Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Failure at the World Cup

All triumphant athletes look alike, but do all distraught and disappointed ones?

In past blogs, we have noted frequent observations of the universal “triumphant” pose amongst victors in sports competitions, but sports reveal other universal poses as well. For instance, as David Gendelman writes for The New York Times, this summer’s World Cup helps showcase a similar “disappointed pose.”

Mr. Gendelman noticed that athlete after athlete reacted with the same pose to a missed goal: a look of shock accompanied by the perplexed raising of both arms to clutch the back of the head. If you’ve been watching the games, I’d imagine you immediately recognized it!

This inspired him to ask psychologists and other professionals about this phenomenon, such as Dr. Jessica Tracy from the University of British Columbia. Dr. Tracy emphasized that clutching the head indicated shame but also that “the constriction of the body, in the way that the player is moving his arms around his head, almost to make himself smaller. Those are very classical shame display elements.”

She went on to describe the gesture as conveying a message of failure to fellow teammates: “I get it and I’m sorry, therefore you don’t have to kick me out of the group, you don’t have to kill me.”

Dr. Tracy actually published similar findings with Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto in their 2008 study of blind Olympians. Through this research, they found that athletes exhibited both triumphant and shameful expressions upon victory or defeat. While we have focused on the triumphant poses in other blogs, the universality of shameful expressions across blind and sighted athletes of different cultures suggests a poignant universality to these gestures as well.

Other psychologists situated this gesture deeper in our evolutionary history, which shouldn’t be surprising to followers of this blog. Dr. Dacher Keltner, of the University of California, Berkeley, sees this gesture as rooted in defense of one’s head: “The oldest kind of behavioral intention in that class of behaviors is to protect your head from blows.”

This observation certainly fits with the idea that triumphant and shameful gestures serve as a sort of message to others in the group. This connects to research presented in a past blog that sees universal emotions as rooted in their function as a form of social communication.

Dr. Keltner’s point is further supported by the fact that many fellow athletes, as well as their fans, will mimic the same gesture upon watching the game. There is a strong group component here. Not only is the gesture universal, but it is also something taken up by those who empathize with and share the emotion.

The World Cup serves as a great source of entertainment and as a showcase of athletic prowess, but it also reveals a lot about human psychology. Like the Olympics, the cross-cultural nature of such an international event lets us see what is deeply common about the psychologies of people across cultures.

This is just a start however, as Humintell has focused on how deeply these cultural similarities (and differences) impact our ability to read people and understand their diverse perspectives.

Political Facts or Deceptive Opinions?

It’s no surprise that deception and politics are intertwined, but are you the person to disentangle them?

The Pew Research Center has issued that very challenge, though in the somewhat lighthearted context of an online quiz. This challenges readers to classify given statements as “factual” or simply “opinions,” but it’s harder than you would think!

In fact, only 26 percent of Americans could correctly identify all the factual statements, and only the slightly higher 35 percent could identify the opinion statements. This is somewhat easier if you are politically engaged and follow the news, but even that’s no guarantee!

Can you tell the difference between factual and opinion news statements?

The role of deception in politics is an omnipresent concern. During the election season, Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto published an enlightening series of posts discussing the ways in which language and nonverbal behavior can be used to spin the news or conceal a politician’s motives.

Check our Parts One, Two, and Three here, but especially Dr. Matsumoto’s conclusion here!

Expressing Control or Displaying Expression?

When understanding how other cultures express emotions, it is almost as important to reflect on our own cultural norms as it is to recognize differing ones.

This is essentially what Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and his team find in a recent publication. Dr. Matsumoto studied the role that one’s own cultural norms and sense of emotional regulation have in evaluating the expressions of other people. Excitingly, they found a close link between our cultural norms of emotional displays and our own sense of emotional regulation, as they relate to evaluations of other people’s emotional states.

Their study sought to address the challenges in recognizing the often muted expressions of those from more subdued emotional cultures, but it also hoped to disentangle the perceiver’s own expectations and judgments from their evaluations.

In order to accomplish these aims, Dr. Matsumoto and his team conducted two studies. Both of these asking participants to identify the expression displayed in a series of images of faces, in addition to rating the intensity of the expression. Notably, the judges were split between English speakers raised in the United States and native-born Japanese participants, and the pictures included both American and Japanese faces.

In the first of these studies, judges were also asked to report their own emotional state’s intensity while judging images of faces, and they completed a measure intended to capture “cultural display rules” or the extent to which a culture encourages intense emotional expressions.

They found that cultural differences accounted for significant variations in how the judges evaluated the intensity of expressions, with Japanese judges tending to infer that an expression showcased more emotion than American judges.

The second study built on this work by replicating the same experiment only this time asking judges to evaluate their own emotional responsiveness. Dr. Matsumoto connects this to cultural display rules, because both have to do with the “management and modification of emotional expressions and reactions.”

After being shown expressive images, the judges would again make judgments as to the intensity of the emotion displayed, but this time they would also complete self-reported measures of emotional regulation. The results suggested that emotional regulation was at least as strong in mediating judgments as cultural norms.

The fact that cultural display norms and one’s own emotional regulation both mediate our perception of others’ emotions has profound implications for anyone attempting to better learn to read people. It is not enough for us to learn other people’s cultures, but we also have to critically reflect on our own norms, both personal and cultural.

This makes the process of emotional recognition just that much harder, which is why Humintell is trying to help by training you in the skill of reading people and understanding cultural differences.