The key ideas

Read People Like a Book: How to Analyze, Understand, and Predict People's Emotions, Thoughts, Intentions, and Behaviors

Patrick King, 2020

Why does someone blow up over nothing, argue with the obvious, or accuse you of something that never happened? Patrick King believes reading people is a skill, and it starts not with watching gestures but with asking what a person wants and what they fear. You will learn how motives, the defense of self-esteem and personality add up to behavior, how not to be fooled by a single signal, and why a lie is more often given away by the story than by the eyes.

Who it is for

For anyone who keeps getting caught off guard by other people: a colleague's sharp tone, a friend's hurt feelings, a strange silence from someone close. And for anyone who wants to understand people not by a single gesture, but by what drives them.

What someone insults you with is often just a label they can't admit in themselves.

Why did he say that?

Picture an evening after work. Your colleague Igor was polite all day, and then at the team meeting he suddenly cut you off over something trivial. You replay the scene again and again. Maybe he doesn't respect you? Maybe it's about the project? Or maybe it has nothing to do with you at all? There's no answer, and that's what makes it sting.

Patrick King is a communication coach from San Francisco who has written about social skills for years. In 2020 he published a book on how to decode scenes like this one. His central idea: reading people can be learned, like any other skill. But it doesn't start with gestures or facial expressions. First you need to understand what drives a person: what they want, what they fear and what they are protecting.

So the book moves from the depths to the surface. First come motives: hidden desires, the pull of pleasure, basic needs, the defense of self-esteem. Then personality, as a stable pattern of behavior. And only after that, the signals: the body, clothing, words and the signs of a lie.

King doesn't promise mind reading. He teaches you to form guesses and test them. By the time you finish, Igor's behavior will no longer be a puzzle without a key: you will have questions that help you solve it.

The first person to read is you

Picture a job interview. The candidate speaks slowly, stumbles over words and barely makes eye contact. Your first thought: an insecure person, not someone you'd send into a negotiation. King warns that this is exactly how mistakes are made. Slow speech may simply be a habit, and nerves may come from a hard week rather than from weakness.

King insists there is no magic in reading people: it's logic and practice, and anyone can learn it. He names four rules, without which it turns into fortune telling. First: know how the person normally behaves. Someone who is quiet by nature isn't silent because they are offended. Second: don't draw a conclusion from a single sign. Gather several. Third: take the setting into account. Someone is fidgeting in their chair, but maybe they are just cold.

King considers the fourth rule the trickiest. It is correcting for your own biases. If a person strikes you as unpleasant from the start, you will notice only what confirms that judgment. The mind loves quick conclusions and happily finds evidence for them.

That's why, for King, reading people begins with an honest look at yourself. What do I expect to see? Does this person remind me of someone who once hurt me? Without these questions, you aren't reading the other person. You are reading your own expectations.

Read in Livria

About the author

Patrick King is the author of popular books on social skills and a communication coach based in San Francisco. He writes about understanding people, starting conversations more easily and building relationships.

All books by this author: Patrick King

Terms from the book

  • Freud
  • mirroring
  • Ego
  • repression
  • Jung
  • jargon
  • Shadow
  • introvert
  • Big Five
  • Projection
  • Maslow
  • Self-actualization
  • Denial
  • Rationalization
  • Microexpression
  • Thin slicing
  • Pleasure principle: Sigmund Freud's idea: people seek pleasure and avoid displeasure.
  • Hierarchy of needs: Abraham Maslow's model, in which needs are arranged in levels: bodily needs, safety, love and belonging, esteem, self-actualization.
  • Defense mechanism: An unconscious way the mind shields self-esteem from unpleasant thoughts and feelings. The idea comes from psychoanalysis.
  • OCEAN: An acronym for the five Big Five traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.
  • Extraversion: A Big Five trait: how much a person is energized by company and by other people's attention.
  • Neuroticism: A Big Five trait: a tendency to feel anxiety, irritation and other unpleasant emotions easily.
  • MBTI: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: a popular typology that sorts people into sixteen personality types.
  • Mehrabian: Albert Mehrabian, American psychologist who studied nonverbal communication. His experiments gave rise to the well-known 7, 38 and 55 percent ratio.
  • Ambady: Nalini Ambady (1959–2013), American social psychologist. Thin slicing is usually linked to her 1992 work with Rosenthal.
  • Rosenthal: Robert Rosenthal, American psychologist known for his research on expectations and nonverbal behavior.

All terms

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