Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

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!

Microexpressions Differentiate Truths from Lies about Future Malicious Intent

Finally! The first scientific evidence that microexpressions are a Key to Deception Detection!

While there has been a general consensus that microexpressions play a significant role in deception detection for decades, in reality there had never been a research study published in a peer-reviewed, scientific journal that documented that claim.

Until now.

New and exciting evidence comes from Humintell’s own Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang in a recently published paper in Frontiers in Psychology. In their study, they sought to determine whether microexpressions could reliably indicate deception in a mock crime experiment. Ultimately, they found that microexpressions served as a helpful guide both in detecting deceit and also in evaluating future misconduct.

In actuality, previous studies did try to document the effect of microexpressions as deception indicators. But past research did not assess microexpressions effectively. An experiment was conducted featuring a mock crime. Here, participants were told to either lie or tell the truth during a simulated interview. Both the prescreening interview and the actual experiment were modeled as closely as possible on real-world law enforcement procedures.

Because past research has found that microexpressions are universal culturally, participants included both U.S. born European-Americans and Chinese immigrants. Throughout the interviews, each participant was filmed and their expressions closely analyzed.

After performing these mock interviews, facial behaviors were hand coded by experts to determine whether microexpressions were present. Emotions were then grouped as either negative, such as fear and anger, or positive, such as happiness.

It turned out that liars and truthtellers had starkly different expressions manifestations, with liars showing markedly more negative microexpressions. Not only does this help show that negative microexpressions can be used to determine deception, but the average duration of these microexpressions was relatively constant as between 0.4 and 0.5 seconds.

This study, then, not only provided the first scientific evidence that microexpressions can help detect deception, but it also helped foster further research in looking critically at what constitutes a microexpression.

And it may be a good time for you to participate and learn how to detect deception yourself!

READ THE FULL ABSTRACT AND DOWNLOAD THE FULL ARTICLE

Santa Claus and Deception

santa-claus-christmasHow merry is it to lie to your kids about Santa Claus?

While some parents worry about the impact of lying to their children about this popular Christmas legend, it’s possible that it may be better for them in the long run. This is what Dr. Kristen Dunfield, a professor of developmental psychology, argued in a recent blog. Certainly, concerns have their role, but she contends that the process of figuring out the truth can be good for their development.

In fact, fantastical beliefs, like that in Santa Claus, can lead to certain positive developments in a child’s psyche. This can include what are known as counterfactual reasoning skills, which basically involve a child’s ability to think creatively and outside the box.

There is not even much a parent has to do to foster this belief. As Dr. Dunfield discusses, belief in Santa is overwhelmingly popular amongst children, but they tend to figure out the truth by the age of eight or so. This means that not only does the burden of promoting the myth not fall on the parent, but neither does the duty of dispelling it.

This very process of coming to understand that Santa is not real can also be helpful from a developmental perspective. By figuring out that magical actions are not really possible, children come to develop and apply critical thinking to the world around them.

That very method of critical thinking is often on display when older children begin testing the mythos, asking difficult questions about how Santa can manage to circumnavigate the globe, for instance.

The goal of a parent, for Dr. Dunfield, does not have to be about propping up the story or about being the Grinch who dispels the happy story. Instead, parents can encourage their children’s creative impulses, asking them to think through their questions for themselves.

For instance, she recommends “simply direct[ing] the question back to them, allowing your child to come up with explanations for themselves.” Rather than just answering, a parent can respond “I don’t know, how do you think the sleigh flies?”

This may help many of us with the dilemma of whether to lie to our children. While deception in the household is common, that does not mean it is particularly desirable. However, by simply allowing children to come to understand the world for themselves, the problem can really be turned to their cognitive advantage.

One could even make the argument that this sort of process can help bond a family together, discussing the question of Santa and using the mythos as a sort of family-based holiday tradition. Not only could this be a fun way to spend time with a child, but it can also help forge family cohesion over the season.

This may be especially important, given that the ways in which we spend the holidays can have a significant impact on how pleasant the time is. For instance, we discussed in a past blog how family rituals significantly increased feelings of life satisfaction and reduce social loneliness. Another blog focused on how social interaction, and not overreliance on gift consumption, can significantly predict happier holidays.

However, if you are concerned that you are being lied to about Santa Claus, maybe this would be a good time to check out our deception training program.