Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Detecting Deception Close to Home

Parents and really anyone who works with kids can attest to many children’s tendency to lie.

While these might take the form of minor fibs of who hit whom, and that sort of common deception, it is not just our anecdotal impression that children are often dishonest. As Dr. Wendy Patrick explains, there is a significant amount of evidence showing that children are quite likely to practice deception. The upside to this is that childhood behavior serves as a great case study for understanding human deception practices.

For instance, Dr. Patrick cites a 2011 study which found that, while younger children lie frequently, dishonesty decreases as they grow towards middle adolescence. The authors speculated that this may be due to increased moral awareness or from a better understanding of the possible consequences of being caught.

Another similar 2016 study concluded that children do not just lie randomly but will select various forms of deception based on perceived social advantage. This conclusion led the authors to suggest that as children age, they begin to use more socially acceptable methods of deception, like white lies.

Perhaps most interesting is that this 2016 study also found that children with greater social skills tended to lie more. This is definitely in line with earlier research that explored a correlation between popularity and deception amongst teenagers.

In a 1999 study, for example, Dr. Robert Feldman interviewed a group of 11 to 16 year olds. While older children might lie less frequently, he found that they are better at it, both controlling nonverbal behavior and better verbalizing their fibs. He also found that more socially competent or popular children were better at lying.

Dr. Feldman concluded “convincing lying is actually associated with good social skills. It takes social skills to be able to control your words as well as what you say non-verbally.”

But how does all of this impact our relationships with children? Does monitoring childhood behavior make us better lie detectors?

Dr. Patrick contends that, while we may develop better skills at catching our kids in lies, these skills may be limited to those individuals, and our children develop correspondingly better abilities for telling us lies.

When we get good at detecting lies in certain children, it is not necessarily because we have unlocked universal skills of lie detection, but because we are better at comparing their mannerisms against possible divergent behavior. For example, a child that always makes eye contact gives themselves away when they fail to meet our gaze, but another child may simply be too shy to maintain similar levels of eye contact.

Moreover, while we can practice lie detection by analyzing divergent behavior, our children also monitor our behavior for similar deviations. In their case, they track signs of distrust or suspicion, learning what nonverbal behavior is leading to their possible detection and adjusting behavior in response.

While our social interactions may be poor guides for effective lie detection, there are universal behaviors and expressions that give away deception.

For more information, check out these Humintell training programs here and here.

Emotionally Disguised Faces

Emotional and facial recognition may be even more closely linked than we thought.

In past blogs, we have discussed how better understanding facial recognition may help us better understand emotional recognition, and we have also talked about how understanding emotions requires similar processes as those which identify faces.

During that discussion, we explained how recognizing faces is an often instantaneous process that synthesizes not only facial features but also assesses deviations from the norm to determine emotional states.

But we have not discussed how different emotions may make facial recognition harder! A recent study by Dr. Annabelle Redfern from the University of Bristol found that, with unfamiliar faces, different emotional expressions significantly hamper our ability to identify the faces.

Dr. Redfern exposed participants to images of actors in movie stills, monitoring how long it took them to learn how to identify that actor in subsequent images. While this seems straightforward, she also divided the participants into two experimental groups.

The first group was exposed to actors with generally expressionless or “neutral” faces. This first set of images didn’t show a particularly emotive face, while the second group was exposed to pictures showing distinctive emotional expressions.

The researchers found that participants had a harder time learning from the emotional images than from the neutral ones, both in terms of a lower level of accuracy and a slower response time. Similarly, when groups of respondents training to identify neutral faces were asked to apply this knowledge to more expressive faces, they faltered and were significantly less accurate.

As Dr. Redfern concluded, “The differences we found point to the idea that facial expressions and facial identity are not treated separately by our brains; and instead, we may mentally store someone’s expressions along with their faces.”

It is important to note that this was done with unfamiliar faces, as we almost instantaneously can recognize familiar ones. However, this results in important practical implications.

For example, witness testimony in legal proceedings often depends on facial recognition, but this can become difficult if a witness got a glimpse of a face with one expression and now sees that face with a quite similar expression.

Unsurprisingly, other research notes how bad most people are at recognizing emotions, especially when those expressions are ambiguous.

But that’s what Humintell is here for! Check out these pages, here and here, for some more information on how you can better develop your facial and emotional recognition skills.

Prenatal Facial Recognition

We already know that faces are incredibly central to human interaction, but facial recognition may also be fundamental to our brain’s development.

Science has long demonstrated that even newborn infants have a strong preference for human faces over other stimuli. Now, a new study from the University of California, Los Angeles, may have found that our preference for faces begins even before birth itself!

These researchers exposed fetuses to triangles of red dots which sought to mimic facial structures, by representing the triangle that two eyes and a mouth create in a real face. In fact, past research has shown that such triangles serve as similar stimuli to faces for newborn children.

After projecting these dots into the fetus’ peripheral vision, researchers slowly moved them away from the fetus’ line of sight. Amazingly, ultrasound pictures show that a significant number of fetus’ moved their heads to follow the dots. While this was still a minority of total exposures, when contrasted with nonfacelike triangles, the fetuses reacted almost three times as often.

While some critics have said that it is too early to conclude any level of actual facial recognition, the very method of projecting images into the womb has yielded praise. Scott Johnson, a developmental psychologist uninvolved in the study, said the method “opens up all kinds of new doors to understand human development,” adding that it was “very, very exciting.”

While it may be premature to conclude a preference for faces at this stage in development, such a conclusion would be consistent with previous research that has found a consistent preference for human faces amongst newborn babies, within minutes of birth.

For example, a 1974 study showed newborns images of faces after only nine minutes. They found that the newborns would follow these faces as they moved for longer than they would for similar images of unintelligible images.

Subsequent research found that, within hours, babies would be able to differentiate their mother’s face from strangers, showing a preference for their mother. What is most striking about this is the speed at which young humans learn how to recognize and differentiate faces.

Similar research has even found that newborns, after only a day, show increased preference towards “beautiful faces.” These researchers contended that such faces better represent the stereotypical or “prototypical” human face, helping to explain these surprising results.

If facial recognition is really this deeply ingrained in our brain’s development, it would help explain the notion of universal emotions that span cultures. Followers of this blog will be familiar with the notion of universal basic emotions, and of the idea that these have an evolutionary origin.

For more information on this, check out our relevant blogs here and here!