Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Adaptation to Deception

It seems intuitive that lying gets easier the more we do it, but that may actually be supported at the neurological level!

New research found that, when we lie frequently, our brain begins to adapt to the practice of deception, to the point that we no longer feel the emotional stress that normally comes with lying. These results are important both for informing on how we practice deception but also for shedding light on the ways in which our brains adapt to patterns of, perhaps immoral, behavior.

Typically, when we tell a lie, our brain’s amygdala produces a negative emotional state, essentially making us feel stressed or uncomfortable during the process. However, a new study in Nature Neuroscience contends that, the more people lie, the less their brain produces negative stimuli.

In this study, participants were given images of glass jars filled with pennies. They were asked to report the number of pennies but were often incentivized to exaggerate the amount. While they often told the truth, they often engaged in deception when given self-interested reasons to do so.

Over the course of repeated deceptions, the researchers tracked each participants’ amygdala’s functioning, finding that they became less intensely activated each time. This even remained the case when the magnitude of the lie increased.

This last point is especially troubling, as it suggests that minor lies can escalate into major acts of deception the more accustomed to them we become. Study author Dr. Tali Sharot emphasized this point saying, “[the amygdala] response fades as we continue to lie, and the more it falls the bigger our lies become. This may lead to a ‘slippery slope’ where small acts of dishonesty escalate into more significant lies.”

In fact, the study also found that, not only did people begin to feel better about lying the more they did it, but they also became more likely to do so.

While this experiment demonstrates how our brains react to deception, it may also reflect broader trends in our ability to adapt emotionally to other actions. The lead author, Dr. Neil Garrett, alluded to the possibility of these results being replicated during troublesome behaviors besides lying.

Dr. Garrett remarked “We only tested dishonesty in this experiment, but the same principle may also apply to escalations in other actions such as risk taking or violent behavior.”

What do the results of this study mean for efforts to detect deception? In fact, it bolsters many of the challenges with lie detection, namely that habitual liars can be incredibly good at it. Not only do they learn how to lie, but their brain actually adapts to the practice!

This is all a great reason to let Humintell train you to become a better lie detector! But in the meantime, check out some helpful tips here and here.

Antisocial Behavior and Facial Recognition

We often tell children that bullies struggle with their own self-esteem, but they may also struggle with an even more fundamental skill!

Groundbreaking research suggests that those with severe antisocial behavior actually fail in properly recognizing emotions in other humans. A team of researchers from the University of Bath and the University of Southampton examined both male and female teenagers who had been diagnosed with conduct disorder, finding that they are often unable to detect emotion and rarely make eye contact.

Conduct disorders refer to a set of antisocial behaviors that often features dishonest behavior, theft, or even aggression towards people and animals. Due to the distrustful nature of many of those with these conditions, treatment can be extremely challenging, making further research into these conditions incredibly important.

The study authors analyzed a group of teens with conduct disorders as they attempted to identify emotions displayed through pictures and video clips. When compared to a control group, they found that the teens with conduct disorders were significantly worse at accurately identifying emotions, with the boys scoring even lower than girls.

Simultaneously, they analyzed the participants’ eye movements as they sought to recognize those emotions. While they did find that the participants tended to avoid looking at the eyes, this alone did not explain their lack of emotional recognition. Even when they did examine the eyes, those with conduct disorders still tended to score poorly.

Senior study author, Dr. Graeme Fairchild emphasized the importance of using these results to bolster treatment, saying “These findings could lead to the development of new treatments aiming to enhance emotion recognition and empathy or even prevention programmes for at-risk children.”

The idea of providing more effective treatment for conduct disorders resonates strongly given the ongoing challenges in this sort of therapy. Antisocial youth tend to be especially resistant to treatment and distrustful adults, making it even harder for therapists and children to address their behavioral difficulties.

Another interesting aspect of the study was its findings on gender differences: namely the fact that boys tended to perform worse than girls. This even held amongst the control group which lacked conduct disorders.

Another author, Dr. Nayra Martin-Key observed that “that interventions designed to improve emotion recognition might need to be tailored according to gender, with boys with Conduct Disorder needing a longer or more comprehensive intervention than girls.”

Perhaps the gender disparity is not surprising. In an earlier blog, we observed that there is a distinctive difference in emotional intelligence between boys and girls, rooted in the way they tend to be raised.

For more information on the role of eyes in emotional recognition, check out our blogs here and here!

Emotions vs Expressions

We know there are seven “basic” emotions, but aren’t there many more emotions?

In fact, there is significant difference between what emotions we experience and how our faces are able to express these emotions. While mountains of previous research have settled on the existence of seven basic emotional expressions, ongoing research seeks to quantify exactly how many emotions there really are

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, attempted to do just that. In a recent study, psychologists ran an extensive analysis with over 800 participants, attempting to provoke and record their range emotional expressions.

Each participant was exposed to a selection from more than 2000 short video clips, intended to trigger various emotions. These videos ranged from beautiful nature shots and romantic weddings to macabre images of human suffering and natural disasters.

The first group was shown 30 of these videos and was asked to simply write out whatever emotions they felt, garnering a vast range of self-reported descriptions. Then, a second group, again exposed to a selection of videos, was asked to identify their emotions from a predetermined list. This list ranged impressively from anger or anxiety to romance or triumph, but sought to give some common ground between individual reports.

Interesting, about half of the second group selected the same emotions after watching the same videos.

Finally, a third cohort was asked to rank their emotional experiences on a nine-point scale after viewing a series of 12 videos. While analyzing all three of these results through statistical models, the study authors found significant overlaps between reactions to a given video. When compiling all of these overlapped reactions, they were able to settle on a spectrum of 27 shared emotions.

However, the study authors cautioned that these different emotions were not entirely distinct. Senior author Dr. Dacher Keltner pointed out that “there are smooth gradients of emotion between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement and adoration.”

Long-time readers of this blog will note the potential conflict between this expansive view of 27 emotions and the more limited view of seven universal basic emotions.

But, as Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto clarifies, this question is solved by distinguishing between experienced emotions and nonverbal expressions of these emotions. While we can feel a huge range of emotions, there are only so many facial expressions that humans universally use to express them.

Dr. Matsumoto’s distinction also explains another difference between emotions and expressions. The seven universal emotional expressions are distinct, separate categories. For example, the emotional combination of sadness and anger does not have a universal facial expression. On the other hand, emotions, as Dr. Keltner explained, are not so categorically distinct. Sadness and anger can overlap, making emotions more scalar and continuous than simply categorical.

To learn more about recognizing emotions and emotional expressions, check out Humintell’s training tool here!