Body Language is very important to understand as a Social Engineer. Ever heard of microexpressions? Microexpressions are facial expressions that cannot be consciously controled and so are very important to recognize.

They can only last for a few miliseconds but with some practice they are fairly easy to catch.

1. Anger

Anger is particularly easy to spot on a human face as it is a stark warning – if you see someone looking at you with this expression you will be acutely aware of its implications.

2. Contempt

Normally contempt is visible on the face as a kind of half smile. One corner of the mouth is drawn inwards and upwards, signifying an extreme dislike that is different to disgust and anger. It shows a feeling that someone or something is inferior, lacking or worthless, and is a very dangerous emotion, and is more often the expression associated with hate than Anger or Disgust would be.

3. Disgust

Spotting this emotion is not difficult, and if you look for the nostrils flaring upwards it will be pretty obvious. This is based on our nervous system blocking off our nasal passages to avoid unpleasant smells, and a person displaying this emotion will wrinkle their noses, and often squint. Think if it as trying to experience as little of an unpleasant thing as possible, most often wrinkling the nose, raising of the upper lip, squinting and turning the head away.

4. Fear

Eyebrows raised and pulled together, raised upper eyelids, stretched lips. Fear can be easily confused with surprise because of their similarity. Try to notice if the persons eyebrows are pulled together or not.

5. Happiness

Happiness is probably the easiest of all seven. Raised cheeks, corners of the lips are drawn back and up. And remember that real smile always involves muscles around the eyes.

6. Sadness

Sadness shows itself by lip corners pulled down and drooping upper eyelids. Sometimes hard to spot because it can be very subtle and also by people trying to hide it by fake smile. Luckily you now know how to spot fake smiles too.

7. Surprise

Surprise displays in a very clear way, but as I mentioned earlier it is very brief, and may last only 1/5th of a second. A surprised person may open their mouth slightly, raise their eyebrows and widen their eyes. Sometimes this emotion may only display in a very subtle way, without the open mouth and only the slightest widening of the eyes, and this subtler expression is very difficult to see with the naked eye.

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This refers to the phenomenon where people think something has more value than it actually has just because it costs a lot of money.

 

An experiment has been done where people have been offered wine. The first time the people were told that wine cost $50, the second time that is costs $500.

After tasting the wine, researchers asked the participants what wine tasted better.

 

As you probably can guess, it was the wine for $500.

BUT what the reaserchers didn’t tell the participants was that it was the SAME wine all along. That’s interesting isn’t it?

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This psychological principle called anchoring was discovered by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. These two researchers found that people tend to make judgements by using relative distances from anchor points.

In their study, participants were asked to compute, the product of the numbers one through eight, either as 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 or as 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 within 5 seconds. Because participants did not have enough time to calculate the full answer, they had to make an estimate after their first few multiplications. When the sequence started with small numbers, the median estimate was 512, when the sequence started with the larger numbers, the median estimate was 2 250.

This is used in sales where, say you are buying an expensive suit for $10 000, at the checkout they offer you shoes for $500. You’ll be more inclined to buy those shoes than if you were buying a T-Shirt for $50 instead of a suit because it doesn’t seem that much money in comparison.

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