Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

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.

Raising Awareness about Active Shooter Incidents

Active shooter incidents are incredibly frightening events that often have deadly consequences for individuals, and dire consequences for organizations. The term “active shooter” describes a “situation in which a shooting is in progress and an aspect of the crime may affect the protocols used in responding to and reacting at the scene of an incident” (Blair & Schweit, 2014, p. 4). Most government agencies in the U.S. define “active shooter” as an “individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area” (Blair & Schweit, 2014, p. 5). Since they have been studied, active shooter incidents have been steadily increasing over the years (Figure 1), causing increasing numbers of casualties, including many who have been killed or wounded (Blair, Martaindale, & Nichols, 2014; Blair & Schweit, 2014).

Figure 1: Active Shooter Events by Year

Image retrieved from https://leb.fbi.gov/2014/january/image/figure-1.-active-shooter-events-by-year.jpg/image_preview.

 

Unsurprisingly, most of these events have occurred at businesses (Figure 2). Because these data are cause for grave concern for any organization, private or public, it is no wonder that many organizations are coming to grips with the reality of considering ways of dealing with, managing, and preventing these kinds of incidents to occur.

Figure 2: Locations of Active Shooter Incidents

Image retrieved from (Blair et al., 2014).

Obviously there are multitude of ways to approach this very important problem for security professionals. The first step is often raising awareness of this important issue, as many security professionals and organizations unfortunately remain in the dark about the frequency and/or severity of these types of events. Raising awareness alone is not enough; what is equally if not more important is to actively consider, implement, monitor, and refine a comprehensive security plan in order not only to deal with these incidents when they occur – as well as their aftermath – but also how to prevent them in the first place.

By now many security professionals have heard of the current rendition of the “best” response to an active shooter incident, involving the mantra “Run, Hide, Fight.” But let’s dive deeper into how this may actually occur in an active shooter situation. In reality, data on active shooter incidents have shown that 70% of such incidents ended in five minutes or less, with 37% ending in two minutes or less (Blair & Schweit, 2014). At the same time, the average (median) response time by law enforcement officers to the scene is about three minutes. These statistics indicate that civilians often have to make life and death decisions in a very short time, and in a very emotional situation. How to do so?

My many years of training athletes in Olympic judo competition gives us clues about how to approach the problem. These are also highly charged situations in which split second decisions need to be made when one is hyper aroused. In fact we have clocked athletes’ heart rates in competition upwards of 200 beats/minute. Given that that is what is occurring in real life, it becomes very clear very quickly that training in what to do in a very neutral, calm environment (e.g., a classroom lecture or workshop) has little or no bearing on making constructive changes to behaviors in the hyper charged situation. While classroom workshops on active shooter incidents are great for raising awareness, their potential in producing effective behaviors in a hyper charged situation is extremely limited. What is needed is training that simulates, as close as possible, the actual environment in which the desired behaviors need to take place. The most effective training will be that which produces that simulation well.

There are many ways to think about prevention as well. Research has increasingly documented the signs and signals of impending violence (Matsumoto, Frank, & Hwang, 2015; Matsumoto & Hwang, 2013, 2014; Matsumoto, Hwang, & Frank, 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2016), much of which can be transformed into proactive detection capabilities to intervene before things escalate. Moreover, recent research on lone actors and other actors who perform violent acts against others has documented that many – upwards of 80 – 90% of these individuals – leak their plans and intentions in some way, shape, or form to others (Meloy & Gill, 2016; Meloy, Roshdi, Glaz-Ocik, & Hoffman, 2015). Heightened awareness of these signs and signals, and procedures for reporting these to security professionals may be of interest.

These are just some of the many ways to consider how to deal with, manage, and prevent active shooter incidents. Perhaps the most important factor to consider, however, and perhaps the most difficult, is to find the courage and conviction to truly deal with them in the first place.

References Cited

Blair, J. P., Martaindale, H., & Nichols, T. (2014). Active Shooter Events from 2000 to 2012. FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, January. Retrieved from https://leb.fbi.gov/2014/january/active-shooter-events-from-2000-to-2012 website:

Blair, J. P., & Schweit, K. W. (2014). A study of active shooter incidents in the United States between 2000 and 2013. Washington, D.C.: Texas State University and Federal Bureau of Investigation. U.S. Department of Justice.

Matsumoto, D., Frank, M. G., & Hwang, H. C. (2015). The role of intergroup emotions on political violence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24, 369-373. doi: 10.1177/0963721415595023.

Matsumoto, D., & Hwang, H. C. (2013). The language of political aggression. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 32, 335-348. doi: 10.1177/0261927X12460666.

Matsumoto, D., & Hwang, H. C. (2014). Facial signs of imminent aggression. Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, 1, 118-128. doi: 10.1037/tam0000007.

Matsumoto, D., Hwang, H. C., & Frank, M. G. (2013). Emotional language and political aggression. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 32, 452-468. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0261927X12474654.

Matsumoto, D., Hwang, H. C., & Frank, M. G. (2014a). Emotions expressed by leaders in videos predict political aggression. Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, 6, 212-218. doi: 10.1080/19434472.2013.769116.

Matsumoto, D., Hwang, H. C., & Frank, M. G. (2014b). Emotions expressed in speeches by leaders of ideologically motivated groups predict aggression. Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, 6, 1-18. doi: 10.1080/19434472.2012.716449.

Matsumoto, D., Hwang, H. C., & Frank, M. G. (2016). The effects of incidental anger, contempt, and disgust on hostile language and implicit behaviors. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. doi: 10.1111/jasp.12374.

Meloy, J. R., & Gill, P. (2016). The lone-actor terrorist and the TRAP-18. Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, 3, 37-52. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/tam0000061.

Meloy, J. R., Roshdi, K., Glaz-Ocik, J., & Hoffman, J. (2015). Investigating the individual terrorist in Europe. Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, 2, 140-152. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/tam0000036.

Culture and Body Posture

While research into cross-cultural non-verbal communication often focuses on facial expressions, body posture is also an important consideration. This may seem intuitive, as we all have experienced the role that body posture has in communicating emotions, but it has been neglected in most research, at the expense of its valuable potential for effectively reading people.

However, in a pair of studies, Dr. David Matsumoto sought to examine how body posture serves as a different non-verbal cue for people from American or Japanese cultures. While both of these studies date back to the 1980s, the evergreen and often neglected nature of this research merits consideration.

The first of these papers, coauthored with Dr. Tsutomu Kudoh, sought to test conventional wisdom about the role of posture in social situations against the possibility that these were limited only to Western culture. Past research had emphasized the immediacy of a reaction and the level of relaxation shown as the main predictors for how those postures would be understood.

In order to test these theories, Drs. Matsumoto and Kudoh recruited a large sample of Japanese subjects and asked them to develop a list of postures that they had encountered in real life. This resulted in a list of 40 postures which were then rated based on 16 criteria that included confident, respectful, friendly, or calm.

The participants were then instructed to imagine individuals they knew showcasing each of these postures and to rank them based on the aforementioned criteria. This allowed the researchers to assess the role that particular hierarchical roles may have in shaping these evaluations.

In fact, they found that their Japanese participants did evaluate posture in a significantly different way than Western-centric research had found. While Westerners emphasized like or dislike cues, these participants relied on cues rooted in status and power.

In another study with Dr. Kudoh, the researchers further examined the role of cultural norms in interpreting the emotions behind different postures. Given the conclusions of the previous paper, they emphasized that while the United States fosters an individualist culture, Japanese society is more characterized by status.

This paper gathered both American and Japanese students and asked each of these participants to rate the same postures with the same rubric from the last study. Interestingly, none of these postures were unknown to Americans, even though the list was developed by individuals from Japan.

Again, they found that the role of status differed dramatically between cultural groups, as Drs. Matsumoto and Kudoh found that considerations of status impacted social judgments of internal states and interpersonal interactions. They also found considerable variance between evaluations of different attitudes, such as pleasure and dominance.

Not only do these results help expand our understanding of cross-cultural behavior, but they also serve as a caution to avoid expectations that members of other cultures behave in the same way as do members of our own. This has crucial ramifications in attempting to read people, as we explicate in our cross-cultural communication workshops!