Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

To Lie or not to Lie, that is the Question

Lying is as old as humans and research has confirmed that we learn to lie at a very young age.  Studies have also suggested that the average person lies several times a day. So it’s not surprising, then, that lie detection has a long history.

“By this method [Middle Age’s thinking that physical torture elicits truth], the robust will escape, and the feeble be condemned.  These are the inconveniences of this pretended test of truth,”  wrote Italian Enlightenment thinker, Cesare Beccaria.

See the videos below for Part 1 and Part 2 of  Jimmy Kimmel’s Lie Detector Series for some comic relief to your day.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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?
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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!