Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

The Nonverbal Sleuth

Most detective procedures center around hard physical facts and evidence, but what is the role of detecting nonverbal behavior?

A new study in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior sought to challenge conventional wisdom that emphasized physical facts over nonverbal behavior. By replicating a previous study with slightly different variants, Dr. Eric Novotny and his team sought to fold in the role of nonverbal behavior detection in developing suspicions and driving along initial investigations into criminal wrongdoing.

The paper points out that much previous research actually casts doubt on the use of nonverbal detection in investigations. While there is a great deal of research finding that nonverbal detection can be effective, such research casts doubt on the claim that this is actually relied on by police investigators or even laypeople.

However, they contend that a distinction must be made between “discovering” and “suspecting” a lie. When we discover a lie, we have finished an investigation and concluded that a lie has taken place, but what causes us to initially suspect a lie?

The central contention is that suspicion does not depend on hard evidence because it is inherently the act of intuiting or suspecting that hard evidence would exist. Thus, suspicion has a critical role in leading to the investigation in the first place.

This is where behavioral cues and nonverbal detection come into the picture. It is in noting deviations from a behavioral baseline that individuals often come to conclude that something is being hidden or that deception is taking place.

In replicating previous work that emphasized the role of hard evidence, the current study asked not just what factors led participants to “discover” a lie but, in the treatment group participants were instead asked what led them to “suspect” a lie.

Each participant was asked to recall a previous time where they had caught somebody in a lie and to explain exactly what factors led to that conclusion. They did in fact find that most participants relied on hard evidence in order to discover lies, but the story for suspicion was very different.

Over forty percent of respondents pointed to nonverbal behavior as the stimulus for them beginning to suspect a lie, with only nineteen percent pointing to physical evidence.

This presented compelling evidence for the role of nonverbal behavior in beginning to suspect deception. To further drive home these points, the paper continued by conducting an additional study, this time asking more explicitly whether lies were discovered/suspected via hard evidence/behavioral evidence, dividing participants into a total of groups.

Again, their results confirmed the main hypothesis. People cited behavioral evidence much more often for determining suspicion, while they prefer non-behavioral evidence for discovering the truth.

This research helps contribute to the very important role of non-verbal assessments in deception detection. As has often been discussed, this is hard to do, so if you want to act on these conclusions, come check out Humintell’s own training programs on deception detection.

How to Read Microexpressions and Improve Your Observation Skills

This special blog showcases an interview recently done with Humintell’s own Dr. David Matsumoto.

The online behavior lab, Science of People, asked him to delve into the question of how we can use observational skills to determine other people’s intent and to assess the possibility of deception, as well as his own personal background.

Science of People emphasized Dr. Matsumoto’s recent research finding that microexpressions can be helpful in detecting deception. In fact, we blogged on this just recently! They also walked readers through the universal basic emotions, which is of course a staple for those who follow this blog.

However, Dr. Matsumoto consented to give a little bit more insight into what he means by “observational skills” and into his vision for the future of relevant research.

Specifically, he emphasized that the observational skills necessary for effective deception detection are not just something that we passively or naturally do. Instead, we have to actively try to employ these abilities, thus developing our skills.

Quite simply, he said, “If you want to get better at this skill, observe.”

As an exercise, Dr. Matsumoto suggests counting the number of times the interviewer, Vanessa, gestured with her right hand during the interview. Can you count the final number? The correct answer is revealed at the end of the video!

Or, if you are more ambitious, he recommended watching interviews with politicians and celebrities. When these are off script, you can see how people’s subtle expressions betray their emotions, and you can begin to learn to see those same patterns in everyday conversation.

Of course, there is no one thing that can betray somebody’s emotion. Instead, clusters of nonverbal behavior are incredibly important, albeit understudied. This can include changes in the type or frequency of gestures or in how their speech changes. Not only does this depend on the specific emotional context, but it depends on the individual too.

It is those sorts of behavior clusters that Dr. Matsumoto expressed interest in studying going forward. How do a combination of factors uniquely specify emotional states?

Not only does microexpression research demand that sort of synthesis, but Dr. Matsumoto went further in emphasizing the need for even higher level coordination amongst relevant researchers.

Because this field demands that many individual pieces come together, the current state of study suffers from a “Humpty Dumpty” problem where the disparate findings must be put together. This can be challenging and underlines the need for increased coordination.

Expressing Corruption?

Many of us worry about corruption amongst political elites, but could it be possible to actually recognize it in their faces?

In a pretty creative study, a team of psychologists from the California Institute of Technology sought to explore whether people could detect evidence of corruption by government officials by providing them with pictures of their faces. This study helps shed light both on efforts to effectively read other people but also on efforts by citizens to better evaluate our elected representatives.

While this may seem initially like a pretty far-fetched idea, there is a long history of research showing that people tend to make competent decisions about people’s trustworthiness from images of their faces. This has even been applied to potential leaders, where prosocial outcomes lead to positive evaluations.

However, this study makes an important break in shifting from just evaluations of a person’s charisma and perceived competence to actually determining if they have been practicing deception. Still, there is some prima facie credibility in that guilty expressions are generally identifiable.

To answer their question, the study authors undertook a series of experimental designs, showing images of politicians and asking participants to identify salient traits, such as corruptibility, dishonesty, and selfishness but also including more prosocial tendencies like competence and ambition.

In the first of these studies, participants were exposed to a series of 72 photos of actual elected officials in the United States. Of those, half had been convicted of some form of corruption, such as violations of campaign finance laws.

Before exposing participants to these photos, they were prompted with an instruction that they would have to designate the official’s level (1-5) of a given trait as quickly as possible, and they only had about four seconds to do so. This sought to ensure that people were judging based on spontaneous and initial reactions of emotional recognition.

Subsequent studies functioned similarly in an effort to strengthen the generalizability of any findings. This included varying the level of government that a given official held or using variants of the initial traits.

Overall, this series of experiments found broad support for the ability of participants to identify political corruption in faces of elected officials. This held up across variants, suggesting that it would apply more broadly outside of a limited experimental setting.

While many questions about generalizability and the precise causal mechanisms remain, this ambitious study does give us further evidence that our ability to read faces and detect deception has great potential even in photographs.

It would of course be interesting to see if an observer professionally trained in deception detection and people reading would do better.

In the meantime, check out some of Dr. Matsumoto’s work on politics and deception!