Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Lie Detection in the Media

Learning how to read people extends beyond one on one conversation into the realm of politics and media studies.

A recent study published in Science has sought to analyze the ways in which such false stories get promoted and circulated throughout social media. While many news commentators have pointed to the role of automated bots in spreading such “fake news”, Dr. Soroush Vosoughi and his team found that it’s humans themselves that are most responsible for this phenomena.

They looked at the idea of “rumor cascades” by tracking news stories from their origin along a series of “retweets” or shares on Twitter. This allowed them to first look at the origin of a social media story but also the path that story took among its online audience.

Stories were distinguished between fact-checked and verified stories and those debunked as hoaxes and “fake news”. These consisted of many topics, including political stories about elections and urban legends, with political stories being the most commonly shared and analyzed.

The political nature of many of these stories seems quite relevant, as they spiked during particularly salient times such as the 2012 and 2016 elections.

Moreover, false and true stories diffused in markedly different ways. False stories spread much faster in all of the topic categories, reaching more people more quickly than true stories. In fact, controlling for many factors, the average false story was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the average true story. This was especially true for political stories.

So far, this has matched the media narratives that warn of the vast diffusion of false news stories, especially during the 2016 election. However, when the media points to the role of bots in promoting these stories, they begin to drift from the truth themselves.

Instead, when excluding bots from the analysis, Dr. Vosoughi and his team found identical results, suggesting that it was not bots but humans who were spreading false stories. Perhaps we have nobody to blame but our own human judgment and inability to properly detect deception. The notion of confirmation bias may be important here, as our brains tend to emphasize what supports our convictions.

The authors declined to offer a firm reason for why this would be the case, but they ruled out the possibility that particularly influential users were promoting false stories. Rather, they emphasized the role of novelty in resulting in assessments that the story was more important. If everyone has already heard a story on CNN, what point is there in sharing it?

In attempting to evaluate this hypothesis, they found that false stories were more generally novel and also that many users expressed surprise in their response. Yet, this is not the whole story, as these same users frequently also showcased reactions of disgust.

While a great deal of questions remain, the proliferation of false news stories emphasizes the applicability of lie detection and people reading in a broader political environment. While we cannot use the same lie detection skills that this blog has discussed at length, Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto’s advice is always relevant.

Aping Around with Gestures

Many of our gestures and emotions are universal across cultures, but is this limited to just our species?

In an exciting new study by Dr. Kirsty Graham of the University of York, researchers found surprising patterns among gestures utilized by bonobos and chimpanzees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Not only did they find similarities between these closely related species, but they also noticed amazing parallels with another closely related species: humans.

After watching videos of wild apes, Dr. Graham’s team noticed an amazing 90 percent overlap between the gestures of bonobos and chimpanzees. For this study, gestures were defined as clear nonverbal activities that engendered apparently successful communication between two individuals.

One gesture featured an ape scratching their own shoulder as a request to be groomed, and another saw apes stroking each other’s mouths to ask for food. Some common gestures were similar but had different meanings, just like among humans. For example, a raised arm may request on object move for chimpanzees, whereas bonobos use this gesture to initiate grooming or mating. This could certainly be an egregious miscommunication!

These gestures seem alien, but others are very close to home. If a bonobo looks at you and flaps its hand towards you, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans alike will all know that this means “move away”!

While some gestures were clearly learned, others were just as clearly evolved and ingrained at the biological level. Given that all three of our species evolved from a common ancestor, a possible link seems almost intuitive.

Perhaps none of this is surprising. In a past blog, we tracked the development of universal emotions based on evolutionary grounds. This built on research that tied emotional expressions to outside stimuli. This included narrowed eyes for disgust, as though we are trying to reduce the amount of disgusting imagery we have to see.

Darwin himself theorized that universal emotions would emerge from evolutionary processes. Thus, the universal nature of human gestures fits into this schema as well. As we discussed in a past blog, Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto has found that athletes from around the world celebrate the Olympics in similar fashions, displaying a posture of triumph with arms thrown into the air.

Dr. Matsumoto has even pointed out that this triumphant behavior is similar in primates.

Still, the groundbreaking nature of Dr. Graham’s research does not answer all of our questions. Dr. Richard Moore, a cognitive psychologist from Humboldt University in Berlin, points out that this research only shows the potential of apes to mutually understand each other’s gestures. Moreover, it doesn’t address subtle but possibly important variations in gestures that may complicate the picture.

When we are trying to read other people, we may be tempted to just focus on their eyes or their face, but this sort of research shows how crucial reading the whole body is to gain insights. Moreover, while cultural differences complicate the situation, focusing on universal signals, be they emotions or gestures, can help you read just about anybody, including chimpanzees!

Framing a Reciprocal Interview

What is the impact of offering an interviewee a bottle of water?

This seemingly innocuous question actually delves into major questions both with regard to communication but interviewing techniques more specifically. By looking at this basic question in a recent study, Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang were attempting to look at the notion of reciprocity and whether more reciprocal interviewing tactics contribute to boosting rapport and information gathering.

The subject of reciprocity essentially looks at the idea that people want to return or reciprocate favors offered to them. So, if an interviewee is offered the simple kindness of bottled water, they would be more likely to feel obliged to provide additional information during the course of the interview.

Reciprocity is just one form of what is known as “social influence.” The theoretical literature identifies six principles of social influence that hold across cultures, but this study focuses on reciprocity which had been identified as one of the more powerful and pervasive aspects of social influence.

The study in question divided experimental groups around this simple treatment, offering water to half the participants. They hypothesized that this would boost rapport between interviewer and interviewee and would result in more relevant and plausible information.

These experimental groups were also divided internally between those who were asked to lie and those asked to tell the truth about whether they had stolen a $200 check. The experiment was set up to incentivize participants to lie to their best ability, as they were told that being suspected of deception would result in an extra-long questionnaire after the interview.

Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang found general support for their hypotheses. Liars tended to give more relevant and plausible details after being offered water. Interestingly, neither ethnicity nor culture had an impact. Rapport was also boosted by the reciprocal treatment.

This has significant ramifications for both interviewing tactics and efforts to boost rapport in social situations. When rapport was high, the interrogation proved more fruitful, and reciprocity helped accomplish that! This means that when interviewing an individual, efforts intended to elicit reciprocity may be helpful, even though an actual interview situation is generally a bit higher stakes.

But what does this mean for those of us who are just trying to get better at reading people? Sure, we can offer people we meet bottles of water, but that might be socially out of place! However, the basic principle of reciprocity will hold.

By offering something, be it a compliment, personal information about ourselves, or a gift, we can help create a sense of reciprocity, boosting rapport and better enabling us to know about other people. This is not just some manipulative tactic but also a way of developing better interactions and getting to know people!