Body language experts are not psychics, and they can’t read minds. No one but Pinocchio has a built-in lie detector, and Pinocchio is a fictional character. In the world of reading body language, we have just two rules:

1. There is no one definitive way to tell if someone is lying.

2. If anyone says there is, they’re lying.

Everything else, as with body language itself, is subject to interpretation. Body linguistics is not judging or predicting. It is the interpretation of thoughts and feelings externalized through a combination of cues—gestures, facial expressions, spoken words, and tone of voice. Part art and part science, reading body language is a combination of subjective and objective analyses based on grounded research.