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Deceptive Dimensions: Intro to Deception

A successful persuasive campaign usually ends with another person acting against his or her own interests in favor of yours.  Since most people are naturally selfish, getting them to act against their interests requires deception.  Rare are the times when all the facts will be on your side, rarer still will be the times when you need to persuade someone to act selfishly, and rarest of all are the people who won’t use deception when trying to persuade you.  Basically, if you’re not deceiving, you’re probably not persuading; attempting to influence someone without deception is like trying to win a war without bullets.

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

The Hot Hands Fallacy

Back in April – in our Exploring Unpredictable Social Strategies post – we told you that the best way to control your subordinates (if you have any) was to reward them randomly when they do something you like.  We explained:

“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

Zeroing in on Narcissism

We’ve published over a dozen posts about the Dark Triad since we first started researching its potential links to attraction.  We want to answer this question: What, if anything, enables Dark Triad males to sleep with more women, more often, with less romantic commitment?  It could be that:

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.