Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

How Wearing a Mask Makes it Difficult to be Polite

Now that everyone is wearing masks, we have to understand that we lose a major portion of the entire communication package when interacting with each other. This is significant considering that 65-95% of messages are communicated nonverbally. However despite this loss, it is still possible to pick up cues in the face, which we covered in a past blog. But are there particular expressions you can’t see when people are wearing masks? The answer is yes.

There are many different types of happiness including elation, euphoria, excitement, and amusement. However, research has shown that these enjoyable emotions are all expressed on the face the same way: by the Duchenne Smile.

A Duchenne Smile occurs when the lip corners move up and the muscle around the eyes moves as well. Oftentimes you see wrinkles around a person’s eyes. This is often described as a “twinkling” or “sparkling” in the eyes. This smile is a true indicator of enjoyment and because the muscles around the eye are activated, it is possible to see this expression even when someone is wearing a mask.

But what about other smiles?

In addition to the Duchenne smile, humans also display what Dr. Matsumoto calls a “social smile”. This smile involves the pulling up of the lip corners, but the muscle around the eye generally does not activate.

Below you can see examples of a true smile (left) and a social smile (right).

Unfortunately because the muscle around the eyes are generally not activated, one is generally unable to see these social smiles that are important in everyday life and culture.

Even though social smiles are not emotional expressions, they serve an important purpose in all of our daily interactions and communications. Social smiles serve several different purposes including:

  1. Serving as a note of politeness or courtesy or greeting

Things like social smiles are incredibly important techniques that we use to grease the wheels of society and bind people together. Since are unable to see social smiles, those wheels are not greased and it may make passing a stranger a little bit rougher. Although the effort to try and be pleasant is not an emotional signal, for social affordances, it’s an incredibly important expression. The social smile has a lot of social and cultural meaning that we consciously and unconsciously attribute.

  1. Telling you something about the person who is smiling

When a person smiles at you, they are showing you they’re more sociable, more outgoing, and approachable at that time. These social smiles give insight into their personality and intentions for that interaction at that time.

  1. Commenting on things that we say or other emotions that we show

If you deliver a harsh comment with a smiles on your face, it’s perceived differently than if you said the same thing with an angry expression. Social smiles comment on things we say and without them, words could be misconstrued to be interpreted differently than what we intended.

It’s clear that social smiles are important for every day interaction. Without the ability to see them, we may have to take some extra steps to compensate.

Here are some helpful tips we suggest when passing a stranger when wearing a mask:

  • Nod when you see someone
  • Wave “hello”
  • Saying “hi” in a pleasant voice

Please weigh in on the comments if you can think of any more!

Can you tell the difference between an enjoyment and social smile?
Put Yourself to the Test

Emotional Consequences of Digital Communication

Video Call Facetime Chatting Communication Concept

Several weeks ago, we published a blog on how the recent shift from in-person to digital communication has changed the way we read people and their body language. We discussed how humans did not evolve to do 2-dimensional communication and that there are drastic differences in the nonverbal messages we receive in real-life versus digitally.

We’re now talking to people more than ever using digital platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Slack and Zoom. Last month, Teams reached 44 million daily users, up from 20 million in November. But what is gained and what’s lost through these types of digital communication? What are some of the long-term emotional implications of these types of interactions?

We sat down with Humintell Director Dr. David Matsumoto to discuss his thoughts on these issues.

Human emotions evolved to facilitate human social bonds

In real-life interactions, emotions arise as consequences of the interaction. In a live setting, as we are expressing ourselves verbally, we’re also emoting non-verbally. Simultaneously, we’re also perceiving each other’s verbal expressions (words) as well as their nonverbal behavior in total, some of which may be unconscious (including sights, sounds and smells). With all those receiving channels operating, it in turn elicits some kind of emotional reactions in the receiver.

Dr. Matsumoto believes that these reactions allow for the development of emotional bonds and connections among people. As humans, our whole communication package is not only about sending signals across all the modalities, it’s about receiving them in all the channels as well. Not only that, we’ve evolved for these emotional bonds to develop. This reciprocal exchange through words through language but also emotions and feelings and sentiments, non-verbally, is an important part of human interaction.

Mirror neurons are further evidence that receivers in an interaction are not passive clinical recipients. These neurons in the brain are specific to producing or mimicking other people’s expressions. And as result of them, interactants are actively processing information being received and then having thoughts, feelings and emotions triggered by what they’re perceiving.

These emotional, strong human bonds are critical to our evolutionary success.

They also play a part in our overall well-being. Strong social bonds have been proven to be beneficial to one’s life satisfaction and overall health. In addition, high levels of social support appear to buffer or protect against the full impact of mental and physical illness.

When using digital communication, there is a drastic reduction in our senses.

Including the loss of smells and sounds, we lose the complete nonverbal package we often get in real life. In addition, we lose the ability to read facial expressions of emotion as well as we would in a live setting; the observable contours, the wrinkle patterns and the shading of the face are greatly diminished. The amount of overall stimuli is greatly reduced.

Therefore, even though the empathetic response system of the body (including mirror neurons) may be turned on during digital communication, Dr. Matsumoto can’t see the thoughts, feelings, emotions in reaction to the other person are going to be triggered as to the extent they are in real-life.

As a result, with digital communication, we lose an emotional connection to the people with whom we’re interacting and there are several emotional consequences:

  • It’s difficult to develop strong relationships with others
  • It’s harder to maintain good relationships with others
  • It’s easier for existing relationships to degrade

Dr. Matsumoto states that there are potentially major social and individual consequences to this kind of exclusivity of interaction and recent research seems to back up his concerns. According to new research released by Well Being Trust (WBT) and the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care, the growing epidemic of “deaths of despair” is increasing due to the coronavirus pandemic—and they anticipate as many as 75,000 more people will die from drug or alcohol misuse and suicide.

So where do we go from here?

Having an awareness of these potential negative side-effects of digital communication equips us to insulate ourselves from such possibilities. Knowing these consequences can occur give us the gateway to then think about ways to mitigate and even counter such effects. Proactively planning around it and beyond it could be beneficial. For example, perhaps having longer discussions remotely or when safe, plan to have more in-person interactions with those you are close to in order to re-group what may have been lost.

Developing and maintaining relationships takes conscious effort and work. Devote your time and prioritize relationships that are important to you. Realize the importance of emotional and social bonds.

We are all going through this difficult time together. But if we remain cognizant of these potential negative consequences of digital communication and proactively plan for the future, we can overcome these challenges.

Addressing Arguments Against Facial Expressions of Emotion

Within the past few months, many people have reached out to Humintell and asked us to comment on recent research articles that argue against facial expressions of emotion. After a lot of deliberation, Director Dr. David Matsumoto addresses those issues in the video above. 

First and foremost, I’d like to express my deep and sincere respect for all the researchers on both sides of this issue. I encourage healthy debates and more importantly, data about those debates. I think those debates are very healthy for science as well as for scientists, practitioners but most importantly, for the general public.

Dr. Matsumoto has researched and read the vast majority of all the studies that have been cited as evidence for and against the various positions that exist. In the video above, he does not get into technical issues of claims or the nature of the studies or exact data. Though he is happy to get into those discussions, they would require some knowledge of methodology. More importantly, he thinks the message that he wants to impart gets lost really easily if that path is gone down.

Dr. Matsumoto agrees with all the data he has seen from all the researchers. What he doesn’t agree with are all the interpretations or claims made about that data.

I believe data and findings are generated within the limitations of the methodologies that are used to produce that data.

If you look at the papers that argue against facial expressions of emotion, they typically don’t encompass all of the evidence for facial expressions of emotion or their universality including:

  • 100s of Judgement studies
  • Production studies
  • Studies of blind individuals
  • Studies of children and infants around the world
  • Studies of kin vs non-kin
  • Studies of family vs non-family members
  • Non-human primate studies

These types of debates have been occurring for a century. Ever since Darwin started this work and published it in 1872, these ideas have been debated hotly both in the lay public and academic discourse. Within the academic discourse, the start of these debates came from early anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ray Birdwhistell. Those debates carried on to the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The original universality studies were conducted in the 60s and 70s. And even from the 80s these same debates and arguments have been occurring. 

To tell you the truth, the nature of the arguments made are essentially the same today as they were 30 or 40 years ago when I started being involved with them directly myself. 

A lot of the thinking that’s dominated this field and much of academia is what Dr. Matsumoto calls “logical determinism”. Logical determinism is a way of thinking that things are mutually exclusive; they’re either or, it’s this way or that way. They are either or dichotomies. Dr. Matsumoto thinks this is true for a lot of academic debates as well as much every day thinking.

What are the limitations of logical determinism?

  • Leads easily to confirmation bias. This confirmation bias exists in the way academics think about their phenomenon. It also biases the way they create studies and the way they, Dr. Matsumoto included, interpret data. 
  • Leads to what might call straw person arguments. One straw person argument heard all the time is “facial expressions of emotion are the only things that faces do” or that “they’re always reflective of an emotional state”. 

The thought that facial expressions are always reliable indicators of emotion is a straw person argument because no one who studies facial expressions of emotion today seriously believes that. 

There’s actually a recent survey of all of the most contemporary emotion researchers in the field that was published in 2016. A survey went out to about 250 of those researchers around the world and 88% of them believed there was compelling evidence for universals in any aspect of emotion. The vast majority of researchers in this field believe the existence of facial expressions of emotion but they don’t believe these extreme straw person arguments and no one does.

Faces do many, many things.

One very special thing that faces do is create facial expressions of emotion. We know that our faces can create thousands of behaviors.

We also know that our facial behavior has many other different functions such as:

  • Signal cognition and cognitive processes
  • Signal specific verbal words or phrases
  • Speech articulation
  • Signals of physical exertion or physical effort
  • Idiosyncratic things

Because of these multiple functions of facial expressions, it makes perfect sense that some experiments will find (under some conditions), that facial behaviors are not necessarily a signal of an emotion. There’s no question about that.

But what is also true is that when a true and strong emotional reaction is spontaneously triggered, and the closer that reaction is to something that is really meaningful in our lives, that will produce the impulse to create a facial expression of emotion in people all around the world.

The link between a spontaneous, strong, intense, meaningful emotional reaction and a corresponding facial expression has never been refuted by any study.

There have been many other studies about other aspects of the face, especially studies where people are judging faces. But no study that has actually elicited a meaningful, intense, emotional reaction *spontaneously* has shown otherwise. In addition, there are a lot of studies that have shown that the face does many, many other things sometimes with the same muscles we use for emotion signaling. 

It is necessary to understand the entirety of the data in terms of the complexity of the face.

What is it about the question of universality or not that gets people so heated?

Perhaps the question about universality is somehow related to how we see ourselves and humankind; whether we see humans as fundamentally similar or somehow different. It is a deep, philosophical question with no clear answers.

Although he doesn’t agree with all the interpretations that are made of the data, Dr. Matsumoto believes that we can find ways to understand the totality of the data without negating one side or the other. 

To learn more about the seven basic emotions, visit this past blog