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January 3 - February 21, 2024
“No theory is too remote to explore, no person is beyond consideration, no gut feeling is too unsubstantiated.”
We unconsciously read tiny untaught signals: the slight tilt of a stranger’s head or the momentarily sustained glance of a person a hundred feet away tells us it is safe to pass in front of his two-ton monster.
We want to believe that human violence is somehow beyond our understanding, because as long as it remains a mystery, we have no duty to avoid it, explore it, or anticipate it. We need feel no responsibility for failing to read signals if there are none to read.
Pre-incident indicators are those detectable factors that occur before the outcome being predicted.
literal warehouse of alarming and unwelcome things which stalkers have sent to the objects of their unwanted pursuit, things like thousand-page death threats, phone book-thick love letters, body parts, dead animals, facsimile bombs, razor blades, and notes written in blood? Would you have imagined that there is a building containing more than 350,000 obsessive and threatening communications?
only 20 percent of all homicides are committed by strangers. The other 80 percent are committed by people we know,
Intuition is the journey from A to Z without stopping at any other letter along the way. It is knowing without knowing why.
Distinguished psychiatrist Karl Menninger has said, “I don’t believe in such a thing as the criminal mind. Everyone’s mind is criminal; we’re all capable of criminal fantasies and thoughts.”
Einstein’s letter concluded that “man has in him the need to hate and destroy.”
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. For when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”)
One thing that does predict violent criminality is violence in one’s childhood. For example, Ressler’s research confirmed an astonishingly consistent statistic about serial killers: 100 percent had been abused as children, either with violence, neglect, or humiliation.
Recklessness and bravado are features of many violent people.
“People should learn to see and so avoid all danger. Just as a wise man keeps away from mad dogs, so one should not make friends with evil men.”
Forced teaming is an effective way to establish premature trust because a we’re-in-the-same-boat attitude is hard to rebuff without feeling rude.
The detectable signal of forced teaming is the projection of a shared purpose or experience where none exists: “Both of us;” “we’re some team;” “how are we going to handle this?;” “now we’ve done it,” etc.
The best cons make the victim want to participate.
Think of charm as a verb, not a trait. If you consciously tell yourself, “This person is trying to charm me” as opposed to, “This person is charming,” you’ll be able to see around it.
niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait.
People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive.
When people are telling the truth, they don’t feel doubted, so they don’t feel the need for additional support in the form of details. When people lie, however, even if what they say sounds credible to you, it doesn’t sound credible to them, so they keep talking.
typecasting. A man labels a woman in some slightly critical way, hoping she’ll feel compelled to prove that his opinion is not accurate.
Typecasting always involves a slight insult, and usually one that is easy to refute. But since it is the response itself that the typecaster seeks, the defense is silence, acting as if the words weren’t even spoken.
loan-sharking: “He wanted to be allowed to help you because that would place you in his debt, and the fact that you owe a person something makes it hard to ask him to leave you alone.”
forced teaming, too many details, charm, niceness, typecasting and loan sharking
The unsolicited promise is one of the most reliable signals because it is nearly always of questionable motive.
Why does this person need to convince me? The answer, it turns out, is not about him—it is about you.
“No” is a word that must never be negotiated, because the person who chooses not to hear it is trying to control you.
Declining to hear “no” is a signal that someone is either seeking control or refusing to relinquish
The worst response when someone fails to accept “no” is to give ever-weakening refusals and then give in. Another common response that serves the criminal is to negotiate (“I really appreciate your offer, but let me try to do it on my own first”). Negotiations are about possibilities, and providing access to someone who makes you apprehensive is not a possibility you want to keep on the agenda. I encourage people to remember that “no” is a complete sentence.
A woman alone who needs assistance is actually far better off choosing someone and asking for help, as opposed to waiting for an unsolicited approach. The person you choose is nowhere near as likely to bring you hazard as is the person who chooses you.
At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.
Remember, the nicest guy, the guy with no self-serving agenda whatsoever, the one who wants nothing from you, won’t approach you at all.
Trust that what causes alarm probably should, because when it comes to danger, intuition is always right in at least two important ways: 1. It is always in response to something. 2. It always has your best interest at heart.
There is another signal people rarely recognize, and that is dark humor.
Humor, particularly dark humor, is a common way to communicate true concern without the risk of feeling silly afterwards, and without overtly showing fear.
While a group of employees at the Standard Gravure plant sat eating lunch, they heard sounds from outside. Some thought they were firecrackers, but one made a quip about an angry co-worker: “That’s probably just Westbecher coming back to finish us off.” A moment later, it was indeed Joseph Westbecher who burst into the room spraying bullets, one of which hit the man who’d made the joke.
THE MESSENGERS OF INTUITION Nagging feelings Persistent thoughts Humor Wonder Anxiety Curiosity Hunches Gut feelings Doubt Hesitation Suspicion Apprehension Fear
Predicting human behavior is really about recognizing the play from just a few lines of dialogue. It is about trusting that a character’s behavior will be consistent with his perception of the situation.
Though he had no luggage,
Knowing the question is the first step toward knowing the answer.
women are willing to call out what comes to them—they are willing to guess. The men, conversely, won’t risk being wrong in front of a roomful of people, so they won’t call out an answer until they are sure it’s correct.
We predict the behavior of other human beings based on our ability to read certain signals that we recognize.
threats are rarely spoken from a position of power. Whatever power they have is derived from the fear instilled in the victim, for fear is the currency of the threatener.
Some say, “You’ll all be blown up within the hour,” then say, “You ought to be killed,” then say, “Your day will come, I promise.” We call these amendments value reduction statements, and callers who use them reveal themselves to be more interested in venting anger than warning of danger.
Since the motive for nearly all anonymous threats is to influence conduct, I suggest that clients ask who would be served if they took the actions that they’d take if they believed the threats would be carried out. This often leads to the identity of the threatener.
extortion cases, a person threatens to disclose information he predicts will be damaging and he offers to keep the secret if compensated.
in interpersonal situations (neighbor, friend, spouse) a threat tends to actually increase the likelihood of violence by eroding the quality of communication and increasing frustration,
those who make direct threats to public figures are far less likely to harm them than those who communicate in other inappropriate ways
Direct threats are not a reliable pre-incident indicator for assassination in America,
If you tell someone ten times that you don’t want to talk to him, you are talking to them—nine more times than you wanted to. If you call him back after he leaves twenty messages, you simply teach him that the cost of getting a call back is twenty messages.
