Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Deception as Human Nature

Part 1 of 2

Is lying part of our fundamental human nature?

While we often like to think of lying as some sort of aberration from normal human behavior, the truth may be much less pleasant. An increasing number of studies are illustrating that lies and deception are not only ubiquitous in our everyday behavior but also serve a fundamental role in human development.

In a landmark study, Dr. Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist with the University of California, Santa Barbara, tracked the frequency with which participants lied during their day to day activities. While most of the deceptions were minor, she found that the average person lies one or two times daily!

When similar experiments are conducted across cultures, the results continue to support DePaulo’s finding of frequent deception.

The ubiquity of deception is not surprising, because lies are a natural part of children’s brain development. Dr. Kang Lee, from the University of Toronto, attempted to analyze the frequency with which toddlers are inclined to lie. While asking children to guess the identity of a hidden toy, Dr. Lee and his researchers regularly left the room, telling children not to peak at the toy. When asked if they had looked at the hidden toy, Dr. Lee found that a majority of children lied, and almost all of them did peak!

Perhaps surprisingly, the percentage of children who lied increased with age, from 30 percent of two-year olds, to 80 percent of eight-year olds. They also got better at it, learning to control their tones or even deliberately giving the wrong answer.

Similarly, lying requires some understanding of other people’s minds, so as we get older, we advance in competency. In order to lie, we must be able to deduce the knowledge and beliefs of other people, stepping into their shoes, so to speak. For example, children performed better on tests of executive function and ability to read other people, the more proficient they were at deception.

Many academics have sought deeper explanation for this troubling behavior. If deceit is closely related to normal brain development, then why did this pattern of brain development arise in the first place?

For example, Dr. Sissela Bok, of Harvard University, connects lying with evolutionary advantage. She contends that deception is rooted in efforts to gain competitive advantage by manipulating other humans: “It’s much easier to lie in order to get somebody’s money or wealth than to hit them over the head or rob a bank.”

While some of our everyday lies are based in pathology or malice, most are, in fact, told out of pure self-interest, with motives such as concealing mistakes or gaining personal and financial advantages.

Despite the prevalence of deception, most people assume that others are telling the truth. By accepting that we will sometimes be lied to, we can develop trust that is generally more advantageous than rampant cynicism.

However, people do lie all the time, and we are terrible at identifying these lies. That’s why some psychologists, like those at Humintell, work to better understand how people give themselves away with subtle expressions.

For more information on how to detect deception, check out our training tools here and our past blog post.

Cracking the Facial Recognition Code

How do our brains recognize faces?

This is an incredibly complex question, because the process of facial recognition is an almost miraculously instantaneous one. As discussed in a previous blog, we don’t need to make a careful study of somebody’s face to recognize them. Instead, we just know who someone is, which is really amazing, given how complex people’s faces are and how frequently environmental factors, like lighting, complicate the matter.

But even a process so incredible is not immune to thorough scientific analysis. In a recent study, Dr. Doris Tsao at Caltech analyzed the brains of macaque monkeys to model which neurons fired during the recognition process.

Previous studies have identified specific parts of the brain, small regions in the temporal lobe, that consistently respond to facial recognition. Building off this research, Dr. Tsao found that different sections of these regions, or “dials,” respond to the recognition process for specific features of the face, such as eye placement, shape, or skin tone. From all of these responses, the brain synthesizes the data and creates a model of the face.

In fact, Dr. Tsao concluded “the values of each dial are so predictable that we can re-create the face that a monkey sees, by simply tracking the electrical activity of its face cells,” calling this process “mind-blowing.”

And here’s the really mind-blowing part:  Dr. Tsao and her team were able to create a predictive model for various facial features, based on the monkeys’ brain activity. After showing a monkey an image of a human face, they analyzed the brain activity through their model and generated nearly identical images to the ones that were shown.

This research has the potential to dismantle our current understanding of facial recognition. While some researchers have advocated for the view that faces are created from this synthesis of individual features, the more prominent view held that our recognition of each individual face is stored in individual, face-specific, neurons.

However, one of this view’s proponents, Dr. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, of the University of Leicester, said that Dr. Tsao’s research “completely changes our understanding of how we recognize faces.”

While this research is certainly fascinating, what are the practical implications?

In fact, facial recognition is a critical component in recognizing emotions as well. When we look at a face, our brains analyze deviations from a “normal” facial expression, contrasting emotional signals with our expectations. Thus, by better understanding how the brain recognizes faces, we can also further our understanding of how to recognize emotions!

And the practical implications of reading emotions have been thoroughly demonstrated as methods of detecting danger or evaluating truthfulness.

Anxiety and Ambiguity

Why does that person look so angry?

You don’t have to have any sort of chronic anxiety to understand how easy it is to misunderstand other people’s facial expressions. We often interact with strangers, or even friends, and find ourselves unable to read their emotions, fearing that they are unhappy or angry.

In fact, newly published research suggests that feelings of anxiety do actually make us misread ambiguous facial expressions. Not only are we left unable to accurately determine their emotions, but we are more likely to mistakenly conclude that they are angry.

A group of researchers at the University of Bristol sought to investigate the role that anxiety has on impairing emotion recognition. They brought together a group of volunteers and exposed them to a series of images showing the same face, but with fifteen different emotional expressions. These ranged from surprise and happiness to disgust and anger, and the volunteers were asked to identify each emotion. A follow-up study expanded this analysis to 45 images.

Sounds pretty straightforward, but here is where the experiment gets really interesting. Each participant was given a facemask that pumped air into their lungs. Now, some of these facemasks simply delivered normal oxygen-dominated air, but half of them contained large amounts of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide spiked participants’ heart rates and blood pressure, causing anxiety attacks.

When compared to the control group, who was given normal air, the participants who inhaled carbon dioxide were about eight percent worse at correctly identifying emotions. Moreover, they tended to perceive anger much more often than happiness.

This is certainly not the first evidence that anxiety emphasizes negative emotional recognition. As this 2016 study outlines, a great deal of research demonstrates how those with social anxiety have trouble recognizing emotion and often attribute anger or sadness to neutral expressions.

Similarly, other disorders, such as depression and eating disorders, thwart one’s understanding of facial expressions.

All of this is perhaps not surprising, however, given the role of the amygdala in the recognition of ambiguous expressions. The amygdala, which is deeply connected with anxiety and fear, is activated when we see people with uncertain expressions, firing according to the level of perceived ambiguity. Similarly, it is also activated when attempting to read fear into other people’s faces.

Given that the amygdala is connected with both anxiety and ambiguous expressions, it would certainly make sense that increased levels of anxiety would thwart effective emotional recognition.

So perhaps, in your next uncertain social interaction, don’t conclude that the other person is angry with you. Perhaps, they are just distracted or not particularly emotive, leading to ambiguous expressions.

For more information on the neurological underpinnings of emotional recognition, check out our past blogs here and here.