Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Statement Analysis In Cyber Space

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Courtesy of StockVault

Ever wonder if the person on the other end of a chat room or email really can’t meet with you for that lunch date OR if they really didn’t receive the email you sent a few days (or weeks) ago?

Well, The Wall Street Journal interviewed Defense Intelligence Agency senior officer Tyler Cohen Wood to discuss how to tell if someone is lying to you when your not interacting on a face-to-face basis.

There is always room for ambiguity and misunderstanding when communication is conducted in spurts and is written rather than face-to-face.  This room for “error” is due to the lack of nonverbal behavior signals called Gestures.  When we communicate face-to-face most of what we say is communicated not in the words but by our body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice and gestures.

According to the article, research has shown that most of us tend to be be suspicious of information we receive online but override our suspicions and trust the information anyway. Experts call this our “truth bias.”

We often have powerful emotional reasons to believe what someone is telling us. We really want to believe the message from the cutie on the dating site is real. Ditto the text saying our spouse is working late.

Ms. Cohen Wood notes, “The majority of people prefer to tell the truth.  That’s why when they are lying, the truth is going to leak out.” She notes that using a modified version of statement analysis will help a person sort out the truths from the untruths.

Some of the things to look for are below:

1) Pay attention to a person’s use of emphatic language. It doesn’t necessarily mean he or she is lying, but rather that he or she really wants you to believe what is being said. This is also the case when a person keeps saying the same thing over and over in slightly different ways.

2)Look for language that distances the writer from the intended reader. That is they omit personal pronouns and references to themselves from a story. Ex: Say the person receives the following text, “Hey I had a great time last night, did you?” and they reply, “Last night was fun.”

3) Watch out for is the unanswered question. You ask, and the other person hedges or changes the subject. Most likely, the person doesn’t like saying no, or doesn’t want to hurt your feelings. But he or she also may also be keeping something from you.

4) Noncommittal statements are red flags—”pretty sure,” “probably,” “must have” and, my least favorite, “maybe.” “These words leave the person an out,“ Ms. Cohen Wood says.

5) Qualifying statements, are another potential tell. Expressions such as “to be honest,” “there is nothing to worry about,” “I hate to tell you this”—often signal that the person is uncomfortable with his or her next statement.

6) Tense Hopping:  Someone describing an event that happened in the past usually uses the past tense. But if midway through the story the person starts fabricating, that material plays out in his or her head and leads to a switch to the present tense.

Ms. Cohen Wood notes that all of this also relies on the person’s baseline behavior.  You have to the norm for someone before you can detect that they are veering away from it, which is a sign that there is more to the story than is being told.

Want to Learn more about Reading Gestures and Nonverbal Communication? 
Attend our “The World of Gestures” LIVE Webinar hosted by psychologist Dr. David Matsumoto this Saturday June 7th at 10:00am PST.

Nascent Facial Images

Fetal imaging has grown slowly but surely over the last 2 decades.  Today we have 4D imaging that shows unborn babies in surprisingly great detail.  According to new research reported on by Mail Online, babies begin practicing their facial expressions such as smiling 16 weeks before they are born.

The study led by psychologists at Durham University, monitored the development of the unborn infants’ emotional and language abilities.  Their findings are published in the journal Physiology and Behaviour.

The researchers took ultrasound scans of 15 healthy fetuses at regular intervals between 24 and 36 weeks of pregnancy. Using 4D scans, that can capture frame-by-frame pictures, the scientists tracked the fetuses’ mouth movements and compared them to the development of the different parts of their brains.  The right side of the human brain is related to emotional skills and controls the left-sided mouth movements, whereas the left side of the brain is linked to language skills, and controls the right-hand side of the mouth.  The researchers found that the mouth movements they tracked were significantly biased towards emotional left-sided movements.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Their findings suggest that babies refine the neurological ability to show emotion very early in their development.  Previous research into the development of babies between five and 12 months of age has shown that they use the right side of their mouth when babbling, suggesting that the left part of their brain is specialized for language.  Lead author Dr Nadja Reissland noted:

 ”As the left hemisphere of the brain is larger in fetuses from 22 weeks you would expect to see that the right side of the child’s face is more expressive, but we found the opposite.  What our research shows is that while both right and left mouth openings increased as the fetus grew, there was a consistent bias towards left-sided mouth openings.  This suggests that babies are more neurologically prepared to use the emotionally expressive side of their face and that the neurological preparedness to use language develops later when it is needed.“

Psychologists say the images show infants practicing mouth movements (which express their emotions) that they will need after birth to bond with their parents.

Can You Beat the Odds?

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Courtesy of StockVault

     Do you think you have an addictive personality?  No what about when it comes to games of chance are you fooled by the odds in your head?

New research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS reports that an area of the brain thought to be important for emotion may be hyperactive in gambling addicts. People who suffer damage to this area – the insula – do not appear to experience the distorted thinking that spurs people to keep gambling.

Dr. Luke Clark, of the University of Cambridge, and colleagues set out to explore whether there might be a neurological explanation for the erroneous beliefs seen in problem gambling. Medical News Today reports that to do this Dr. Clark and colleagues needed to examine patients with brain injury, as he explains:

“While neuroimaging studies can tell us a great deal about the brain’s response to complex events, it’s only by studying patients with brain injury that we can see if a brain region is actually needed to perform a given task.“

The researchers recruited patients with injuries to one of three different parts of the brain – the insula, the amygdala or the ventromedial prefrontal cortex – and invited them to play two different gambling games: one using a slot machine and another using a roulette wheel.

The slot machine game was designed to deliver wins and near misses, such as a near jackpot where one of the cherries is just one place above or below the winning line. The roulette game just involved red or black predictions to bring out the gambler’s fallacy (i.e. assuming the chances of black are higher if there has been a run of reds).

For comparison, the researchers also invited patients with injuries to other parts of the brain and healthy volunteers to play the gambling games as well.

Many of us who play the lottery or the occasional game on a slot machine or roulette wheel have felt the hope that is reflected in thoughts like – “I didn’t win this time, so I am bound to win next time.“  Problem gamblers seem to be more susceptible to this distorted thinking – what the researchers describe as “distorted psychological processing of random sequences (the gambler’s fallacy) and unrewarded outcomes that fall close to a jackpot (near misses).”

Many of experience the gambler’s fallacy when we toss a coin and get 10 heads in a row. There is a natural tendency to believe the odds of tossing a tails next time is higher. Yet while it feels hard to believe, the odds are exactly the same for the 11th toss, even after 10 heads in a row, as they were for the first – the chance of tossing tails is still 50-50.

The “near misses” distorted thinking is the kind that makes us believe that because we just missed the jackpot this time, it means we are more likely to hit it next time or in the future.

The results showed that only participants with intact insulas showed signs of cognitive distortion. They were more motivated to continue playing after near misses (compared with after full misses) on the slot machine, and they were also more likely to choose either color less after longer runs of that color on the roulette game.

This was not the case in those participants who had suffered damage to the insula, suggesting the damage had abolished the tendency to the type of distorted thinking that problem gamblers are more prone to.

Dr. Clark says the finding leads them to believe “the insula could be hyperactive in problem gamblers, making them more susceptible to these errors of thinking.“