stinks to high heaven.
A seasoned pro in the field of reading tics, cues, tones and postures, Wood has spent the last three decades in police stations and living rooms dissecting other peoples’ behavior. The Daily Caller sent Wood several videos of Greene with the request that she analyze the candidate’s quirky interactions with the press.
Her first take? “This guy is so bizarre.”
This was after we sent Wood the links to three Greene interviews posted on YouTube: one from a South Carolina TV station the day after Greene’s victory, one from ABC News and the wild Keith Olbermann interview in which MSNBC’s resident blunderbuss asks Greene if he is, as South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn alleges, a Republican plant. Wood spent some time reviewing the tape, then called The Daily Caller to share her findings.
During the ABC interview, in which Greene wears a homemade campaign T-shirt, Wood says Greene’s “voice has normal energy, his pacing seems normal,” and she suspects that’s “his normal baseline.” But, she said, “in the other interviews, his voice gets mushy and deadens.”
In deception detection, the cornerstone of most interrogation methods, Wood said one “of the characteristics of someone’s voice when they are deceiving is for it to lack vocal variation, because they’re hiding” their true emotions.
“Think about it this way,” she said. “When the brain is under stress, and you’re trying to hide something, your strong lymbic brain tells your body, ‘I’m just not going to show anything.’ If you only saw one video, you would think the man was really stupid. I mean, something is really-seriously-missing-stupid. But after watching three videos, my take on it is that he’s hiding a ton. That’s his cover, his mask for when he doesn’t want to go there. He just shuts down.”
While Wood did not say that she knows Greene to be lying, she did say that his lack of facial “affectation” (expression) is a common sign of deception — and drug use. “Normally, a lack of affect means you’re either being deceptive or you’re medicated. But I don’t know what normal is for Greene, so I can’t say for sure,” Wood said.
So what, specifically, did Greene lie about?
When asked about his campaign strategy by a reporter from South Carolina’s ETV, Greene exhibits a “mismatched” reaction.
“When I teach deception techniques to police using videos of murderer interviews,” Wood said, “you’ll see people saying something positive while shaking their head to communicate a negative. It’s a really big tell. What’s happening, is that the lymbic brain — -the primitive part of the brain — responds first, before the neocortex can put a lie into words.” Essentially, the head betrays the lie.
“One of the dramatic things that showed up was that he was saying positive statements and shaking his head ‘no,'” Wood said. “He did that quite a few times. He says, ‘I worked hard,’ while shaking his head ‘no.’ He does it again when he says, ‘I campaigned all across the state.'” After Wood reviewed all three videos, she concluded that Greene exhibited deceptive behavior every time he spoke save for once: When he told a reporter that 60 percent of the vote is “a lot.”
What would a normal, honest response look like? “A normal response would be that you would be proud, bragging about your success, and happy to share your success,” Greene said. “Instead we see him shaking his head and jerking away from the interviewer.”
Wood also noticed that Greene used “eye-blocks” when answering questions.
“He also has what I call ‘sleepy eyes,'” she said. “They’re hooded over, sort of like Sleepy from the Seven Dwarves. It’s brief, but it’s not normal. When you’re talking about something you’ve done that you should be proud of, you don’t do an eye-block in response. And what’s also significant is that sometimes people will excuse these cues by saying, ‘I did that because I was nervous.’ If that were true, the rest of the body would be showing nervousness or anxiety throughout the interview. But Greene’s posture is down, his voice is suppressed, and then he does an eye-block. And because those cues are timed to the response, it becomes a tell that he’s perhaps being deceptive in his response.”
The eye-block shows up yet again when Greene explains how he came up with the $10,000 filing fee, currently a source of much consternation among reporters, who can’t quite figure out how an unemployed and discharged veteran came up with $10k.