Practical Persuasion Blog, Author at Social Engineering Blogs

Practical Persuasion Blog August 11, 2013

The Detector’s Playbook – Stereotype Accuracy

Before reading this post, we highly suggest that you read Deceptive Dimensions: Intro to Deception and The Ekman Nursing Student Study.

Lying, in essence, is just a game: the deceiver faces off against a detector, each using offensive and defensive strategies, both trying to succeed at singular opposing goals. It’s zero-sum, one-on-one competition with an equal, the third type of social situation “where unpredictability can be applied in Robert Greene’s strategic sense.”

So far, we’ve learned that the odds of success for high-stakes lying are random at best. We think you’ll agree that when your job, your marriage, or your criminal record is on the line, you need more control. To fix this, we need to know what your opponent, the detector, is looking for and what he’s basing his decisions on.

To form an effective unpredictable strategy in this game, you must first know what’s expected of you; only then can you avoid being thwarted by a counter-strategy. And to know what’s expected, you must steal the detector’s playbook.

The playbook we’re imagining is nothing more than a list of common behavioral cues used by average men and women when they’re forced into the detector role of a deceptive scenario. Some behavior-based detection strategies are probably air-tight, and aren’t likely to be circumvented without special training. Some will be specific to the type of social backdrop against which the deception is taking place. Some fluctuate in frequency of use depending on what’s at stake. And some are so universal, so predictable, that we can’t, in good conscience, let you be taken down by them. These are what we’re looking for. Once we know what behaviors detector’s use to make their judgments, we can identify which you should try to control. Not all of them can be controlled, of course, but those that can should definitely not be ignored.

Polygraphs

Polygraphs (lie-detector machines) do not detect lies effectively, contrary to popular belief. This scene from Lie to Me demonstrates why. Take a second to watch it. You’ll see that when the polygraph demonstrator answers control questions (questions the answers to which are obviously and undeniably true), the polygraph only interprets them as true when the demonstrator is calm. When he’s sexually aroused, the device malfunctions. Polygraph machines only register arousal, not actual lies. Introducing any stressor stimulus into the environment – for instance, a sexy latina chick in a skin-tight, v-neck dress – will cause the machine to interpret true statements as lies.

Popular methods for “catching” liars are just as rudimentary as those used by polygraphs. Surveys show that the average untrained detector looks exclusively for obvious signs of nervousness. That’s all. Now, liars in general could very well be more nervous than truth-tellers, but nervousness about lying is indistinguishable from nervousness about being disbelieved, nervousness about whatever consequences may result from failure, and nervousness related to the imposing presence of the detector. When persistent anxiety extends over the entire duration of a deceptive interaction, it garbles the signals. This helps explains why successful deception rates are random; not only are detectors looking for deception leakage in all the wrong places, but they’re looking for the wrong things to start with.

Nonetheless, in symmetrical/high-salience situations where the stakes are high, the detector makes the rules, and you, the deceiver, are playing his game. All the more reason to steal that playbook.

The Hocking Study

In 1980, John Hocking and Dale Leathers, speech communication professors from the University of Georgia replicated the Ekman nursing student study we examined last time, but using a different theoretical perspective.

Prior to his experiment, Hocking analyzed survey data to outline the popular cultural stereotype of a liar. In the survey, respondents overwhelmingly described liars as nervous, defensive, and fidgety. Liars, they said, will display a wide range of anxious behaviors, such as facial manipulators (i.e., touching the face), restless lower body movements, and lipwetting. About 65 percent of them also expected liars to avoid eye-contact. (That last belief will come up repeatedly after this study; research suggests that eye-contact avoidance is a myth; liars actually make more eye-contact.)

Since the stereotype of a liar is so pervasive, Hocking hypothesizes that avoiding stereotypical typecasting is paramount for successful deception; a liar, he says, must monitor and control the behaviors that are under scrutiny, suppressing stereotypical (read, “nervous”) lying behaviors and maximizing stereotypical (“calm”) honest behaviors.

As a final pre-experiment preparatory step, Hocking categorizes all the behaviors from the survey into three classes: 1. gestures (Class I); 2. facial expressions (Class II); and, 3. vocal changes (Class III). Class I behaviors are the easiest for a liar to monitor and control. Class II behaviors are easy to control, but hard to monitor; after all, a liar can only guess what his face looks like. Class III behaviors are easy to monitor, but practically impossible to control.

So, according to Hocking’s hypothesis, liars, by default, will exercise more control over their bodily and ocular gestures than anything else. This contradicts Ekman, who argues that liars control Class II behaviors over and above all others.

Deceptive Dimensions

Deceivers: Criminal justice students. First, they view a neutral video clip. Then, they view a positive video of a landscape scene, followed by the negative medical training videos used previously by Ekman, with scenes of limbs being cut off and burnt flesh being peeled away and debrided. In the interviews that follow, the students will selectively lie about facts pertaining to the first video and will lie completely when they see the medical videos.

Detector: An interviewer. Hocking recruits a local detective to interview the students. Hocking provides no details about what the detector says or does; all we know is that he asks questions and gets lied to.

Stakes: Job success. The students are recruited with a letter bearing the signature and seal of the Director of the School of Criminal Justice. Hocking not only tells the students that their job success is directly related to their performance, but also convinces them that their results will be reported to the faculty.

Salience: High, symmetrical. As expected, the detective is fully aware that lies are coming. The students understand, too, that he’s trying to catch them. The belief that their careers depend on success means they are also closely watching all sources of feedback, external and internal.

Leakage: Class II and Class III behaviors. After training observers to identify the survey behaviors, Hocking showed them three edited versions of the students’ interviews. The first version was a silent, face-only recording, which the observers used to identify facial expressions; the second was a silent, full-body recording, used to identify eye and body gestures; and the third was an audio-only recording, used for vocal changes. The observers counted as many behaviors as they could, and the results were compared against which interviews were truthful and which were deceptive. No judgments were rendered by the observers.

Results

The results only partially support Hocking’s hypothesis. In Class I, several nervous behaviors decreased in frequency during deception (foot movements, head movements, and facial manipulators), but the decreases were not dramatic. Overall, nervous gestures decreased by about 10 percent during deception. Class II behaviors neither increased nor decreased, disproving part of Hocking’s hypothesis and again raising the question: Are liars exceptionally good at controlling their facial expressions, or are detectors just really bad at reading them? Class III’s results do suggest Hocking was right about one thing: the liars couldn’t control their vocal changes. They spoke faster, paused more, and interrupted themselves much more often. Finally, Hocking’s eye-contact hypothesis was wrong, too: the liars looked away more often and held eye-contact less. This is the last study where you’ll see that result; in all subsequent studies we’ve seen, eye-contact frequency and duration both increase during deception.

Later on, we’ll see that Hocking’s experimental design was significantly improved upon by subsequent researchers to fix issues like sample size, subjects’ anxiety fluctuations, deceiver motivation levels, and individual subject’s baselines. But Hocking’s theory makes a major contribution: the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the average detector is stereotype accuracy. Once you know how detectors (in general) expect you to act, acting in the opposite way will increase your odds of successful deception considerably.

For now, our advice is, Don’t appear nervous. Impractical, yes. Vague, of course. But as of right now, we can’t say more. We’re not done, though. As we progress, we will identify which behaviors receive the most attention and, of those, which are the most easily controlled. Once we’ve isolated these, we believe a little easy practice will make you appear much more honest when the appearance of honesty counts the most.

Sources

Hocking, John E. & Leathers, Dale G., (1980). Nonverbal Indicators of Deception: A New Theoretical Perspective. Communication Monographs, 29, 119-131.

Practical Persuasion Blog July 21, 2013

Another Dating/Seduction Blog You Should Be Reading

In Five Dating/Seduction Blogs You Should Be Reading, we introduced you to big-name bloggers Roissy, Susan Walsh, Mark Manson, Rollo Tomassi, and the anonymous author of The Rules Revisited, popular writers whose work we’d been following long before we started our own blog. But there’s another blogger, wholly unique from these, that we never knew existed until we decided to set up our shop in WordPress. His name is Kenny, and you should be reading him. Here’s why:

Kenny’s PUA Thoughts: “Get Laid By Being Social” (@SocialKenny)

We didn’t discover Kenny, of course. He’s been around (no pun intended). No, he discovered us. But we got hooked on his blog immediately, and now we probably spend more time reading and debating his work than all the Big Five blogs’ newest releases combined.

Kenny does three things very well, things rare in blogs from his genre (and blogs in general these days); 1. He has original opinions and backs them up with documented successes, past and present; 2. He admits mistakes and documents them, too, putting them up for all to see; and, 3. He manages to do all this on the move, truly living up to his tagline.

Kenny has unique opinions, which is refreshing. Big blogs and other collaborative sites like Reddit sometimes devolve, turning from open forums to noisy echo chambers, constantly rehashing and reusing the same tired old ideas, censoring or attacking anyone who tries to break the cycle. Kenny’s blog is the anti-echo chamber. His comment threads are still alive (although sometimes we wonder what would happen if Kenny and all his commenters got together for drinks…). How does he keep it going? If you have a question, he will answer it. If you want to disagree, he’ll hear you out. And if you comment, he’ll go out of his way to comment back. That’s blogging, people. We’ve taken that lesson to heart.

Standing by failures and mistakes isn’t a common virtue in the blogosphere, but doing so proves a blogger is authentic, not just another bullshitter. This is especially true for PUA blogs, because some nights you go home alone even though you talked smooth, looked good, and sent just the right signals. It’s a statistical inevitability. After all, when dealing with people, nothing is certain. Unfortunately, many bloggers in this field refuse to show how, why, or when they fail. To them, game shall overcome. “If you fail,” they seem to say, “well, then it’s probably because you’re a beta pussy-boy.” You won’t see Kenny doing that shit. It doesn’t matter to him when he gets thrown out of a bar, has a shitty wingman who ruins his game for three consecutive weeks, or gets screwed over by unfavorable logistics. You’re going to see all of it…and be wiser for it afterwards.

Finally, the strongest aspect of Kenny’s blog is the evidence. He records everything, including himself. Many other bloggers give out tons of advice, but are as scopophobic as “Rick,” the famed operator of Backroom Casting Couch. You never see their names or their faces. Now, don’t get us wrong; we sympathize. HR can fire you for practically anything these days, and we suspect filming one-night-stands and bashing feminism are on many companies’ lists of terminable offenses. But still, we can’t help but admire bloggers that put everything on the line for what they believe, society be damned,* and we can always get behind a blog that eschews op-eds and rambling diatribes.

In addition to these three points, Kenny’s site is packed with content. You can find posts on a wide variety of topics other than pickup. Also, he has a YouTube channel and a podcast. And remember, if you have any questions to ask or insights to share, he’ll actually respond, so feel free.

* We personally don’t advise doing this.

The Ekman Nursing Student Study

Before reading this post, we highly suggest that you read Intro to Deception – Deceptive Dimensions.

Effective deception is an indispensable professional skill. Whatever career you’re pursuing, you will need to lie frequently and convincingly – first to get in, then to stay in, and finally, to rise to the top. But the list of professions that actually teach lying are few. Only lawyers, sales reps, PR managers, and politicians – in other words, society’s quintessential liars – receive truly rigorous training in the science of deception. The average grunt, unfortunately, learns to to lie on the job, in fits and starts, and those who don’t quickly learn quickly disappear.

In Deceptive Dimensions, we introduced you to Paul Ekman’s theory of nonverbal deception. In this post, we’ll examine another Ekman study, one of the first of its kind ever conducted. Not only do the findings largely support the validity of the Ekman model, but it also demonstrates how necessary lying is, even in the most unlikely job fields.

The Study

ER nurses, as some of you may know all too well, are not just assistants for doctors and surgeons; they’re consummate liars. No matter how devastating the trauma or how gruesome the scene, the nurse who greets the victims’ panicking friends and family at the hospital must convey reassurance. If she fails, emotional breakdown results. To keep chaos out of the waiting room, good nurses are quick to lie, and they lie well.

In 1974, Paul Ekman designed psychology’s first nonverbal deception experiment around this fact. Let’s use his deceptive dimensions to break it down.

Deceivers: Nursing students. They’re the subjects in this experiment, and to examine their nonverbal deception behavior, Ekman needs them to lie. The nurses view two positive and two negative film clips, and while the final report doesn’t tell us what the positive videos displayed, the details of the negative videos are vivid: live amputations and scenes of third-degree burn victims receiving emergency treatment, exactly the kinds of scenes ER nurses see every day. Ekman instructs the students to lie and describe the first of these gruesome videos as pleasant, the kind they would feel comfortable showing to small children.

Detector: Naive interviewer. While the nurses are watching their four videos, an interviewer grills them. She asks questions such as, “What kinds of feelings are you having right now?” and, “What kind of mood does the film create?.” For good measure, Ekman instructs her to turn up the heat by asking, “Are you really telling the truth?” and, “Do you think I believe you?”

Stakes: Job success. Ekman convinces the nurses from the very beginning that their success in nursing school and in their future careers depends upon their ability to deceive the interviewer. Ekman explains that if they can convince her they’re seeing pleasant images when in fact they’re witnessing horrible pain, suffering, and bloodletting, then they’re ahead of the curve, already equipped to do the same when under pressure from prying patient families. The Dean of the School of Nursing herself invites them to participate, cloaking the project in her official title, and tells them that prior research showed successful nursing candidates had already passed this ordeal. Not one subject senses the experiment. In their minds, it’s the real deal.

Salience: High, symmetrical. As if the students aren’t under enough pressure, Ekman stacks the deck against them by telling the interviewer to be alert. Some of these nurses will lie to you, he says; try to figure out who. The nurses weren’t completely at a loss, though; they, too, are informed that the interviewer is trying to catch them. But this information comes at a hefty cognitive price; now they must monitor their own internal feedback and interpret their interviewer’s external feedback – difficult tasks by themselves, much more so when done simultaneously.

Leakage: Facial expressions and body language. After the interviews are finished, Ekman sends secret recordings taken by hidden cameras to observers who then look for leakage. Ekman edits the tapes to be mute and to display either the faces or the bodies of the nurses, never both. (As in his prior article, he expects observers to find leakage more accurately in body language than in facial expressions, so separating the two regions is necessary; leaving them combined would confound the results.) First, the observers rate one facial clip and one body clip for half the nurses in the experiment as deceptive or honest. Then, the observers rate the remaining clips the same way, but only after seeing and analyzing two “baseline” clips for each nurse.

Results

In Task A, the observer’s were unable to accurately detect deception in either the face or the body (the group’s success as a whole was random, or nearly 50/50.) Once they had become acquainted with the subjects’ baseline body language in Task B, though, their accuracy jumped for detecting leakage in this category, from 50/50 to 64/36. Nonetheless, even after analyzing the subjects’ baseline facial expressions, they were still unable to detect facial deception; their collective success rate remained random.

Ekman admits that the results “only partially” support his hypothesis. Why “partially?” Because he originally argued that an untrained observer could pick a deceiver through his or her body language alone, excluding all other stimuli. But though the results prove his hypothesis wrong, the most plausible explanation – that observers are terrible at reading body language, either because they just are or because they haven’t practiced it – actually supports his overall argument. We spend so much time looking for lies in faces that the remaining 95.5% of a liar’s body can rob us blind. Its classic misdirection, and it seems to work.

Cause for Relief, Cause for Concern

We’ve said before that you’re probably already a very good liar. Lying is instinctual, reflexive, and after years of practice and repetition, your skills now are beyond the days of your youth. So far, Ekman’s research teaches us that lying is easy (or should be, anyway) because 1. people can’t read your facial expressions; and 2. people always look at your face to find lies. For small, mundane white-lies (technically speaking, these are called asymmetrical/low-salience lies), this is probably true.

But the results of this study should worry you if your lie is life-or-death. The pressure under which Ekman placed these nurses was intense; his scenario forced them into a symmetrical/high-salience scenario intended to squeeze and wring as much deception leakage out of them as possible (5 nurses out of the original 22 cracked and confessed, by the way.) Under observation, the tapes in which they were truthful were mistakenly mislabeled as dishonest half of the time, with no identifiable pattern. This is terrible news. If you screw up big time at work, your livelihood is at the mercy of a coin toss. For big lies, you must lie better, plain and simple.

To Lie Is To Succeed

If you need any convincing that successful high-stakes lying is a skill everyone should learn and practice, consider the following:

“It was reported in the Method section that the subjects had been told that behavior in the honest-deceptive session was relevant to success in nursing…At the time, such claims were based largely on conjecture…The results now show that this is very likely the case…the supervisors’ ratings of the subject’s work with patients one year later was positively correlated with the subject’s being a successful facial deceiver…”

Now, we all know correlation does not imply causation. But we can see where this is headed.

Sources

Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1974). Detecting deception from the body or face. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29(3), 288-298.