Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Emotion Transference

Did you know that objects can grab properties from nearby objects?  This is referred to as illusory conjunction.

Well, according to Scientific American this is true not just of objects, but of social beings such as human, more specifically their faces.

They report that researchers at Arizona State have documented that male faces are more likely than female faces to ‘grab’ the anger from an adjacent face.  Female faces, on the on other hand, are more likely to ‘grab’ happiness from an adjacent face.

Their findings published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology indicate that it is not just a matter of the participants both male and female seeing male faces as more angry and female faces as more happy but that the errors were most common when the emotion came from the adjacent face.

However, it is important to remember that this “grabbing” of emotion can be influenced by biases we hold.  Our expectations do shape perceptions as well as misperceptions.

What are your thoughts on this research?  Have you noticed this in your real world experiences?

Eye Movement Mishaps

LP Magazine has reported on the misconceptions between eye movement and deception detection.  They refer to a seminar by Humintell’s director Dr. Matsumoto at the Certified Forensic Interviewer Elite Training Day last November.

The seminar focused on the difficulty in establishing deception or truth and the flaws most people commit when trying to do so.  After reviewing a number of videos, participants were asked to judge whether the person on the video was  being truthful or deceptive and why they were identifying that person as truthful or deceptive.

No surprise to Dr. Matsumoto, many of the participants delineated eye contact (lack of or too much) as a sign of deception and pointed out that the suspect looked left or right as they were being questioned.

It is particularly difficult to define statements of truth when there is no norm (baseline) to observe, no real threat of punishment if caught lying, or no strong emotion to conceal (high stakes situations). Dr. Matsumoto was quick to note that twenty-three of twenty-four research studies finding’s had no support for eye direction as an indicator of truth or deception.

The article goes on to discuss the role of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Recall vs. Creation in the process of predicting truthful vs. deceptive statements.

It points out that eye movements assist in the recovery of memories and speech and establishes that there is a memory search and additional thought taking place. This additional thought could either be of a creative or recall nature.

However, there is no way to establish whether this is the recovery of a truthful detail or the creation of a deceptive component of the story.

Did you have these same misconceptions?  Do you agree with this article?