Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Do You Swear to Tell the Truth?

Is honor court an effective tool in coercing the younger generation into telling the truth?  According to students at the University of Virginia, yes it is.

Students at the University created an “honor court” in lieu of a court of “justice”. 

The Daily Progress delineates the difference between a court seeking justice and one seeking honor.  The difference is that unlike an honor court, a court of justice has the flexibility to distinguish between experimental versus incorrigible behavior.

They side with the court of justice whose penalties can be much less severe.  The UV’s honor court expels students found guilty on the first offense!

This is a key fact because scientific studies have shown that 1 in 4 students will cheat at least once in college, but those students most often self correct stopping after the first incident.

The Daily Progress goes on to affirm that universities have a right to fairly evaluate each student’s achievement and Cheating violates that right.

However, they suggest that the honor court’s message – you can come to school here, but only if you promise to be good- is pretty juvenile.

What do you think?  Is Honor court effective or do you prefer a court of Justice?

Belly Buttons Bare All?

You must have heard the idiom, “Your eyes don’t lie” right?  Well, what about your belly button?

An article in the Winnipeg Free Press delineates what body language expert Janine Driver purports, that body language can give a person the upper hand in professional interactions.

Driver claims that the belly button plays a significant role in body language and is an accurate indicator for reading and influencing others.

In her book, You Say More Than You Think, Driver writes, “the direction our naval faces reflects our attitude and reveals our emotional state.  When we suddenly turn our navel toward a door or exit, or simply away from someone, we subconsciously send the signal that we want out of the conversation and perhaps even out of the interaction.”

Most of our communication with others is non-verbal.  Learning how to interpret that body language can be crucial to success in personal and business endeavors.  However, Driver is quick to comment that being able to read body language does not make you a mind reader.

The article goes on to point out that a person needs to understand another person’s baseline before making any truth judgments.   For example, evasive eye contact can mean a nervous liar or simply be reflecting an honest person’s shyness.

A suggestion from Driver to make yourself look more powerful at work is to stand inside the door frame with your hands up, one on each side of the door.  So, next time you want to ask your boss for something or need a little respect when delivering news, go to your boss’s office and stand inside the door frame.  Tip:  Tilt your hip to add casual charm and likability.

“We face our belly button toward people we like, admire and trust,” says Driver.

What do you think from your personal experience? Do you think that what Driver suggests is true?

Does Gossip Affect Your Brain?

Using neuro-imaging, scientists are measuring which image a person’s brain will focus on given a choice between two visuals of faces one with negative connotative associations and one with positive or neutral associations.

Which image does the brain choose according to io9 Psychology ?  The results are intriguing to say the least.

Previous research has shown that people remember negative information better.   This new study took it a step further testing our brain and determining that the brain responds differently to a person’s face after we hear nasty gossip about someone.

Scientists found that people will stare longer at the face’s of people they’ve heard bad things about.  They suggest that this brain override for focusing on people we’ve heard bad things about could offer an evolutionary advantage:  They commented in the journal Science:

‘It is easy to imagine that this preferential selection for perceiving bad people might protect us from liars and         cheaters by allowing us to view them for longer and explicitly gather more information about their behavior.’

The study links gossip as having a measurable effect on our perception of other people.
The down side to this study is that the desire to stare at victims of gossip is no guarantee that their behavior matches the gossip.  They might not be “bad” people.  Also, a true criminal would exploit this human weakness.