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The Humintell Blog June 15, 2012

Spotting Lies: A How to Guide

Experts are not good at detecting deception according to the The Huffington Post and new research conducted by Professor of Applied Social Psychology, Aldert Vrij.

Dr. Vrij reveals that with an average accuracy rate of 56.6%, lies go undetected more than 1/3 of the time!

His latest research suggests that even trained professionals such as police and customs officers are no better than the average person at detecting deception.

Why are trained professionals not good at lie detection?

There are a plethora of reasons why professionals may not display a high accuracy rate for deception detection.  Perhaps,  they are only trained in one area of deception detection such as body language (excluding, micro facial expressions and/or statement analysis).  Perhaps, they are just not trained often enough, that is there is an infrequency to their trainings; therefore, the review of their skills.  It could even be that they were simply not trained properly and there is a misapplication of the skills that they learned.

Detecting inconsistencies in nonverbal behavior (including facial expressions and microexpressions) is a crucial skill that needs to be practiced often.  As with many trainings, including Humitnell’s micro expression training, one should re-visit it often to remain agile in the core principles of that training.

We do not expect our trained soldiers or law enforcement agents to go out into the field without continuing to practice gun safety and execution.  Like many other things in life, deception detection techniques should be practiced  to be able to accurately and efficiently sift the truth from the lies.

Dr. Vrij goes on, in “How to Tell Who is Lying to You”,  to note the two main ways to be a better lie detector are:

1.  The Baseline Method:  There is  no one behavior that is universally characteristic of liars, but when any particular individual starts to stray from the truth, various cognitive, emotional and physiological processes kick in, which are  possible to detect.  However, you can only spot these if you already have the ‘baseline’ of how someone behaves when they are telling the truth

2.  Devil’s Advocate:  Interviewees are first asked questions inviting them to argue in favor of their personal view. This is followed by a Devil’s Advocate question that asks interviewees to argue against their personal view.   The Devil’s Advocate Question is actually what they really believe, but are covering up.  As we think more deeply about, and are more able to generate, reasons that support rather than oppose our beliefs, this leaks out during the answer to the Devil’s Advocate Question.

Dr. Matsumoto’s new book, Nonverbal Communication:  Science and Applications, marries the two worlds of knowing how to detect deception with putting that knowledge into practice.

What do you think about the information in this blog?
What is the top pertinent point that you would share with someone else?

Filed Under: General, Hot Spots, Nonverbal Behavior, Science

The Humintell Blog June 9, 2012

Why You Should Smile at Strangers

A recent LiveScience article highlighted research that suggests that giving strangers a slight smile can make people feel more connected to one another.

At the annual meeting of Society for the Study of Motivation, researchers from Purdue University in Indiana suggested that people who have been acknowledged by a stranger feel more connected to others immediately after the experience than people who have been deliberately ignored.

Eric Wesselmann and his colleagues conducted a study where 239 pedestrians on a busy campus area didn’t even know they were part of a study. They simply passed by someone who acknowledged them politely, acknowledged them with a smile or stared straight through them as if they weren’t even there.

Immediately after this encounter, the unknowing participants were approached by another person who asked them to fill out a survey on social connectedness. The participants had no idea that the stranger who had just passed them was part of this study. A fourth group of participants filled out the survey without ever encountering the stranger at all.

The survey results showed that being pointedly ignored by a stranger had an immediate effect.

Participants who’d gotten the cold shoulder reported feeling more socially disconnected than people who’d gotten acknowledged, whether that acknowledgement came with a smile or not.

People who hadn’t encountered the stranger fell somewhere in the middle.

Researchers suspect that this response is evolutionary. Humans are social animals, adapted for group living, Wesselmann said.

He and his colleagues detailed their results in February in the journal Psychological Science. The abstract to their study entitled To be Looked at as though Air can be found here

Do you smile at strangers on the street? Maybe you should!

Filed Under: Nonverbal Behavior, Science

The Humintell Blog May 19, 2012

Pentagon Research: Narratives Negate Violence?

BBC has reported on the Pentagon’s growing interest in the neurobiology of political violence, a relatively new field that combines neuroscience with more traditional social science-based approaches to understanding human behavior.

One program by Darpa is working on a project, Narrative Networks, that tries to “understand how narratives influence human thoughts and behavior, then apply those findings to a security context in order to address security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution,” according to William Casebeer, the Darpa official leading the work.

If US officials had a device that could advise them what to say, generating a story based on a scientific understanding of the brain’s inner workings to soothe tempers and calm the mood of the population, would it be beneficial to not only the US, but the world?  It can be and is considered by some to be a nonviolent way to create change.

Dr. David Matsumoto, Director of  Humintell & the Director of the Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory at SFSU, has been recruited by another Pentagon initiative, Minerva.  His mission is to conduct scientific research on the role of emotions in inciting political violence.

Dr. Matsumoto and his colleagues are doing this by studying the facial expressions and language used by political leaders to see if those can be used as predictors to  future violence.  He states,

“I think that one of the most logical direct applications of this kind of finding and this line of research [is] to develop sensors that can watch, either monitor the words that are being spoken and/or the non-verbal behaviors that are expressive of those emotions,” he says of the Pentagon’s interest in his work. “I think the development of sensors like that … would be sort of an early warning signal or system [to detect violence].”

Should we celebrate the non-violent, non-confrontational path the government is taking in their effort to ease tensions and violence among the world’s people?

The article goes on to ask a more fundamental and perhaps important question, which is whether such research will actually help the Pentagon convince people that the US military is really there to help them.

“None of the work we are doing, nor anyone else I know in the Narrative Networks group, is about increasing the ability of soldiers or sailors to kill people or to brainwash people,” says Paul Zak, a professor at Claremont Graduate University, who specializes in neuroeconomics, and whose work has been funded by the Darpa program.

Read Montague, a neuroscientist at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute and also a part of the Darpa Narrative Networks Project states,

“I see a device coming that’s going to make suggestions to you, like, a, this situation is getting tense, and, b, here are things you need to do now, I’ll help you as you start talking.  That could be really useful.”

What do you think?  Could this research be beneficial in curbing violent acts?

Filed Under: Nonverbal Behavior, Science

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