Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Trying to Buy Happiness

Could happiness be a purchasable commodity like any other?

It has long been a cliché that we cannot simply buy happiness, but is this really true? In fact, several recent studies have begun to find striking correlations between wealth and happiness, but it isn’t that simple. For example, your purchased happiness seems to depend on what exactly you are spending money on.

A growing body of research is growing to support the idea that money does lead to happiness. For instance, a 2013 study by economists Dr. Betsey Stevenson and Dr. Justin Wolfers found that happiness is heavily correlated with per capita GDP, meaning that the wealthier a nation is, the happier people in it tend to be.

Similarly, Stevenson and Wolfers found that, within a given country, happiness rises alongside income. This study flies in the face of some conventional wisdom by denying any so-called “satiation point,” where happiness ceases to grow despite rising wealth.

The concept of a “satiation point” is evident in an earlier study from 2010. This study did find that happiness rise together, but only up to an annual salary of $75,000. After surpassing this point, authors Dr. Daniel Kahneman and Dr. Angus Deaton found that happiness levels no longer correlated with wealth.

While this picture remains muddled, new research suggests that looking at gross income does not give us a full story. Instead, it is important to examine specifically how wealth is used to foster happiness. A groundbreaking 2017 study sought to analyze the effect of differing spending habits on happiness.

The study authors recruited participants and asked them to spend money on material purchases, like clothing or wine, but the following weekend, urged them to purchase services that would give them more leisure time. This latter category included paying for a cleaning service or meal delivery, both of which would save the purchaser the time and effort need to clean or cook.

After each of these weekends, the researchers asked for participants to report their levels of happiness and found decidedly more positive emotions amongst those that purchased leisure time.

Similarly, the same authors surveyed approximately 6,000 people with incomes ranging from $30,000/year to some in the millions. They asked each respondent to report their level of happiness and to describe their purchasing habits. Reinforcing their previous results, they found that those who “purchased leisure time” were happier than those who spend money on material objects.

In emphasizing the conclusion’s significance, one study author, Dr. Elizabeth Dunn, said “if altering slightly how people are spending their money could [boost life satisfaction], it’s something we really want to understand and perhaps encourage people to do.”

These results confirm some previous research. In a previous blog, we reported how spending money on experiences, like vacations, boosted happiness more than material purchases. Similarly, other research has found that charitable giving provides more happiness that just spending that money on ourselves.

Clearly, how we spend money matters, and hopefully further research will continue to shed light on such an important question.

For more information on the psychology of money and happiness, check out or previous blogs here and here!

How to Tell if Someone Is Lying to You

How can we learn how to spot deception?

It is a sad truth that lying is incredibly pervasive in our interactions with fellow humans. While people lie for a multitude of reasons, we are also quite bad at lie detection, creating a pretty bleak predicament for those of us who value honesty. In a recent article for NBC News, journalist Brianna Steinhilber has compiled an excellent and accessible list of helpful tips to make you a better lie detector.

As we have discussed in a previous blog, people lie all the time, primarily out of self-interest. Steinhilber manages to compile some troubling statistics showing just how frequent this really is. One 2012 study found that the average American lies about 11 times per week, while another claimed that a majority of people lie at least every 10 minutes!

One of the problems with this prevalence is that, according to a 2016 study, the more we lie about small things, the more accustomed our brain becomes to deception in general, fostering lying behavior in the future. This is perhaps unsurprising. As Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto explains, deception is deeply rooted in human behavior and development.

This might be manageable, if we could tell when people were lie. Unfortunately, we can’t, for the most part. One large meta-study by Dr. Charles Bond and Dr. Bella DePaulo in 2006 found that we can generally detect deception with a 54 percent success rate.

But that doesn’t mean that we are doomed to ignorance about other people’s lies! Steinhilber has helpfully compiled a list of five tips for strengthening your lie detection skills:

First, pay close attention to their baseline behavior. This is easiest with people you interact with most, such as coworkers, family members, and friends. From this baseline, you can notice when they practice anomalous behavior that indicates deception.

Second, watch their eyes. While maintaining or avoiding eye contact is not a reliable indicator of deception, the eyes are a great way to compare behavior against the baseline. Is the person blinking more than usual? Do they normally make eye contact but now don’t? These are the sort of indicators that an examination of the eyes can give you.

Third, look for their microexpressions, a favorite topic here at Humintell. Our faces can give us away in many minor ways, as muscles in the face twitch briefly to reveal one’s actual emotions. These can be quite difficult to notice, but reading microexpressions is a skill that can be learned and trained.

Fourth, analyze their smile. A fake smile, a good indicator of deception, looks quite different from a genuine one. In fake smiles, liars tend to press their lips more tightly together. Similarly, genuine smiles reach to the eyes and the rest of the face, while fake smiles tend to stop at the mouth.

Finally, Steinhilber recommends looking for signs of stress or discomfort. While lying, many people will fidget, shift around in their seat, or even yawn. Understanding how a given person acts when they are stressed can help us learn when that person is lying.

While it is certainly helpful to keep these tips in mind, nothing can compare with professional training in lie detection or in mastering the art of reading microexpressions.

Recognizing Friend from Foe

Why does your face look so different from mine?

This blog has spent a great deal of time talking about various methods of facial recognition, as well as its relationship to emotional recognition. An important part of this question rests in the vast diversity of human faces that we come into contact with. We need facial recognition skills, in part, because there are so many faces to choose from! As Psychology Today’s Dr. Nathan Lents explains, this human peculiarity also reveals a wealth of evolutionary information.

When we refer to facial recognition as a human peculiarity, that underscores how unique our multitude of different faces are. We have more unique facial structures than any other mammal, and primates are some of the only animals that have varied faces or emotional expressions. Birds, reptiles, insects, etc., while capable of facial recognition do not form display emotions in a similar fashion.

This demonstrates how closely tied facial recognition and emotional expressions are in humans. According to Dr. Lents, mammals first evolved muscles in the face in order to suckle from mammary glands, but as we began to develop into primates and hominids, these muscles grew to become capable of facial expression as a form of communication.

It was these changing muscles that resulted in such a diversity of human faces. In fact, not only are our faces quite different from each other, they tend to vary more than any other physical features.

Given how deeply ingrained facial features and emotion recognition are in our evolutionary history, it is not entirely surprising that some tendencies seem pretty universal. Not only do human babies across cultures develop incredibly fast facial recognition skills but all humans seem to share a set of universal emotional expressions.

For instance, numerous studies have found that newborn humans gain the ability to recognize faces incredibly quickly, learning to distinguish their mother’s within hours. Shockingly, preliminary research suggests that fetuses begin to favor human faces over neutral stimulus even before birth!

Moreover, we seem to have evolved to display universal basic expressions, such as disgust, fear or anger, based on evolutionary responses to the outside world. This was even postulated by Charles Darwin before subsequent psychological research, including the work of Humintell’s own Dr. David Matsumoto, confirmed the presence of these expressions regardless of culture.

For more information on the links between emotional and facial recognition, check out our past blogs here and here.