Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

The Makings of a Lie Detector

Lie detection is tough for a lot of people, but why do some people happen to just be better at it than others?

This is an important question not just in our attempts to understand how to detect deception but also in efforts to better understand the role of emotional recognition in lie detection. A new study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin sought to disentangle various features of emotional recognition as a way of explaining variations in participants’ abilities to detect deception.

The study authors look at several variables that could explain variation in deception detection. One is “Theory of Mind” which looks at an individual’s general ability to read others’ mental states. Similarly, they looked at emotional intelligence which, while similar to Theory of Mind, focuses more on interpersonal competency and emotional recognition.

It is important to distinguish truth detection from deception detection. This should make sense intuitively, as we often get a clear intuitive sense that we are being lied to, but that doesn’t mean we always have an affirmative sense of another person’s truth-telling. Instead, we often just don’t feel lied to and conclude they are telling the truth.

They also distinguished between “high-stakes” and “low-stakes” deception, under the hypothesis that behaviors would be significantly different between the two. Namely, they note that past research has found that people tend to believe others most in low-stakes scenarios, while they become more discerning when the states get higher.

In order to explore the relationships between those topics, the study authors performed an experiment on over 100 participants. In the experiment, each participant was asked to review a series of videos of individuals speaking to high profile events, such as cases of alleged murder. Half of these were incidents of deception.

After watching each video, the participants were asked to determine who was telling the truth and who was not. Because emotional intelligence and other variables were measured by a pre-treatment series of questionnaires and tests, the researchers were able to explore statistical relationships between those emotional traits and rates of accuracy.

Overall, they did find that truth and deception detection were different as suspected, with different predictors proving significant for each. For instance, Theory of Mind accounted for much deception detection variance and emotionally intelligent participants often felt too much sympathy for liars.

This distinction seems rooted in the need for detached reasoning in detecting deception. While recognizing and understanding emotions is helpful , it often must be paired with a calculated and logical approach. This can be difficult for those with high levels of empathy, even though they tend to be good at noticing emotions like guilt.

Hopefully, this gives you some more information on what makes a good lie detector, but also come check out our new website dedicated to deception detection for more!

Landmarks in the Field of Nonverbal Behavior

We spend a great deal of time talking about Humintell’s work on nonverbal behavior, but it’s important to know that this is a wide and exciting field!

In a recent paper in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, a pair of researchers sought to map out the major authors and major papers that have dominated the field. Instead of just looking at new developments, this was an important way of seeing what the lay of the land in the field is, so to speak, and this sort of work is incredibly valuable to those trying to expand the field and to those trying to understand the academic consensus.

One of the exciting features of this research was also an analysis of the most frequently cited and published scholars in the field. We were proud to see Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto listed in the top five scholars!

In mapping the discipline, Drs. Pierrich Plusquellec and Vincent Denault leveraged a massive bibliographic database that included more than 200 million articles from thousands of journals, not limited to psychology. However, they subset this database to a series of important keywords that were relevant to nonverbal behavior and folded in citation counts to each article to determine its importance.

The first intriguing finding was a calculation of the most common words used in the titles of relevant articles. This tells us what most scholars tend to focus on and included “emotion,” “facial,” “expressions,” and “recognition.” However, these were often paired with applications including “children,” “psychiatric illness,” and “depression.”

Second, the study authors also tracked the frequency of highly cited articles over time. By looking only at the thousand most cited articles, they were able to track the development of seminal works and the emergence of increased interest in the field. They found that the field emerged during the 1960s but that most of these articles were actually quite recent.

This last finding indicates that, while the field has been developing for over 50 years, it has gained newfound emphasis and popularity recently.

These over-time findings were further explored by looking at how frequently used words over time, i.e. which words were most frequent during given decades. “Facial expression” tends to be one of the most frequent across the whole time period, though this was not so pronounced until the 1990s and 2000s.

So what exactly does this tell any of us about the field?

A main takeaway seem to be the primacy of studying facial expressions within nonverbal behavioral studies, which is notably different from looking at body language or even microexpressions more narrowly.

Another important conclusion is also the exciting nature of the current period of this field. It appears that the last 15 years have experience a sharp increase in interest, academic and otherwise, in nonverbal behavior, and we are optimistic that this trend continues!

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.