Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

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!

Farming and the Evolution of Speech

As we know, many of our nonverbal behaviors have deep roots in our own process of evolution, but maybe our verbal behaviors have historical roots too.

While perhaps not quite as deeply ingrained as biological evolution, a new study in Science found evidence that many of our speech patterns can be linked back to changing dietary practices due to the dawn of agriculture. Specifically, our use of sounds like “F” and “V” can be linked to changing jaw and overbite structures that arose around that time.

Postdoctoral researchers Damián Blasi and Steven Moran got their idea from 34 year old linguistic analyses that found that contemporary hunter-gatherers lacked some of the linguistic types, called labiodentals, that many agricultural based people had.

When humans became accustomed to chewing foods high in fibers, the jaw bone is put under pressure and molars are worn down. This results in a more even mouth, developing away from an overbite and also making it easier to pronounce sounds like “F” and “V”.

While this idea may have some intuitive credibility, such an attitude was not shared in linguistic communities when linguist Charles Hockett made these unusual observations. Instead, he was met with skepticism, and it was that skepticism that Blasi and Moran sought to validate by proving Hockett wrong.

But they were very surprised. In order to assess Hockett’s claim, they made use of computer models to simulate how the human mouth makes sounds with varying degrees of overbite, and they analyzed languages around the world to see which languages most frequently used labiodental sounds.

The results are incredible striking. The computer models indicate that overbites make labiodental sounds much harder, with contemporary edge-to-edge teeth reducing the necessary effort by almost 30 percent.

Similarly, they discovered that labiodentals were much less common among languages used by hunter-gatherer communities. What might be most striking about these findings is the fact that they were able to track the progress of labiodentals emerging in languages throughout history, finding a steady increase in their use as societies developed and became more focused on expansive settled agriculture.

It is not all good news for those of us who enjoy our labiodentals, as we are also more at risk of cavities and of our teeth becoming overcrowded.

However, this study makes important strides in tracking how our communicative patterns are closely tied to our evolution and to our society. This is important if you are trying to better understand people of different cultures.

For instance, this study shows certain commonalities among those who speak Indo-European languages, emphasizing cross-cultural similarities. Yet, on the other hand, the fact that these speech patterns only emerged because of certain social arrangements also shows how deep the communicative gap can be between people of different cultures.

Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to better read people and communicate across cultural divides. This is one of Humintell’s specialties, and we even offer a cross-cultural training class!

Studying Deception Among Children

As many of us know, children are still known to practice deception, and maybe there is a lot to learn about deception from them.

This was the motivation for a recent study by Hilal Şen and Aylin C. Küntay in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, where they sought to simulate acts of deception amongst preschool age children in order to better understand the relationship between practices of deception and nonverbal behavior.

While children may seem to be an odd choice for a deception detection experiment, there is actually a long extant literature delving into childhood deception. Interestingly, previous research has found that adults have trouble distinguishing between truth and falsehood among children. As we have previously written, children also practice deception at relatively high rates.

Despite this literature, the study authors sought to go a step further. Previous research, they contend, has largely failed to grasp actual spontaneous acts of deception, instead prompting children to lie or not. A more accurate approach would certainly be to try to more closely simulate real world situations where children being studied practice deception spontaneously and on their own volition.

Moreover, they note that collective interviewing, where multiple participants are asked to practice deception at the same time has been successful in the past in determining deceptive behavior. Yet, no such studies had been done with children.

It was both of these gaps which the current study sought to fill: spontaneous lying of children during group interviews. In order to do this, they relied on an experimental method where children were tempted to commit a transgression and later interviewed to examine what behaviors were showcased when deception was practiced.

Each participating child was sorted into a pair with another child that they already knew and was told to avoid touching certain toys. Then they were left alone while their behaviors were secretly recorded. After some time, each child pair was brought into an interview setting and asked a series of questions.

Throughout the interviews, each child was given clear opportunities to lie by omitting crucial details about their potential rule breaking while being asked to give a full account of what they had done while presumably unobserved. They were also tasked with answering direct questions about whether they had followed the rules.

After recording these interviews, the researchers were able to see if there were systematic differences in nonverbal behavior between the children who lied and those who had not, as of course the veracity of the interviews could be tested against video recordings.

Overall, there was very little difference in nonverbal behavior when children simply talked around their lies, such as by omitting it, but the situation was a bit different when asked a direct question. At that point, children took significantly longer to give their response when lying.

When lying, moreover, children were also more likely to look at each other than the pairs that told the truth. This is one way that the collective interviewing process can shed light on deceptive behavior.

This study then serves as a helpful template both for future research but also for our own efforts to detect deception. Collective interviewing clearly has its benefits in deception detection, as does the practice of asking straightforward questions and measuring response time.

This can be challenging though, as many behaviors were hard for the researchers to detect, and that’s a great reason to take a deception detection class!