Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Why is that Funny?

Psychology often tries to unravel emotional mysteries, but some resist investigation more than others.

One of these long-standing mysteries is the reality of humor. What exactly makes a joke funny or not? And to whom? It is this question which has long puzzled psychologists and philosophers, and Scientific American’s Giovanni Sabato attempts to trace the history of theory and research on humor in a recent article.

Sabato delves into a long philosophical tradition, including the likes of Plato and Sigmund Freud, which has sought to model how humor works. While Plato and other ancient Greeks theorized that humor resulted from a sense of superiority over the failings of others, Freud made a great deal about the tendency for humor to thrive on the violation of taboos.

Another theory has focused on the idea of “incongruity.” Humor is derived from the subversion of expectations or the incompatibility of various concepts or situations. This helps explain the presence of double meanings and puns in humor, and it showcases the frequency with which humor deals with unexpected punchlines or resolutions to tricky situations.

The latter should be pretty intuitive to anyone who has watched a sitcom!

One more modern attempt to develop a unified theory of humor has built on that idea of incongruity. Drs. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, have introduced the idea of “benign violation.”

This theory focuses on humor being derived from violations of expectations surrounding norms. When somebody acts in a way that they are not supposed to, if it does not result in indignation or scandal, the situation will often be perceived as humorous.

There is also a role here for being distant from that particular, often awkward, violation. By hearing these stories second-hand from a comedian or friend, we have enough distance to find these situations funny.

However, this theory of distance and violation is not the only popular theory. Some psychologists and evolutionary biologists simply see humor as an evolutionary mechanism. Spontaneous and genuine laughter is deeply ingrained in our biology, while contrived and forced laughter developed as a way of smoothing social situations.

One way that humor can be derived from our hard-wired evolutionary experiences is related to the subversion of expectations. A group of philosophers, including Matthew Hurley of Indiana University Bloomington, saw humor as related to mistakes, or at least to their detection.

Our mind naturally assumes that it knows what will happen, relying on heuristics to predict likely events, but when things don’t happen as they should, for instance when another person acts erratically, we interpret that as humor.

None of these are necessarily perfect explanations for such a complex phenomenon. However, they help situate the question of humor into our cognitive and evolutionary history. From past blogs, we already know that emotional expressions are deeply rooted in evolution, and we know that properly reading people often depends on situating our experiences into these cognitive roots.

Social Influence in Investigative Interviews

We talk a lot about how to understand people’s emotions and how to read what they say accurately, but what about learning how we can change our behavior so that they are more forthcoming?

This is the subject of a recent paper by Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang. In this study, they sought to examine the impact that different cues of authority had on information interviews. This was an attempt to determine whether the truth-tellers or the liars in a mock interview context were more likely to convey information, depending on the influence of the interviewer.

After recruiting participants, they were divided into a treatment and control group. The treatment group was encouraged to commit a mock crime but told not to disclose that they had done so, while the control group simply proceeded directly to the informational interview.

This design split the participants into those who had to lie and those who had to tell the truth during the interview, with each being encouraged by a small monetary payout to convince the interviewer that they were telling the truth and had not committed the crime.

However, there were other experimental conditions at play, namely the environmental context and appearance of the interviewer. In order to prime a sense of interviewer authority, for instance, some of the interviewer wore intimidating suits or had impressive degrees and law enforcement posters on the wall.

Nothing beyond those environmental factors was different. All of the interviewers followed the same script and spoke in comparable fashions, but previous research has seen profound differences in perceptions of authority based on these apparently simple differences.

Overall, they found that the authority conditions got truth-telling participants to freely volunteer more information than their counterparts in low-authority conditions. However, there was no effect for the liars.

Interestingly, the effect of the authority condition seemed to hold even for the truth-tellers written statements, even though these were completed after the interview. This suggests that there is some lasting impact from an impression of interviewer authority.

This helps expand on previous work that looked at how to evaluate interviewees’ truthfulness and emotions by looking instead at what can promote efficacy by the interviewer. It appears that these signs of authority, even if limited to clothing, can result in more forthcoming interviews.

While this appeared to only work on people who were already telling the truth, that does not take away from the usefulness of this information. Many interviews are conducted on truthtellers, with the struggle sometimes involving getting tight-lipped people to speak more freely. Wearing a suit or even putting your diploma on the wall might help here!

In the meantime, there is always more that needs to be learned about how to tell if your interlocuter is lying, so check out Humintell’s exciting training procedure!

Dr. Matsumoto Podcast Interview

Communication may be much vaster than we thought.

In a new podcast, Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto helps explain the non-verbal world of communication to wider audiences. He emphasizes that non-verbal communication is anything that does not include verbal language, but the varieties of non-verbal communication are almost endless.

One of these is based in the environment. What is the lighting of the conversation? Is music playing or is there a specific sound? This helps communicate something. Similarly, our personal characteristics, such as how we dress, convey something revealing about our personality, without us even opening our mouths.

Dr. Matsumoto also describes “behavioral traces.” Even when we are not in the room, certain aspects of our personality can be conveyed. For instance, if somebody were to enter your house without your presence, they would see how you have laid out your room. They would see what you put on the walls. Each of these things communicates something to that person.

While these forms of communication are not Humintell or Dr. Matsumoto’s focus, they help show how many things we can use to understand people and how vast the potential for communication without words is.

Of particular focus, however, are non-verbal behavior which includes the microexpressions, body language, and other slight activities that we engage in. While words are incredibly powerful, they must inevitably exist within a context of non-verbal behavior, and non-verbal communication more broadly.

In fact, when verbal messages contradict non-verbal messages, most of the information we garner from the conversation come from the non-verbal messages. Even though we are often bad at reading these forms of communication, there is still some instinctive receptivity, according to Dr. Matsumoto.

After discussing non-verbal messages, the conversation shifted to whether expressions are universal, which is of course a major topic of this blog.

Dr. Matsumoto emphasized the biological research showing the presence of expressions, emotions, and behaviors across cultures. This tendency is innate in us from the level of infancy, but it is also quickly modulated and influenced by the culture that we are in. Our cultures helps shape what we would feel emotional about, for instance.

When asked about the impact of globalization and cultural homogenization, Dr. Matsumoto pointed out that this is a significant cultural force and that, especially in urban areas, cultures are increasingly merging. However, it remains unclear what impacts this will have on cultural expression and serves as a potentially fascinating place for future research.

The only preliminary research about homogenization in communication has come at the level of gestures. Traditionally, gestures have been thought to be incredibly specific to cultures, but Dr. Matsumoto’s work has found that people are able to recognize certain gestures, like “thumbs up”, no matter what culture they have come from.

Please stay tuned for a blog on the rest of this fascinating podcast! And let us know what you think about these exciting ideas.