Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Liar, Liar Pants on Fire!

Being an effective and believable liar can be beneficial in a plethora of ways.

So, if you are not a natural then how can you learn to be a more effective liar especially in this day and age where technology is trying to thwart our every effort in duplicity?

Look no further. Scientific American has released 18 attributes of a successful liar.

According to a team of scientists led by Dutch psychologist Aldert Vrij, there are precise ingredients to a great liar.  They delineate 18 traits to a super liar.  Listed below are the top ten:

1.  Manipulativeness:  Liars are not fearful or anxious.  They are scheming, relaxed and confident.
2.  Acting:  Good actors make good liars.
3.  Expressiveness:  Liars are seductive and their expressions distracting.
4.  Physical attractiveness:  Good-looking people are judged as more honest.
5.  Natural performers:  Good at convincingly adapting to abrupt changes in discourse.
6.  Experience:  Practice make perfect. Prior lying helps manage emotions such as guilt and fear.
7.  Confidence:  Believe and it shall be.  Liars must have confidence.
8.  Emotional camouflage:   Liars mask emotions by feigning the opposite affect.
9.  Eloquence:  Eloquent speakers use word play to buy extra time to create plausible answers.
10.  Well-preparedness:  Liars minimize fabrication on the spot, which is more vulnerable to detection.

The researchers also point out that many of these qualities are inherent and cannot be fully learned (i.e. with ease of effort) if you will.

The full study, along with other studies on deception conducted by Vrij, can be found in the Open Access Journal of Forensic Psychology.

Empathy Emptiness

Do you have emotional empathy for other people?

This seems like a no-brainer but research is now suggesting that people who have had severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) have a loss of emotional empathy , which is the ability to recognize and understand the emotions of other people.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales, conducted a study to investigate whether physiological responses to emotions are connected to emotional empathy.

PsychCentral reported that the team used electromyography and skin conductance to analyze two groups of adults, one with severe TBI and a healthy control group, focusing on the participant’s facial muscle and sweat glands while they viewed happy and angry facial expressions.

“The results of this study were the first to reveal that reduced emotional responsiveness observed after severe TBI is linked to changes in empathy in this population…,” said study author and doctoral candidate Arielle DeSousa.

What are your thoughts on Emotional Empathy or the lack thereof?

Emotional Masks

Who’s the best at hiding their emotions?  Well, take a look at the video below, which delineates the most popular society at masking their emotions.  It is not Brits as one might suggest.

Dr.  David Matsumoto, microexpression expert, comments on why this might be so prevalent in Japanese society.

He suggests that because it is such a populated country, people need to cooperate with one another to live amicably.

Instead of seeing anger or sadness, Japanese people neutralize those emotions to live harmoniously.  This can be seen in the Japanese martial arts as well, where control over one’s emotions and actions as well as having an acute observation of their opponent is crucial for victory.

This is tantamount to America’s poker players who try to mask their emotions at all costs and benefit from being able to read their opponents emotions/body language.

Click here to view the embedded video.