An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields
KTLA Anchors dive under their news desk when a 4.4 Earthquake hit Los Angeles.
Take a look at the expression of surprise on the anchorman’s face!
Click here to view the embedded video.
Thank you to our affiliate Eric Goulard for first posting this video on his website!
Want to know why our eyebrows raise and jaws drop when we are surprised?
Find out in our MiX Professional Online Training!
Don’t break eye contact
No, I don’t mean never break eye contact… That would make you look like a lunatic. This tip only applies to when you are doing the talking. Studies show that the Visual Dominance Ratio (VDR) is a reliable indication of who is more dominant in an interaction. So what in the heck is the VDR anyway?? The VDR is the time you spend looking at someone while speaking/ time looking while you are listening. a high VDR means you are in charge. A VDR of 1.00 means that the power is balanced. A VDR of less than 1.00 means that you are the less dominant person in the conversation. So, if you want to feel and be percieved as higher status, always look at who you are talking to, and don’t be afraid to look away occasionally while they are speaking.
Speak 20% slower
Most of us are over caffeinated and in a hurry. It is natural that in a fast paced world we all tend to walk, talk and work faster than ever before.
But did you know that speaking quickly doesn’t make you appear smarter and more driven? It has the effect of making you seem hurried, disorganized, and even un-confident (people with low confidence often speak quickly to avoid being interrupted)
Barak Obama in his 2015 state of the union address speaks at between 100 and 130 words per minute.
If you want to learn to speak more slowly and powerfully here is a good exercise, find a paperback, count off 120 words, and by speaking slowly and pausing often make those 100 words last a whole minute. Do this again and again until you have found a way of speaking slowly which feels natural to you.
Keep your hands visible (and calm)
People feel at eases when they can see your hands. It seems that as humans evolved, it became a good idea to check a persons hands for weapons as we met them.
But more than just making sure we set the other persons mind at ease, using your hands well is important because hands which are making low confidence gestures are more off putting than hands which are making high confidence gestures.
Here is your action tip to make your hands convey confidence when you start a conversation, set your hands in a steeple and make sure to come back to that as your default listening position.
Until next time…
New research, published in Organisational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, suggest feelings of disgust lead to increases in deceitful behavior that would benefit the self.
In their first experiment, researchers had participants rate consumer products that are known to elicit a disgust response – such as diapers and diarrhea medicine – or neutral consumer products – such as vitamins and pens. They were then tasked to flip a coin. If it landed on heads, the participants could earn $2. If it landed on tails, there was no promise of money. Some participants were told the reverse. The coin flip was committed alone and participants were later asked to report the result. This presented a dilemma of sorts: the participants could lie, get the US$2 and never be found out.
So what happened when participants were left alone to flip the coin? 63% of the disgusted and 52% of the control participants reported a favorable coin flip. Remembering that odds are 50% for a favorable outcome, researchers concluded it’s clear that the disgusted participants were engaging in higher levels of deception.
In a second experiment, participants were asked to describe either their most disgusting experience or a typical uneventful evening. Those who described their most disgusting experience were nearly twice as likely as the others to lie about solving anagrams in order to obtain more credit for completing a survey. How did the researchers know participants were lying? One of the anagrams was impossible to solve.
The researchers also ran two other experiments to test their theory with the same result: those who felt disgust were more likely to participate in deceitful behavior.
For more details about this study, visit this link. For past blog posts regarding the topic of the emotion of disgust, visit this link.
