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.

The post The Detector’s Playbook – Stereotype Accuracy appeared first on Social Engineering Blogs.

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.

Recommended Reading

Greatest PUA Fights of All Time [Among PUA Dating Coaches]
How To Seduce A Girl Whom You Not On Speaking Terms With [infiltrating the enemy]
Guys: There’s No Need To Keep Lying About Having A Girlfriend [A Cheating Man’s Guide]!

The post Another Dating/Seduction Blog You Should Be Reading appeared first on Social Engineering Blogs.

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.

The post The Ekman Nursing Student Study appeared first on Social Engineering Blogs.

Last week, though, we got help.

In our post Exploring Unpredictable Social Strategies, we made a bold claim: we said that the best way to control your subordinates is to reward them randomly when they do something you like, and that no other method would produce the same results.  We based our claim on solid evidence that random ratio reward schedules induce compliance by trapping reward-seekers in a common probabilistic error called the gambler’s fallacy.  After that, we introduced you to the hot hands fallacy, and advised you to be open with your subordinates about the process, lest they commit this error – the wrong error.  The advice was an even bigger leap than our previous claim because we didn’t have – and didn’t expect to find – a study comparing the relative effects of each kind of fallacy.  The concept was just too new.  So we were surprised last week when we found one with this subtitle: “The hot hand versus the gambler’s fallacy.”  Rarely does a search turn up results like that; we eagerly read it.

The study turned out to be better than we could have hoped.  Not only did it address the same question we were asking ourselves, it did so by experimenting with the same random process (coin-tossing) we’d been using as an example, and its findings suggest we were right: random ratio reward schedules work best if everyone knows that the process, not you, determines who wins and who loses.

The Study

Canadian researchers Christopher J. R. Roney and Lana M. Trick wanted to identify the cognitive mechanics behind the gambler’s and hot hands fallacies.  Because the fallacies predict different outcomes and assume different processes, each one should only occur in mutually exclusive situations.  When outcomes are genuinely random, everyone should be committing the gambler’s fallacy.  When outcomes are plausibly skills-based or are possibly rigged, everyone should be committing the hot hands fallacy.  But have you ever heard someone claim they’re “on a roll” after they win twice or three times in a row?  Of course you have.  Have you ever seen a gambler who’s unable to quit while he or she is ahead?  Hopefully not, but perhaps.  Do you know someone who picks their own “lucky” lottery numbers every week?  More than likely.  In all these examples, the person is committing the hot hands fallacy even though the game is random.  Why?

Roney and Trick hypothesized that the cognitive mechanics involved in each of these fallacies activate or deactivate whenever someone’s beliefs about a process’s outcomes change.  If a person believes he or she or some other human being is somehow skillfully controlling outcomes previously believed to be merely random, then the person should switch from using the gambler’s fallacy to using the hot hands fallacy.  For coin-tossing, it would look like this: changing a person’s focus from the random nature of the coin to the real or imagined skills of the coin-tosser should induce a switch in fallacies.

Testing this theory was incredibly simple.  The experiments involved 124 undergrads (the subjects) watching one of two women flip a coin. In the experimental conditions, one woman would flip seven times, and lie about what came up such that the results were always either HTHTTTT or THTHHHH (alternation followed by repetition).  The subjects would bet on the next outcome each time and record their confidence in the bet.  Before the eighth flip, though, the woman would say one of two lines: “Wow, I’m really throwing a lot of [heads or tails],” or, “Wow, this coin is really coming up with lot of [heads or tails].”  (In the control condition, these lines were not said.)  Then, the woman either kept flipping or handed the coin off to the second woman (who, ostensibly, was there to record the “results.”)  You can see that depending on which of the two phrases was said in between the seventh and eight flips that the researchers intended to re-focus the subject’s attention, changing it ever so slightly toward the woman’s “skill” (the first phrase), or even more intently on the coin (the second phrase).  The researchers also predicted that when the coin changed hands, the gambler’s fallacy would remain in effect regardless of which phrase preceded the eighth flip.

They were mostly right.  As expected, nearly all of the control subjects committed the gambler’s fallacy and predicted the streaks to end on the eighth flip. And, as expected, when the coin changed hands, the gambler’s fallacy was predominant in all cases.  But just a small majority of the subjects who’d heard the first phrase committed the hot hands fallacy and guessed that the repetition would continue.  Something similar happened to the subjects who’d heard the second phrase: about half of them committed the hot hands fallacy, probably because the wording of the second phrase led them to believe the coin itself was biased or “charmed.”

The most revealing data, however, are the confidence scores of the bets placed by the subjects.  Overall, those who committed the hot hands fallacy in the first experimental condition were much more confident in their bets on the outcome of the eighth flip than those who stuck with the gambler’s fallacy.  The highest confidence in bets on reversals, of course, occurred in the control condition.

So, what does this mean for our reward system?  Well, if you keep your method secret from those you want to control, you might lose about half of your rewardees to the hot hands fallacy; once you hit a streak, half of them will expect it to continue, and those who don’t won’t hesitate to change their minds if it does continue.  In other words, they’ll stop trying.  Keep it transparent, though, and they will stay busy doing what you want them to.

Damage Control

Let’s say you’re the supervisor of a group of employees (assembly-line workers, for instance.)  You want your workers to be more efficient because your superiors are worried about their bottom-line.  You remember from business school that incentives are a good way to achieve this goal, but your workers are already well-paid and enjoy several generous benefit packages, so you’re at a loss for how to incentivize them more.  That night, after work, you read on Practical Persuasion that a random-ratio reward system based on a coin-toss is the best way to induce compliance.  The next morning, you call your team together and tell them that each day of the month, whoever is 95 percent productive or better could get $100 cash.  You don’t tell them that the result is determined randomly because you’re afraid they won’t play along.

For two weeks, your employees operate at break-neck speed. Efficiency is consistently in the 80s and 90s, even on Fridays.  A third of your employees are 90 percent productive or higher.  As you expected, about half of those get bonuses.  The money you saved the company on labor and utilities more than makes up for the extra cash.  The bosses sing your praises.

The next two weeks, though, are different.  Productivity flat-lines, and then drops back to previous levels.  You remind your workers that the productivity game is still on, but they don’t seem to care.  Only half of the original productivity all-stars from before make the cut this time.  The bosses suddenly can’t remember your name.

After two more weeks of low productivity, HR organizes a company-wide teamwork seminar that wastes even more time and money. You also have to meet for two hours with the 21-year-old economics major who the bosses hired on as a “business strategies consultant” (he gets paid twice as much as you do, by the way).  You’re pissed. You go home, get drunk, and resolve to expose those two bastards at Practical Persuasion for the frauds they really are.

We hope this doesn’t really happen to anyone.  If it does, don’t hit “send” on that angry email just yet.  We now know that when people aren’t aware that a game is random, they assume it’s rigged after seeing several successively repeating outcomes. Also, a bit more than half of them will be almost certain that it is so.  To get them back, try this: explain how your system works…and then secretly scrap it.  Purposefully alternate your responses for a while.  Many people often mistake these alternations for randomness, so intentionally switching back-and-forth like this should get most of the skeptics back on board.  Be sure to submit to the coin (or whatever random process you’re using) once you’re secure.

Sources

Roney, C. J. R., & Trick, L. M. (2009). Sympathetic magic and perceptions of randomness: The hot hand versus the gambler’s fallacy. Thinking and Reasoning, 15(2), 197 – 210.

The post Unpredictability: Hot Hands vs. Gambler’s Fallacies appeared first on Social Engineering Blogs.

Today, we are presenting three new rules that expand upon those we already have.

Strategies

When we need to solve a problem, we start by forming a strategy.  We then check that strategy against three criteria:

Does this appreciably increase our odds of success?
How could it backfire or hurt us later?
Does it make good use of our strengths?

Do these questions sound familiar?  They should; they’re Rules 1 through  If a strategy doesn’t pass, it’s scrapped or altered until it does pass (or until we must act, for better or worse).  The first three rules assume that you already know how to form an effective strategy.  The next three rules are intended to break down that process into logical steps.

4. When developing a strategy, make your goals as clear and unambiguous as possible.  Use quantifications and milestones, and abide by them no matter what.

Vague advice is useless, even if the principles underlying the advice are sound.  We’ve been saying this since Day 1. Practically useless advice constantly floods the Internet, as well as other forms of media.  We intend to improve on this advice.  Much of it could be greatly improved with just a little clarification.

For example, in the second chapter of his landmark book Influence: Science and Practice, social psychologist and business consultant Robert Cialdini explains the concept of reciprocity.  Reciprocity is the ingrained psychological need to discharge an obligation, even if the obligation is to return a small, unsolicited favor from a complete stranger.  One variation of reciprocal persuasion Cialdini examines is the classic “door-in-the-face” (DITF) technique.  By making an extreme request first, backing off once refused, and then making a smaller request later, salespeople turn reluctant strangers into long-time clients.  But there’s a catch: the initial request can’t be too extreme.  How extreme is too extreme?  He doesn’t say.  Clarifying what “too extreme” is would be as easy as comparing the values of the first and second requests to establish a clear, quantifiable threshold.

While tactical clarity is important, clarifying your “end-game” is equally vital, especially if you’re planning long-term.  Over-reach is just as bad for your chances of future success when you’re winning as it is when you’re losing.  Every guy who’s tried to close a pick-up knows that going past the night’s goal with too little planning or too much alcohol is a recipe for disaster.  Every customer looking to haggle down the price of a car should know what his or her total spending limit is before stepping on the showroom.  Every pitchman and scam artist knows when to stop trying to persuade an obviously incorrigible skeptic and switch to a new mark.  Unfortunately, knowing when to stop is usually the last thing a person plans for, if they plan for it at all.  But if you’re smart, you’ll have an end-game.  If you’re strategy is good, you’ll have a clear end-game.

How do you take something vague and make it clear?  Quantify it.  In the DITF example, take Cialdini’s advice (“don’t make your initial request too extreme”) and quantify it (“don’t make an initial request that’s worth more than x percent of your planned second request.”) Even if there’s no evidence whatsoever that the quantity you choose is the proper amount, do it anyway.  If it’s not, you can adjust it later; if you don’t quantify it, though, you won’t know what to do.  If you can’t quantify something, set up a milestone.  In the pick-up end-game scenario we mentioned above, a good milestone is time (“at 2:00am, I’m asking for a number and getting out;” “If I don’t get an IOI in 2 hours, I’m outta here.”)  But no matter how you do it, never let anything convince you or force you to abandon your plan, cross your quantified threshold, or pass your pre-set milestone.

5. To be sound, tactics do not need to be revolutionary, nor do strategies need to be complex.  Keep it simple and aim for maximum efficiency (aka, “The Watergate Rule”).

Tactics don’t need to be original.  Simply making small improvements on a tried-and-true method will suffice.  Complex as the world is, rarely will you ever be called upon to deal with a wholly unique problem for which no solution exists.  As such, you don’t need to be a dazzling innovator or a creative genius to execute effective tactics.  However, not attempting to improve an existing tactic is usually as bad an idea as trying to concoct a completely new one.  Why?  Because most of the tactics others tell you to use are either inefficient or generic.  They work, sure, but their usefulness to you is probably very limited.  Fix them with customizations that make them more efficient and more germane to your specific situation.  But always start with them; don’t ignore them.  In our experience, novelty usually indicates risk.  Stick with what you know and improve upon it, little by little.

Basic tactics should be condsidered the platform upon which your complete strategies are built.  We pointed out that psychopaths utilize a number of tactics to enlarge their pool of possible successes.  A psychopath trying to pick up women in a bar or club, for example, will approach as many women as possible until one decides to give up her number or go home with him.  It’s a very basic tactic, and statistically, it always works, even though it’s inefficient and blandly generic.  But while our entire Dark Triad project is intended to discover how to make tactics like this better, in the end, frequent approaching will always be the foundation of any future strategy we propose.  Our Dark Triad project is essentially an effort to make frequent approaching more efficient.

Sticking with proven tactics also has a beneficial side-effect: it forces you to keep your overall strategy simple.

Now, simplicity is not usually a problem we see in other sources’ persuasion advice.  Most of the time, in fact, these sources could stand a little more (or a lot more) nuance.  But overly complex strategizing is a very common problem among amateurs and laypeople like ourselves.  They’re usually smarter, more rational, and more astute than the average person.  They hold Machiavellian characters in high regard.  And, as a result of their personal proclivities, they also sometimes think they can “mastermind” any situation and become “the-man-behind-the-curtain.”  They usually can’t.  Their strategies are overly-complex and unwieldy.  Too many of them enjoy strategizing more than acting.  And of course, their tactics are usually too creative and too risky to test out.  When they do put their plans in place, though, things break down quickly.

Another example: G. Gordon Liddy, the legendary and infamous campaign strategist, was renown during the Cold War for ingenious plans to subvert domestic political opponents.  When he joined then-President Richard Nixon’s campaign team in the early 1970s, he brought with him his love of intrigue, which Nixon, himself a fan of cloak-and-dagger style strategies, eagerly encouraged.  Liddy’s plans were expensive, elaborate, and shady.  One of them involved spy-planes, unregistered yachts, high-end call girls, state-of-the-art recording equipment, hired goons, kidnapping, blackmail, and burglary.  Nothing like the plan had ever been attempted before in American politics.  In the end, though, all it came to was a bungled B&E at the Watergate Hotel.  The rest is history.

The Watergate scandal is a classic example of a strategy that’s too elaborate for its own good.  And while most of you will probably never be involved in anything this complicated, it serves as reminder to always follow precedent and to always keep your strategies simple.  That’s why Rule 5 is also known as The Watergate Rule.

6. Options are invaluable.  Have an exit strategy in place, and avoid all-or-nothing situations.

Time is valuable.  Energy is valuable.  Money is valuable.  And you you will spend large volumes of each one throughout your lifetime trying to sway others; it’s unavoidable.  Get the most out of your investments by creating or seizing alternative options whenever and wherever possible.  This could be as basic as bar-hopping; it could be as elaborate as seeding a location with a crowd of your own friends via mass text before walking in with your date while simultaneously engineering a spur-of-the-moment houseparty across town.  The more options you have, the more power you wield, and even if you don’t achieve your primary goal, you’ll never feel like you wasted your resources.

But always remember that options are not substitutes for escape routes.  Your strategies will break down, either because of your mistakes or because of unforeseen circumstances.  It’s not a matter of if, but rather of when, and it’s imperative that you have a way out before you go in.  Failure often results in embarrassment, and embarrassment, if not dealt with, leads to long-term social damage.  Minimize that damage by preparing believable excuses and alibis.  Line up a fall guy (or girl).  If you’re out somewhere, have a getaway car on standby.  And needless to say, never get drunk while on campaign.  These are very basic safety procedures everyone should take; not enough people do.

The post Three New Rules appeared first on Social Engineering Blogs.

Here’s the latest version of the Dark Triad Summary page:

What Is The Dark Triad?

The Dark Triad is a term used by social psychologists that refers to three inter-related personalities: sub-clinical narcissism, sub-clinical psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.  The connections between these traits were first documented in 2002 by psychologist Delroy L. Paulhus.

How Are The Dark Triad Personalities Measured?

The most common tool for measuring sub-clinical narcissism is the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, or NPI.  It usually contains 40 items, although the Corry version uses only 23.  Psychologists still debate the validity of this tool.  The most common tool for measuring sub-clinical psychopathy is the Psychopathic Personality Inventory Revised, or PPI-R.

In 2010, personality researcher and Dark Triad specialist Peter K. Jonason published a consolidated tool for measuring Dark Triad traits called The Dirty Dozen.  The tool contains 12 of the most reliable and representative items pulled from the NPI, PPI-R, and MACH-IV (Machiavellianism) tools.

Narcissism

1.  I tend to want others to admire me.

2.  I tend to want others to pay attention to me.

3.  I tend to expect special favors from others.

4.  I tend to seek prestige or status.

Psychopathy

5.  I tend to lack remorse.

6.  I tend to be callous or insensitive.

7.  I tend to not be too concerned with morality or the morality of my actions.

8.  I tend to be cynical.

Machiavellianism

9.  I have used deceit or lied to get my way.

10.  I tend to manipulate others to get my way.

11.  I have used flattery to get my way.

12.  I tend to exploit others towards my own end.

How Does The Dark Triad Relate To The Big Five Personality Traits?

The Big Five personality traits are Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness:

Extraversion: This trait includes characteristics such as excitability, sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness and high amounts of emotional expressiveness.
Agreeableness: This personality dimension includes attributes such as trust, altruism, kindness, affection, and other pro-social behaviors.
Conscientiousness: Common features of this dimension include high levels of thoughtfulness, with good impulse control and goal-directed behaviors.
Neuroticism: Individuals high in this trait tend to experience emotional instability, anxiety, moodiness, irritability, and sadness.
Openness: This trait features characteristics such as imagination and insight, and those high in this trait also tend to have a broad range of interests.

All three personalities are associated with disagreeableness (low agreeableness).  Narcissism and psychopathy both share an association with high extraversion.  Research suggests that narcissists can be neurotic; psychopaths generally are not.

How Are Dark Triad Traits Exhibited?

Personalities exhibit themselves through various factors.  Our simplified narcissism factor model has two factors, borrowing from the Corry Two-Factor Model:

Status-Seeking (Trying to assume power or control over others through leadership or expertise)

Overconfidence (Believing others are more interested in oneself than in other things)

 Our simplified psychopathy factor model has three factors, borrowing from the PPI-R Three-Factor Model:

Recklessness (Disregarding consequences of one’s actions to oneself or to others; lack of planning/goal-setting)
Nonchalance (Disdaining potential danger/embarrassment; inability to feel stress)
Coldheartedness (Lacking remorse when one’s actions negatively affect others)

 The Big Question – What, if anything, enables Dark Triad males to sleep with more women, more often, with less romantic commitment? 

There are at least three possibilities:

1. Dark Triad males may employ unique social strategies that effectively enlarge their pool of potential successes.

One online survey showed Dark Triad males have lower mate-selection standards for traits like creativity, kindness, and liveliness, and characteristics like physical attractiveness and social status.  If that is true, then these men are simply lowering their standards and increasing their options, not attracting more women.  However, another study’s findings suggest that narcissists do not lower their standards when choosing which women to target.  Although the men in this study were paid to approach women, they weren’t incentivized to approach women indiscriminately.  In other words, more approaches did not increase their individual payouts.  They were motivated purely by personal preference.  In our opinion, the second study’s findings are stronger.
In Positive Psychopathy, we examined 7 different psychopathic traits featured in Kevin Dutton’s book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths.  Four traits – focus, mental toughness, fearlessness, mindfulness, and action – are traits that strategically help psychopaths in social situations, including dating and seduction:

Focus – The ability to mute distractions in extremely hectic environments.  Focus is obviously a useful trait in any situation.  By quickly seeing, processing, and remembering tiny details most people miss, psychopaths with this traits excel where others fall behind.
Mental Toughness – The ability to remain unfazed in high pressure situations.  A psychopath with a high level of mental toughness does not respond negatively to criticism or rejection; he simply continues on until he succeeds.  Only a psychopath absorbs stress this easily.  For the rest of us, high rates of failure are inefficient and emotionally taxing.
Fearlessness – The ability to approach high-risk situations without apprehension or inhibited faculties.  It allows the psychopath to try things that other people don’t attempt.  These endeavors have fewer competitors, and succeeding at them is easier for the psychopath as a result.
Mindfulness – An intense, Zen-like state of attention for a current task.  Very similar to focus, mindfulness enables the psychopath to ignore not only present distractions, but also future worries and consequences.
Action – The companion trait to fearlessness.  Action allows psychopaths to constructively channel their natural disdain for risk and embarrassment; they proceed with a task that’s likely to fail even if they know it probably will.  Because psychopaths attempt high-risk endeavors more often than most people, they can claim more individual successes.  From a distance, it seems as if they succeed at them more often than they actually do.

2. Dark Triad males may possess personality traits that are intrinsically attractive.

In Zeroing in on Narcissism, the researchers isolated boldness as a mediator of narcissistic attractiveness.  They did not, however, test what common narcissistic behaviors best demonstrate boldness (besides simply walking up to girls and blatantly asking for contact information.)  We plan on using Vangelisti’s list of narcissistic conversational tactics to help us determine what some of these behaviors could be.
Charm, one of Kevin Dutton’s seven positive psychopathic traits, is the exception to the other six; the rest are strategically useful because they statistically increase success rates for psychopaths in social situations. Charm, however, is intrinsically attractive; it almost always succeeds.  Whether or not it can be learned or mimicked is an open question.

3. Dark Triad males may appear more physically attractive than the average male.

“Zeroing in on Narcissism” also isolated physical attractiveness as a mediator of narcissistic attractiveness. Cleanliness and neatness of dress were two characteristics common to narcissists in the Back Zero-Acquaintance study, but the researchers didn’t control for physical attractiveness.  Given the results of these two studies, it seems that narcissists put more effort into their physical fitness and aesthetic appearance than the average person.  This isn’t surprising, but it is important.
Decades of research suggests that attractive people are afforded more benefits than unattractive people.  If the Dark Triad males is in fact better-looking than the average male, his successes in and out of the dating world could simply be the result of a kind of stereotyping called behavioral confirmation.

The post Dark Triad Recap #2 appeared first on Social Engineering Blogs.

So far, our Dark Triad project has kept us busy with one kind of deception: creating false impressions.  But the project we’re opening up with this post will, hopefully, make another form of deception safer and more efficient for you.  It’s something you do hundreds of times each day, with little or no thought: lying.

You’re probably very good at lying already.  In fact, you’re probably such a good liar that you don’t notice yourself doing it until you get caught.  Also, you’ve lied so much for so long to so many people, that by now, you’re just going through the motions.  If you had a shitty weekend, you lie to your coworkers on Monday and say, “It was fine.”  If you’re running late, you say, “I’ll be there in five minutes,” even if you have no idea how the long the traffic jam you’re stuck in will last.  If you have an engagement ring in your pocket and your girlfriend asks why you look so nervous, you say, “I’m not nervous, why would I be nervous, why, do I look nervous to you, I swear, everything’s fine, I’m not nervous, I swear!”

Ever wonder if anyone actually believes you?

We do.  We want to help you to become a better liar.  That’s why we’re here.

The first step in putting a beneficial habit (in this case, your lying habit) under conscious control is to breakdown the behavior into parts. Once you can control each individual aspect, you can control the whole behavior much more easily.  Thankfully, lying has already been broken down for us by none other than Paul Ekman, the world’s leading expert on emotions, body language, facial expressions, and, of course, deception.

In 1969, Ekman and co-author Wallace Friesen published, “Nonverbal Leakage and Clues to Deception.”  This article initiated decades of research on deception and non-verbal behavior, changed the way law enforcement and security specialists handle interrogations and screenings, pioneered the discovery of micro expressions (involuntary facial expressions that occur without conscious awareness), and inspired a short-lived TV crime drama on FOX.

For us?  Well, for now, we just want it to change the way you think about lying.  The article is mostly theory, designed to provide definitions and concepts to assist in the research that came after it.  In that spirit, we will keep the analysis to a minimum.  Think of this post as a glossary you can refer back to as our project progresses.
 
Terms
 
Usually, we lie on the fly, and then forget about it.  We want you to look at each lie more carefully.  Every one has characteristics common to all lies that affect how easy the lie will be and the odds that you will get away with it.  Ekman calls these characteristics deceptive dimensions.
 

Deceptive Dimensions – Characteristics of specific social situations where lying is involved.

Deceiver – The liar or the person thought to be lying.

Detector – The person being lied to or who thinks he is being lied to.

Stakes – For the deceiver, the stakes are the incentives to lie and to avoid being caught.  For the detector, the stakes are the incentives to catch the deceiver in a lie.

Salience – The degree to which deception is an explicit focus of conscious concern.

 
Salience is determined by how much lying is expected in a situation.  High saliency occurs in situations where everyone involved is acutely aware that deception is happening; the deceiver knows he is lying, and the detector knows she is probably being lied to.  Car sales, contract negotiations, and pick-ups are all situations of high saliency.  Low saliency usually occurs when lie detection is not a priority; job interviews (where the interviewer is primarily focused on qualifications) and low-stakes game-play are examples of low saliency.  Saliency is also affected by personal history, stereotyping, or personality.  For example, a repeat philanderer explaining why he’s coming home late is in a situation of high saliency when lying to his wife.  A straight-laced high school student is in a situation of low saliency when lying about cheating on a test.

Symmetry – The relative degrees of saliency between liar and detector.

Every lie has either asymmetrical or symmetrical saliency.  Asymmetrical saliency occurs when one person, either the deceiver or the detector, is less aware than the other that a lie is occurring.  Usually, the detector has lower saliency than the deceiver, but sometimes the deceiver has lower saliency.  Examples of this latter situation are when a person is delusional (he is lying to himself), and when the detector is paranoid or is making false accusations (the “deceiver,” in this case, is actually being truthful.)  Symmetrical saliency almost always occurs in situations where the stakes are extremely high for both deceiver and detector.  Car sales, contract negotiations, and pick-ups fit this description.  Symmetry also describes situations where one or both persons are occupying the role of deceiver and detector.  In labor/management disputes, for instance, the role-play is symmetrical: both parties are deceivers and detectors simultaneously.

Leakage – Involuntary behaviors (usually non-verbal) that indicate information is being concealed.

Sending Capacity – The relative ability of different regions of the body to convey messages.

Sending capacity is measured in speed, variety, and visibility.  In the 1969 article, Ekman considers three general regions of the body: the face, the hands, and the legs.  The face has the highest sending capacity in all three categories; the hands rank second and the legs rank third.  (Later on, Ekman’s work will help us look at these regions in greater detail; for now, these three general categories are sufficient.)  Each region’s sending capacity is affected by anatomy and culture.  The face’s sending capacity, for example, is high because it’s highly innervated and has an intricate musculoskeletal structure, enabling it to form many expressions very quickly.  It’s also highly visible because most people are trained to look at the face during conversation.  The legs, on the other hand, are not highly innervated, contain just a few very large muscles compared to the face, and are usually hidden from view under a table or desk.  Furthermore, it isn’t culturally permissible to look at a person’s legs (especially a woman’s) during conversation, so even if the legs are visible, you couldn’t watch them for leakage without getting slapped.

Feedback – The information a deceiver uses to determine if his or her lie is being believed or if he or she is lying well.

Feedback and leakage originate in the same degree from the same regions of the body; the face provides the most, the hands the second-most, and the legs the least.  Feedback is mostly external; it comes back to the deceiver from the detector.  Internal feedback is rarer; it is only received by the deceiver if he is aware of his or her own facial expressions and body language during deception.

Applications

Understanding saliency and symmetry is crucial for effective lying and lie detection.  Lying is hardest under symmetrical, high-salience conditions where the liar is both deceiver and detector.  Lying is easiest under asymmetrical, low-salience conditions where the deceiver is not expected to be a detector.  If you have time to plan before telling a lie, try to figure out the salience, the symmetry, and your expected role.  If you’re heading into a symmetrical, high-salience situation where you’ll be expected to lie and be lied to, you might want to stall for time, find an alibi, and collect evidence undermining the other person’s lies.  If you’re heading into the opposite situation, don’t sweat it; save yourself the time and energy.  Most likely, though, you’ll be dealing with something in between these two extremes.

Leakage, feedback, and sending capacity (according to Ekman’s hypothesis) are interrelated.  The greater the sending capacity a region of the body has, the more a detector will focus on it, and the more the deceiver will try to control it.  When lying, the deceiver will do his best to control his face; when being lied to, the detector will do her best to watch the face of the deceiver.  As a result, something strange happens; the legs and hands (the poorest senders) leak more deception clues than the face (the best sender).  But nobody – neither deceiver nor detector – notices it.  When the face leaks, it’s imperceptibly fast, and neither person is likely to notice.  This is great news for a liar like you.  You’re already good at controlling your facial expressions from years of practice, and the people you’re lying to are trying to catch you by looking at the one area of your body that leaks the least.  They probably wouldn’t know how to interpret leakage from your hands or legs even if they did look.  But even better news is the edge you could have on them when they try to lie to you; watch their legs and hands.  Learn how to read leakage from these poorly-monitored body regions, and you will catch them.

Sources

Ekman, P., and Wallace, Friesen V. (1969). “Nonverbal Leakage and Clues to Deception.” Psychiatry Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes, 32(1), 87-106.

Next Post in Series: Intro to Deception – Deceptive Dimensions

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“Each time your rewardees perform a desirable action, flip a coin. If heads, reward it; if tails, ignore it. When the coin generates a long ‘ignore’ streak, your respondent should perform the action over and over again with ever-increasing rapidity and urgency, expecting to be rewarded more and more each time he or she isn’t. This is the gambler’s fallacy at work.”

If you don’t remember, the gambler’s fallacy is a flaw in probabilistic reasoning that causes most people to mistrust long streaks in randomly generated events.  The fallacy gets its name from a common mistake gambler’s make when betting on roulette and slots.  When a roulette wheel has a black streak, players will bet increasingly larger sums of money on red because they think the black streak is more likely to end the longer it continues.  When a slot machine fails to pay out, players will crank the lever faster and faster, depositing money with each pull, because they believe their losing streak will end soon.  In both cases, they’re wrong; random events are always unpredictable.  They’re always as likely to win as they are to continue losing.

If you have the power to give out or withhold rewards, then you should do so using behavioral psychology’s equivalent of the slot machine: the random ratio reward schedule.  This is as easy as requiring your rewardees to “win” a coin toss each time they do something you like before receiving their reward.  Just like the gamblers, they will continue to work harder for your approval if they can’t predict when they will be rewarded.  However, we also supposed that this simple system may not work under certain conditions.  In this post, we’ll show you what those conditions could be.

But first, another fallacy.

The Hot Hands Fallacy

When Amos Tversky’s name appears at the top of a study, there’s a strong chance something you believe will be challenged.  If you like basketball, then the 1985 study he co-authored with Thomas Gilovich (Cornell University) and Robert Vallone (Stanford University) will debunk a common belief you may hold about the game: that some players go on hot or cold scoring “streaks.”  To Tversky, one of the most famous contemporary psychologists (second only to his close friend and colleague Daniel Kahneman; both specialize in cognitive psychology), this sounded like a fallacy.  After all, he and Kahneman documented the existence of the gambler’s fallacy over a decade earlier; he of all people would know flawed reasoning when he saw it.  So he, Gilovich, and Vallone took data from the 1980-81 Philadelphia 76ers’ home games and looked for evidence of streak scoring.

They found none.  Contrary to what 91% of surveyed basketball fans at Cornell and Stanford believed, no player was more likely to score on his second field goal attempt if he had scored on his first attempt, nor was he more likely to score on his third attempt if he had on his first two, and so on.

In case extraneous variables (defensive pressure and shot selection) were contaminating their findings, the authors analyzed free throw data from the Boston Celtics’ 1980-1981 and 1981-1982 seasons.  Did any player’s first free throw attempt affect his second free throw attempt?

No.

Next, the authors set up a controlled shooting test with 26 Cornell players (14 men, 12 women) to eliminate extraneous variables.  Each player shot from a distance at which his or her shooting percentage was 50 percent.  An arc was drawn on the court after this distance was determined, and each player shot once from different points along the arc.  To incentivize accuracy and assess players’ predictions, the players placed high or low bets on each successive shot and were paid a few cents when they scored and were docked a few cents if they missed.

Did statistical streaks appear for players in this part of the study?

No.

Did the players accurately predict their hits and misses?

No; they predicted streaks, though, whenever they made or missed shots successively.

Finally, the authors surveyed the student fans at Cornell and Stanford again to see how well they could interpret basketball data.  Each student was shown six sequences of X’s and O’s (intended to represent hits and misses, respectively) and were asked to indicate which sequences were streaks and which were random.  How did they do?

Terribly.  Only about 30 percent correctly identified the random sequences as random.  About 60 percent believed the random sequences were actually streaks.  And about 70 percent believed that alternating sequences (in other words, streaks of successive hits followed immediately by misses; for example, XOXO) were actually random.  The authors guessed that the reason the students did so poorly on this last test is because they expected repeating outcomes to continue repeating.  In the alternating sequence, the shots did not repeat, and the students saw it as random.  In the random sequences, hits and misses occasionally do repeat, and the students saw them as streaks.  Taken together, these mistakes – seeing streaks in random data where they don’t exist and misinterpreting alternating streaks as random – are called the Hot Hands Fallacy.

The Other Side of the Coin

If you’ve made it this far, you should now be asking yourself why these people did the exact opposite of what gamblers do.  And if you’re really astute, you’ll notice that the Cornell players in the controlled shooting test were gambling on their own attempts, betting that their ‘hot streaks’ and ‘cold streaks’ would continue, not end.

Why aren’t they committing the gambler’s fallacy?

Unfortunately, we don’t know for sure, mainly because no one has tried to find out.  The original Gilovich/Vallone/Tversky study we just examined (known as “GVT” in psychology circles) kicked off a 20-year-long sports argument.  Researches replicated GVT’s basketball studies, taking into account more and more minute variables into their analyses.  Other researchers went into baseball, tennis, golf, mini-golf, darts, bowling, and horseshoes.  We found hardly a study looking for what we were looking for; the mental processes that cause people to commit the fallacy – mental processes that could be exploited.

And then we found Alter and Oppenheimer, 2006.  It’s not a study; it’s a review of the all the work done by cognitive psychologists on the hot hands fallacy since GVT.  Based on their reviews, the authors make this claim:

“…when people assume that a process is random, they expect a more rapid alternation between outcomes than stochastic [randomly determined] modelling would suggest (Falk & Konold, 1997)…Whereas people expect coin tosses to be random, they are willing to entertain the possibility that streaky performance in a human-driven domain like basketball implies a degree of skill…once people decide that a basketball player has violated the assumptions of randomness, his skill is attributed to a ‘hot hand.’” (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2006).

Is this true? If yes, then we must update the advice we gave you back in April.  Yes, continue rewarding your underlings randomly using the coin-toss approach (or any other random method of your choosing).  But make sure they know what’s going on.  If they know they’re being rewarded randomly, they will commit the gambler’s fallacy as planned.  But if they are blind to the process, they’ll give you trouble; each time you repeatedly reward them (heads followed by heads followed by heads, etc.), they will expect you to continue this reward “streak” and will work less hard or more slowly.  The same applies if you repeatedly ignore them (tails followed by tails followed by tails, etc.); they’ll just assume you’re done being generous.  Don’t fall into these traps; inform them that it’s random, and you’ll keep them busy and compliant.

Or so we think.  We still have work to do on this because Alter’s and Oppenheimer’s theory needs hard evidence.  But for now, just to be safe, we’ll take it at face-value.  Make sure your minions know that the coin, not you, is calling the shots.

Sources

Gilovich, T., et al. (1985). The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences. Cognitive Psychology, 17, 295-314.
Alter, A.L., and Oppenheimer, D.M. (2006). From a fixation on sports to an exploration of mechanism: The past, present, and future of hot hand research. Thinking and Reasoning, 12(4), 431-444.

Next Post in Series: Unpredictability: Hot Hands vs. Gambler’s Fallacies

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Dark Triad males may employ unique social strategies that effectively enlarge their pool of potential successes.
Dark Triad males may possess personality traits that are intrinsically attractive and/or behaviorally replicable.
Dark Triad males may appear more physically attractive than the average male.

If Dark Triad males really do in fact have greater sexual and/or romantic success with women, then it probably isn’t a result of just one of the above; all three are important.  So far, though, we haven’t been able to determine which of them is the most important.  We’ve seen evidence for behavioral strategies (i.e., identifying and mimicking Dark Triad behaviors), social strategies (i.e., increasing the number of potential sex partners by lowering standards, approaching frequently, hitting on women most men would not, etc.), and physical strategies (i.e., improving one’s appearance and raw physical sex appeal.)  But we haven’t yet seen a really solid study that addresses the latter two possibilities.

Until now.

Are Narcissists Sexy?

Scholarly reseach is a progressive enterprise, which means its okay to rip off your peers.  Its actually encouraged (as long as you cite your sources, of course).  When your peers publish a study that’s relevant to your area of interest, you can then take their findings and use them to design your own study.  Later, some other researcher will do the same with your findings.  Generations of researchers have been building on each other’s work like this, and, as a result, newer is usually better.  So when we came across a study examining the short-term attractiveness of narcissism published only two months ago, we jumped on it, just because it was relevant and brand new.

Once we read it, we realized it was a gold-mine.

Michael Dufner, John F. Rauthmann, Anna Z. Czarna, and Jaap J. A. Denissen conducted three experiments using college students in Germany and Poland.  The researchers hypothesized that two traits make narcissists initially attractive at zero-acquaintance: physical attractiveness and social boldness.

Study 1:  117 psych undergrads (58 male, 59 female) participated.  The students were assigned to one of three conditions in which they were given a fake narcissism questionnaire.  They were told that the questionnaire was filled out by a member of the opposite sex, and the scores on the questionnaires were low, medium, or high (depending on the condition).  After they examined the fake questionnaires, the students were asked to rate the friend appeal and mate appeal of the imaginary person.

*Note: These fake questionnaires used the NPI, validated Polish version.  The difference between this and the NPI that we discussed earlier is that the Polish version contains 34 items based on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = does not apply to me; 5 = applies to me).  We’ve mentioned before that we’d love to see a Likert-based NPI.  Here it is.

Study 2: This study used peer ratings.  152 participants invited a close friend (mostly of the same sex) to help in the study.  The friends (the inviters) provided ratings for mate appeal, friend appeal, physical attractiveness, and social boldness.  The participants (the invitees) took the NPI, validated German version, to assess their individual levels of sub-clinical narcissism, as well as surveys measuring self-esteem, mate appeal, and social boldness.

*Note: The NPI used in this study is the traditional 40-item dichotomous-response (0=agree; 1=disagree).  They also used the Emmons Four Factor Model.

Study 3: Social science experiments are mostly done in labs where it’s easy to control conditions.  But labs don’t always provide realistic simulations of the interactions and behaviors the researchers are interested in observing.  The authors of this study tried to solve that problem by paying 61 men 35 euros each to approach 25 women on the street and ask for their contact information.  The men were scored for sub-clinical narcissism using the Dirty Dozen Test, and were also scored for self-esteem.  Each man’s number of successfully obtained contacts (phone numbers, email addresses, Facebook friend requests, etc.) counted as his level of mate appeal.

*Note: The Dirty Dozen Test used 12 of the most highly correlating items from the NPI, PCL-R, and MACH-IV to assess a persons sub-clinical levels of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, respectively.

In Study 1, higher narcissism predicted higher mate appeal, while lower narcissism predicted lower mate appeal.

Study 2 provided a wealth of information:

Narcissism positively correlated with mate appeal, physical attractiveness, and social boldness.
Under controlled conditions, self-esteem would not affect narcissists’ mate appeal.
Each of the seven Emmons factors except Exploitativeness/Entitlement (E/E) positively correlated with mate appeal.
Physical attractiveness and social boldness mediated the link between narcissism and mate appeal.  This means that narcissism is not inherently attractive; it correlates with with these two traits, which are inherently attractive.

Study 3 showed that narcissism did not predict which type of woman a man would approach; all the men in the study approached more or less the same type.  It also mirrored the findings of Studies 1 and 2, but under real-life conditions.

In Context

The study contributes considerably to our work on the potential attractiveness of narcissism.  Here’s what it teaches us:

In Four Factors of Narcissism, we pointed out Emmons’ claimed that E/E is highly associated with neuroticism and is therefore the least attractive factor in his factor model.  The results of the Back zero-acquaintance study supported this claim.  But this study claims that the E/E factor doesn’t correlate with attractiveness at all, neither positively or negatively.  Who’s right?
This study gives us more evidence that narcissists are popular in zero-acquaintance situations.  We’ve examined one study so far that supports this idea; however, it did not narrow down the cause.  This one tells us that a specific social strategy (boldness) and physical attractiveness are the causes.
This study’s results suggest that narcissists do not lower their standards when choosing which women to target.  This directly contradicts another study we examined, but the effect was observed under more natural conditions, making this new study’s claims that much stronger.  Furthermore, the men in this study weren’t incentivized to approach women indiscriminately; they were paid and sent out.  More contacts did not increase their individual payouts at the end of the study.  Their approaches were dictated purely by personal preference.
In a controlled setting, self-esteem would not affect sex appeal.  This is a huge and controversial claim.  Conventional wisdom says that confidence is the “magic bullet” in dating.  But this study’s data analyses suggest that it’s irrelevant.  Only social  boldness and physical attractiveness mediate narcissists’ mate appeal.  This claim also directly contradicts the idea that physically-determined behavioral confirmation controls attractiveness.

We’ve taken a huge step forward toward determining what makes the Dark Triad personalities attractive.  This study is fantastic; it controls for physical attractiveness and for self-esteem.  It uses natural, real-life settings to support its claims.  It uses the NPI to screen participants for high- and low-level sub-clinical narcissism.  And above all, it avoids self-report data.  The second study is, of course, flawed by the personal closeness of the subjects and the students, but the authors admit it, and the third study addresses it.  The only other obvious oversight is the lack of attention paid to behavioral strategies.  If the researchers had re-run the third study using scripted or pre-planned interactions, we would then be able to see which specific narcissistic behaviors – if any – increase attractiveness.

We’re confident that boldness is an effective mating strategy for men.  Is it the most efficient method?  Probably not.  How bold is too bold?  We don’t know.  To answer these questions, we need to test behavioral strategies in greater depth and detail.

Sources

Dufner, M., Rauthmann, J. F., Czarna, A. Z., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2013). Are narcissists sexy? zeroing in on the effect of narcissism on short-term mate appeal. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, doi: 10.1177/0146167213483580

For a summary of our Dark Triad posts, visit our Dark Triad Summary page.

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