Read People Like a Book by Patrick King
“Survival overrides everything. When our survival instinct gets activated, everything else in our psychological and emotional makeup turns off.”
In “Read People Like a Book,” Patrick King takes us on a mind-opening journey through the intricacies of human behavior and psychology.
If you wish to better understand people around you, uncover their hidden motives and emotions, and become more trustworthy and empathetic, you should read this book. Not only will you acquire a valuable skill of reading other people, but you will also improve the quality of your existing relationships.
You should by all means read this book for yourself. Below, I have written out my book notes, but I couldn’t cover hundreds of pages in just a couple of bullet points. That is why I highly encourage you to create your notes whilst going through the book, and for the time being use mine as a guide on what this book is about.
For more books check out Best Self-Improvement Books or Best Classic Books, and for a full self-improvement guide, you can also take a look at my Roadmap to Overman.
Book Notes
There are three things you should keep in mind when ever trying to analyze and understand a person. These are:
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- Context matters – We cannot take a single statement, facial expression, behavior, or moment to tell us something definitive about the whole person. Analysis can only happen with data—not a single datum—and it can only happen when we are able to see broader trends. These broader trends also need to be situated in the cultural context that the person you’re analyzing comes from. Some signs are universal, whereas others can vary.
- Baseline – Another way that smart people can come to not-so-smart conclusions about others is if they fail to establish a baseline. The guy in front of you may be making lots of eye contact, smiling often, complimenting you, nodding, and even touching your arm occasionally. You could conclude that this guy must really like you until you realize that this is how he is with every person he meets. He in fact is showing you no interest above his normal baseline.
- Yourself – Finally, there’s something to consider when you’re studying other human beings, and it’s often a real bind spot: yourself. You might decide that someone is trying to deceive you, but completely fail to take into account your own paranoid and cautious nature, and the fact that you were recently lied to and are not quite over it yet.
Motivation
Once you know what motivates someone, you can start to see their behavior as a natural and logical extension of who they are as a person. You can work backward from their actions to their motivations, and finally to them and who they are as individuals.
Motivation as an Expression of the Shadow
By using Jung’s theory of the shadow, you can achieve a few key insights when it comes to understanding people.
First, you can develop a deeper understanding of why they are as they are, and this inevitably leads to heightened feelings of compassion.
Second, by using the shadow model, you allow yourself to reach out to and communicate with people far more effectively. If you can speak directly to those unacknowledged parts of a person’s psyche, you are able to communicate more deeply.
When you speak to someone, the shadow model helps you to speak to all of even the parts they don’t show. It’s a way of “reading between the lines” where people are concerned
Our Inner Child Still Lives
We can understand the inner child as that unconscious part of ourselves that represents the little children we once were.
In the same way, we can learn to identify when someone is operating from their shadow, we can see if someone is motivated particularly from their inner child.
The Motivation Factor—Pleasure or Pain
The pleasure principle asserts that the human mind does everything it can to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. It doesn’t get simpler than that.
While everyone wants pleasure as much as they can get it, their motivation to avoid pain is actually far stronger. So when faced with the prospect of pain, the brain will work harder than it would to gain access to pleasure.
When our brain is judging between what will be a pleasant or painful experience, it’s working from scenarios that we think could result if we took a course of action. Our perceptions of pleasure and pain are more powerful drivers than the actual things.
In general, we focus on the here and now. When considering the attainment of comfort, we’re more tuned into what might happen immediately. The pleasure and pain that might happen months or years from now don’t really register with us.
When it comes to the pleasure principle, your feelings tend to overshadow rational thought. Emotion beats logic. When our survival instinct gets activated, everything else in our psychological and emotional makeup turns off. Survival overrides everything.
The Pyramid of Needs
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one of the most famous models in the history of psychology. It employs a pyramid to show how certain human “needs”—like food, sleep, and warmth—are necessary to resolve before more aspirational needs like love, accomplishment, and vocation. Maslow’s pyramid can be viewed as a visual example of how motivation changes and increases after we get what we need at each stage in our lives, which typically coincides with where we are on the hierarchy itself.
It functions like a ladder—if you aren’t able to satisfy your more basic foundational human needs and desires, it is extremely difficult to move forward without stress and dissatisfaction in life. It means your motivations change depending on where you are in the hierarchy.
Maslow’s theory may not accurately describe all of our daily desires, but it does provide an inventory for the broad strokes of what we want in life. We can observe people to understand which stage of life they are in, what is currently important to them, and what they require to get to the next level in the hierarchy.
Defense mechanisms
The ego’s instinct to protect itself can be reality-bending and can cause mass intellectual dishonesty and self-deception. As such, this is another highly predictable indicator we can use to analyze people’s behavior.
- Denial is one of the most classic defense mechanisms because it is easy to use. What is true is simply claimed to be false, as if that makes everything go away. You are acting as if a negative fact doesn’t exist. Sometimes we don’t realize when we do this, especially in situations that are so dire they actually appear fantastical to us.
- Rationalization is when you explain away something negative. It is the art of making excuses. The bad behavior or fact still remains, but it is turned into something unavoidable because of circumstances out of your control. The bottom line is that anything negative is not your fault and you shouldn’t be held accountable for it. It’s never a besmirching of your abilities. It’s extremely convenient, and you are only limited by your imagination.
- Sometimes, the overpowering emotion is unwelcome, but what is really unacceptable to the ego is where it comes from. In such a case, displacement might occur as a protection against unpleasant truths. An example would be redirecting your frustration caused by unfulfilling job towards your pet or partner.
- Projection is a defense mechanism that can cause considerable damage and chaos if not understood for what it is. In this case, we place unwanted and unclaimed feelings onto someone or something else rather than seeing that they are a part of ourselves. We do not recognize our own “dark side” and project it onto others, blaming them for our shortcomings or seeing our flaws in their actions.
- The example of a blatantly homophobic man who is revealed to later be gay is so common by now it’s almost comical. Reaction formation just might be behind it. Whereas denial simply says, “This isn’t happening,” reaction formation goes a step further and claims, “Not only is that not happening, but the exact opposite is the case. Look!”
- In times of extreme emotional distress, you might find yourself regressing to a simpler time (i.e., childhood). When you were young, life was easier and less demanding—to cope with threatening emotions, many of us return there, acting “childish” as a way to cope. A man might be facing some legal troubles over misfiled taxes. Rather than face the situation, he gets into a screaming match with his accountant, banging his fists on the table in a “tantrum” and then pouting when people try to reason with him.
- In the same way that projection and displacement take the negative emotions and place them elsewhere, sublimation takes that emotion and channels it through a different, more acceptable outlet. A woman may receive some bad news, but rather than get upset, she goes home and proceeds to do a massive spring clean of her home.
The 4 F’s
You can use the knowledge of the 4 F’s to predict and understand why someone is acting a certain way under pressure.
Personality Science and Typology
Personality can be thought of as a persistent pattern of behavior over the long term. You might read a certain gesture or tone of voice to mean XYZ, but that same gesture or voice, when repeated reliably and often enough, starts to cement into a persona.
If you are interested in learning a lot more about personality types and how to apply that knowledge, check out Jordan Peterson’s online lectures.
Test Your Personality
Now, any discussion of analyzing personality and identity would be incomplete without delving into the Big Five personality traits, the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator and associated Keirsey Temperaments, and the Enneagram. These are direct ways of understanding who someone is, to the extent that such tests can be accurate. Very rarely will you possess this amount of knowledge about someone you want to read or analyze, but you can certainly use these tests to understand yourself better.
Consider using these personality models as something upon which you can categorize the people you are trying to analyze. For example, ask yourself if this person is more introverted, extroverted, or in the middle. This process can help you better understand the kind of person you are dealing with.