Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Why is that Funny?

Psychology often tries to unravel emotional mysteries, but some resist investigation more than others.

One of these long-standing mysteries is the reality of humor. What exactly makes a joke funny or not? And to whom? It is this question which has long puzzled psychologists and philosophers, and Scientific American’s Giovanni Sabato attempts to trace the history of theory and research on humor in a recent article.

Sabato delves into a long philosophical tradition, including the likes of Plato and Sigmund Freud, which has sought to model how humor works. While Plato and other ancient Greeks theorized that humor resulted from a sense of superiority over the failings of others, Freud made a great deal about the tendency for humor to thrive on the violation of taboos.

Another theory has focused on the idea of “incongruity.” Humor is derived from the subversion of expectations or the incompatibility of various concepts or situations. This helps explain the presence of double meanings and puns in humor, and it showcases the frequency with which humor deals with unexpected punchlines or resolutions to tricky situations.

The latter should be pretty intuitive to anyone who has watched a sitcom!

One more modern attempt to develop a unified theory of humor has built on that idea of incongruity. Drs. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, have introduced the idea of “benign violation.”

This theory focuses on humor being derived from violations of expectations surrounding norms. When somebody acts in a way that they are not supposed to, if it does not result in indignation or scandal, the situation will often be perceived as humorous.

There is also a role here for being distant from that particular, often awkward, violation. By hearing these stories second-hand from a comedian or friend, we have enough distance to find these situations funny.

However, this theory of distance and violation is not the only popular theory. Some psychologists and evolutionary biologists simply see humor as an evolutionary mechanism. Spontaneous and genuine laughter is deeply ingrained in our biology, while contrived and forced laughter developed as a way of smoothing social situations.

One way that humor can be derived from our hard-wired evolutionary experiences is related to the subversion of expectations. A group of philosophers, including Matthew Hurley of Indiana University Bloomington, saw humor as related to mistakes, or at least to their detection.

Our mind naturally assumes that it knows what will happen, relying on heuristics to predict likely events, but when things don’t happen as they should, for instance when another person acts erratically, we interpret that as humor.

None of these are necessarily perfect explanations for such a complex phenomenon. However, they help situate the question of humor into our cognitive and evolutionary history. From past blogs, we already know that emotional expressions are deeply rooted in evolution, and we know that properly reading people often depends on situating our experiences into these cognitive roots.

Professionalizing Facial Features

We know that facial expressions hugely shape social interactions, but they also shape professional evaluations, as well.

A recent blog by the Association for Psychological Science (APS) critically examines the extant research on the connection between nonverbal behavior and professional evaluations. This article seeks to summarize the role that facial features, such as facial hair, eyebrows, and head tilts, have on others’ perceptions.

Perhaps the least controllable of these are facial features like width, or more specifically, the ratio between the width of our face and its height. While this may seem ridiculous, past research has consistently found a relationship between perceived anti-social tendency and facial width.

However, as the APS points out, this perception fails to hold with people that we have actually gotten to know. Still, it says something about the immediate, almost instinctive, process of emotional and facial recognition.

While facial width is not mutable, facial hair certainly is, and beards can have profound impacts on people’s perceptions of us. For instance, bearded men are more likely to be perceived as angry than their clean-shaven counterparts, but they are less likely to be perceived as sad or happy.

Despite the association with aggression, beards can also relate to positive evaluations of professional competence.

Certainly, this does not seem like a logical evaluation, but it does not have to be in order to have significant impacts on perception. Another such feature is, even more absurdly, eyebrows!

The role of eyebrows connects closely to our blog from last week, as they are emphasized and deemphasized along with various head tilts, and we know that head tilts have significant impacts on perceived dominance and strength.

However, what may have been missing from the study we blogged on last week, is the role of eyebrows in the importance of head tilts. While that study emphasized the importance of the eyes in the process, APS cites research performed by University of British Columbia psychologists who found that the effect of head tilt actually disappeared when eyebrows were removed from the image.

While we know that microexpressions and a host of nonverbal behaviors have profound impacts on social interaction, it is also important to look at the role of actual facial features, like facial hair, symmetry, and even eyebrows. As this research shows, those can have profound impacts as well.

Certainly, as APS emphasizes, these impacts can carry into the professional world. Traits such as emotionality may result in less positive evaluations of one’s competence, while perceived dominance will likely have the opposite effect.

Yet, it is not only the professional world that makes these evaluations salient. Even everyday interaction can be profoundly shifted by whether we are perceived as angry, dominant, or happy. Often, we might not even be aware of these evaluations, making sustained efforts to learn how to best read people’s non-verbal behavior that much more important.

Nonverbal Expression of Dominance

Fig. 2. Stimuli used in Study 1 (top row) and Study 2 (middle and bottom rows). From left to right, the poses illustrate downward head tilts, neutral head angles, and upward head tilts. In all images, targets posed with neutral facial expressions (i.e., no facial-muscle movement).(University of British Columbia)

While we often talk about prominent examples of nonverbal behavior, like the triumphant pose, many are actually quite subtle.

A fascinating new study out of the University of British Columbia looked at the marked impact of something as simple as head position in evaluations of a person’s inclination towards dominance. This study found that a slight downward tilt of the head, while still maintaining eye contact, is often perceived as a dominant and intimidating signal.

In their first experiment, study authors Zachary Witkower and Jessica Tracy recruited subjects online to view a series of computer-generated images of faces. After being shown each image, the participants were asked to rate the person based on perceptions of dominance. This involved answering questions like whether that person “would enjoy having control over others” or “would be willing to use aggressive tactics.”

Consistently, they found that the faces slightly tilted downwards, while still maintaining a level gaze, were rated higher in dominance than the control. While an upward head tilt was also generally significant, its effect was greatly dwarfed by the downward tilt.

Of course, the attentive reader would notice that there could be something wrong with asking participants to look at computer-generated images. In order to address this, the study authors went further and conducted additional studies.

The first of these simply sought to replicate the previous study using actual images of people’s faces, maintaining the same control as well as an upward and downward tilt for comparison. This generally replicated the findings of the first study.

But what about the downwardly tilted face has this impact? Is it knowing that the head is tilted? Or does tilting the head downward have certain impacts on facial muscles that create this impression?

In addressing this final question, Drs. Witkower and Tracy conducted a third study which, instead of exposing participants to images of faces, instead exposed participants to narrow bands of those same faces, this time just showing the eyes.

Noting that these bands still showed marked differences, such a model helped evaluate whether it was a change in eye position or the actual head tilt that promoted a sense of dominance. They also showed participants images of faces, tilted and otherwise, with the eyes missing.

This final study found that the dominance-inducing effect of head tilt was only present when the eyes were, and it did not seem to require the entire face. This indicates that something about the eyes and the related muscles convey that image of power.

Questions of dominance are incredibly important in many of the same contexts that microexpressions are. In conducting an interview or interrogation, it behooves the investigator to show a sense of authority and power. Similarly, recognizing this tactic in other people might greatly benefit your ability to read them effectively.