Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Reading Hairstyles?

We focus a lot on reading people’s nonverbal behavior, but is there something to be read into about our hair also?

This is precisely what Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang argue in a recent paper. Essentially, while past research has argued that emotional expressions can reveal one’s culture, they argue that differing hairstyles, which are often culturally-linked, confounds these impressions and significantly shape our identifications of other people’s nationalities.

Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang are responding to past research (Marsh et al., 2003) which found a distinctive “accent” between Japanese national and Japanese-American expressions. Essentially, this research asked participants to identify the subject’s nationality (Japanese or American), based on their facial expression. When participants were able to do this, it was attributed to fundamental cultural differences in the form of expression.

However, this may have ignored striking confounders that are not linked just to the facial expression.

For context, when we see a person’s face, we process a host of information, such as their facial structure, expressions, and other artificial features, like piercings, glasses, or hairstyle. Each of these have important impacts on our assessment that are often hard for researchers to untangle.

It was these artificial features which Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang turned to in their study. Because hairstyles often differ between people in different nations, even if they have cultural ties, they developed an experiment to see if this accounted for past findings.

After collecting almost 200 students, they exposed them to a series of images displaying basic emotional expressions on Japanese faces, including the photographs used in the previous study to divide between Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans. However, half of the photographs were edited to switch hairstyles between the groups, giving Japanese nationals American hairstyles, for instance.

Once the participants were divided between “original” and “switched” groups, participants were shown a series of images and told that some were Japanese nationals and others were Japanese-Americans. Then, upon being shown each image again individually, they were asked to mark the nationality of each.

As hypothesized, hairstyles did impact evaluations for Japanese nationals and reduced the accuracy for Japanese-American neutral expressions. While it is interesting that Japanese-American emotional expressions were not impacted, it is clear that hairstyle plays a significant role.

This necessarily challenges the idea that emotional expressions have a certain “accent” or “cultural dialect.” Instead, many of those differences could be attributed to proclivities to artificial features, like jewelry or hairstyles.

Not only does this demonstrate the importance of universal emotions, as they really are universal, but it also serves as an important lesson for anyone trying to read emotions across cultures. Our brain immediately picks up on these artificial features as it holistically recognizes the face and emotion, so it might take some training to learn to disentangle them!

Silent Political Power?

Many commentators are keen to read into the nonverbal behavior of political leaders, but is that even really possible?

After Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki last week, it’s safe to say that they completely dominated the news cycle. In a presumable effort for a fresh take, the Washington Post interviewed nonverbal behavior experts, concluding that Putin was the “clear winner” of a “battle for nonverbal dominance.”

This leads to two pressing questions: is it really possible to analyze nonverbal behavior in those settings and, if so, did Putin really win?

First of all, nobody can really say there is a “clear winner” to any nonverbal interactions. This is especially true when somebody is just watching their behavior in the news.

Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto dismissed much of such commentary on the Putin-Trump summit, saying “Whenever there’s a big meeting of leaders, you see all the body language ‘experts’ on TV with interpretations. But the reality is little of that is validated by science.”

This is not to say that we can’t pick up on some nonverbal behaviors, but they have to be carefully distinguished from mere “noise.” Moreover, they can only ever be indicators rather than tell-tale signs of emotional states.

The Washington Post interviewed Dr. Carrie Keating of Colgate University who emphasized how the leaders walked, their gestures, and the extent to which they paid attention to the audience in an effort to analyze the social dynamic. Keating stressed that the most important feature was Putin’s ability to talk first and longest, which she claimed established him as the dominant man in the room.

Dr. Matsumoto did agree that experts can look into certain nonverbal behaviors and microexpressions, pointing out such subtleties as fleeting looks of contempt or disgust, as well as Putin clearing his throat in an apparent effort to control the dialogue.

However, Dr. Matsumoto emphasized that “there are real limits” to any sort of deduction about internal mental states. Expressions must be carefully dissected and coded in a scientific fashion, and the context matters: “You can’t compare Trump walking into meeting with Putin or standing at podium, for example, to video of him sitting down with Angela Merkel. They’re different settings and actions,” he explained.

Followers of this blog know that nonverbal behavior can tell us a lot about an interaction, but it is not a simple process. Yes, we can derive a wealth of information from observing Putin and Trump’s body language and expressions, but it is difficult to figure out which ones signal something interesting and what are just noise.

Similarly, we must be cautious about making claims about somebody’s internal state from their non-verbal behavior. An expression or gesture may suggest that they are lying, but it cannot definitely tell it. This is especially true with people we don’t personally know, as comparisons to that person’s emotional “baseline” are critical.

Still, this is not to say that people can’t learn something about politicians’ motivations and emotions by watching them. In a series of posts during the election, Dr. Matsumoto presented numerous approaches for reading between the lines when following the news. Similarly, this handy quiz helps show us how subtly opinions can be passed off as factual statements.

Failure at the World Cup

All triumphant athletes look alike, but do all distraught and disappointed ones?

In past blogs, we have noted frequent observations of the universal “triumphant” pose amongst victors in sports competitions, but sports reveal other universal poses as well. For instance, as David Gendelman writes for The New York Times, this summer’s World Cup helps showcase a similar “disappointed pose.”

Mr. Gendelman noticed that athlete after athlete reacted with the same pose to a missed goal: a look of shock accompanied by the perplexed raising of both arms to clutch the back of the head. If you’ve been watching the games, I’d imagine you immediately recognized it!

This inspired him to ask psychologists and other professionals about this phenomenon, such as Dr. Jessica Tracy from the University of British Columbia. Dr. Tracy emphasized that clutching the head indicated shame but also that “the constriction of the body, in the way that the player is moving his arms around his head, almost to make himself smaller. Those are very classical shame display elements.”

She went on to describe the gesture as conveying a message of failure to fellow teammates: “I get it and I’m sorry, therefore you don’t have to kick me out of the group, you don’t have to kill me.”

Dr. Tracy actually published similar findings with Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto in their 2008 study of blind Olympians. Through this research, they found that athletes exhibited both triumphant and shameful expressions upon victory or defeat. While we have focused on the triumphant poses in other blogs, the universality of shameful expressions across blind and sighted athletes of different cultures suggests a poignant universality to these gestures as well.

Other psychologists situated this gesture deeper in our evolutionary history, which shouldn’t be surprising to followers of this blog. Dr. Dacher Keltner, of the University of California, Berkeley, sees this gesture as rooted in defense of one’s head: “The oldest kind of behavioral intention in that class of behaviors is to protect your head from blows.”

This observation certainly fits with the idea that triumphant and shameful gestures serve as a sort of message to others in the group. This connects to research presented in a past blog that sees universal emotions as rooted in their function as a form of social communication.

Dr. Keltner’s point is further supported by the fact that many fellow athletes, as well as their fans, will mimic the same gesture upon watching the game. There is a strong group component here. Not only is the gesture universal, but it is also something taken up by those who empathize with and share the emotion.

The World Cup serves as a great source of entertainment and as a showcase of athletic prowess, but it also reveals a lot about human psychology. Like the Olympics, the cross-cultural nature of such an international event lets us see what is deeply common about the psychologies of people across cultures.

This is just a start however, as Humintell has focused on how deeply these cultural similarities (and differences) impact our ability to read people and understand their diverse perspectives.