There were four main types of interpretations, in no particular order of frequency:

– The first posited that they were clearly having an argument of some kind, and that the woman was frustrated with the conversation and ‘biting her tongue,’ so to speak.

– The second was that the girl had clearly done something wrong, and the man was being stern and disappointed, alternately with or without anger, and the girl was looking away innocently, as you would see an 8-year old in a TV-Sitcom do. (Note that I say ‘girl’ only because this is how they called her within that interpretation.)

– The third was that the woman was recalling some sort of happy memory and thinking of it fondly, after having been triggered to in some way by the conversation.

– The fourth was that the woman was recalling some sort of happy memory and thinking of it fondly, with the man just being an onlooker and having nothing to do with it. (And interpretations of what he is doing vary wildly.)

The first implies the woman is frustrated, the second the woman is dismissive of the man’s concerns, the third implies she is happy, and the fourth imagine she is both happy and not even interacting with the man. These are wildly different interpretations for what should be a pretty clear and concise training exercise.

Hadnagy surely knows that a 90 degree angle is a very safe angle for most people, even within personal or even intimate space – though, of course, this is less the case when there is eye-contact. On YouTube, Apollo Robbins gives a great explanation and demonstration of this. However, I don’t think his potentially not knowing this is the problem. Instead, what was probably glossed over is the fact that the reader makes his own interpretation of the _relevance_ of the angle, and does not necessarily know why they are in that angle in the first place.

Maybe Ben has just approached and is now standing there, frustrated or otherwise, waiting for Selena to stop day-dreaming and be given attention? This explains interpretations 3 and 4.

Maybe Ben is standing in that angle because he is frustrated with Selena, like in interpretations 1 and 2, but in a fifth possible interpretation, she might not even be aware he’s there, angry with her.

In that case, as I believe Hadnagy would agree, it would be entirely the wrong move to approach Selena at all, as you’ve just taken away the attention that Ben couldn’t get – what a horrible situation to be in!

So really, I don’t believe this should be a matter of interpretation, given Hadnagy states it is at least part science, and that is the problem with these ‘caricatures’ or ‘set-up’ photo’s – instead, use real photo’s and describe us the situation after we’ve tried to analyze it. That would’ve been vastly more effective, wouldn’t you agree?

To get back to my original point, analyzing just one situation with every possible interpretation would’ve been vastly preferable to meaninglessly glancing over several – because it would’ve illustrated the inherent flaws arising from lack of proper context and have shown the many ways to incorrectly assess both correctly and incorrectly observed data.

Interestingly, this is similar to what I’ve done here – rather than listing all the bad examples, I raised two examples and dissected them thoroughly. This gives the audience a clearer understanding of what is going on, without overloading them with examples that are meaningless to them, or at worst counterproductive and confusing. It’s an effective teaching method.

That is my first major complaint.

My second complaint has to do with the feeling it instills to a potential student of non-verbal communication within social engineering, which seems to be Hadnagy’s main demographic.

This only applies slightly to myself, and more so to the people I’ve polled, among which were some social workers, counsellors and psychology students. My question was: “If I hadn’t opened with the disclaimer that no answer is wrong, and instead this would’ve been part of an emotional recognition test, within either the learning part of a course of examination of that course, what would you be feeling right now?”

Unanimously, they came to conclusion that they would’ve felt either ‘betrayed’ (by the author), ‘indignant’ (for being told they’re wrong when they’re clearly right) or ‘stupid.’ The ‘stupid’ aspect, I can only assume, comes from the fact that even after relooking at the picture, it was difficult to find a way to rationalize ‘coming on strongly’ and ‘discomfort’ were the only explanation, let alone an intuitive one. This seems completely contrary to ‘Unmasking the Social Engineer’s’ aim to be a teaching tool.

One problem is that it (subconsciously) gives us the impression that either Hadnagy is unaware of simple things that we all should know, or that we’re idiots for not noticing such simple things – a feeling, I feel, that a lot less experienced people will have more, and they will be disappointed by themselves as a result. It leads us to feel dumb, not empowered or enlightened – and fools rather than students.

Of course, I don’t agree that feeling ‘indignant’ here is the intended or expected response, mostly because Hadnagy never tells them anything even remotely capable of making us feel that way, but to reprise an old point: “It doesn’t matter what you say – people will remember how it made them feel.”

My suggestion: either be general enough to not have such obvious exceptions, or be specific when using these examples. Again, a short disclaimer could have fixed this problem, and helped ease the reader.

Maybe they used hyperbolic naming for emotions that are not quite so pronounced, but reasonably, they should not be there at all.

Before I conclude this point, my samples also thought the p.69 image didn’t at all show a “perfect example of a confident man” – but a creepy, weird, ‘downy’ man instead. I can only assume this is due to the awkward angle, or perhaps a quality of the lens. The image is entirely unsettling, and I can’t for the life of me imagine Ekman and Kelly both not realizing this.

Perhaps it’s because they are too busy finding what they know is there, rather than seeing the image, and the book as a whole, as a novel situation from the perspective of the reader – which is a thing everyone does, and three legends are no exception.

Continue Reading – [006] Page Count

This second example is far more jarring, and shows what I meant earlier by ‘caricatures’ and the way they distort the learning experience of the reader. On p.78, we are asked to evaluate a picture of two people that are (presumably) interacting in some way, and asked what it is we see. Well, I wrote down what I saw before reading on:

“She looks away with a look of longing (drifting eyes, a ‘genuine’ smile), so she probably was either elicited to recall a pleasant memory or sharing that memory with the man standing next to her before drifting off. Her head is tilted, which again makes me feel like she is highly entranced by that memory. She is manipulating her wrist, but that could have significance in respect to the memory – pacifying herself, meaning whatever she is thinking of comforts her.

“The man is looking at her with particular interest, and his posture is upright, so he is clearly comfortable in the situation, as is she. He stands in genital framing, at an unintrusive 90 degree angle. The significance of this would probably be better understood after invading this conversation (if it even is one – it is not immediately clear, and it could just be that the man fancies this girl).”

In retrospect, this seems completely plausible and vastly more apparent than the conclusion Hadnagy draws from this and tries to convince us is evident. More specifically, he states ‘Did you notice that Ben is trying to assert his dominance?’ which I don’t agree he necessarily is, mostly because of the angle and the way that Selena seems content with the situation, and ‘She doesn’t look too comfortable with his approach, does she?’ which I’d say she does, and I wouldn’t even necessarily agree it is an approach.

The point is not that I’m right and he’s wrong, or vice versa, the point is that it isn’t clear at all who is right, and why. This is more interpretation than observation.

To illustrate and support my proposition that this is more than just a tangential affair, and rather a fundamental problem, I went out (as I was writing this part of the review) and polled people on what they thought was going on in this image, in particular what emotions they thought the two subjects (Ben and Selena) were feeling. Furthermore, they read none of the text, nor did I brief them, instead debriefing them on the contents of the book and what I was hoping to demonstrate afterwards.

Before we get into their interpretations, I’ll start by saying we saw three big issues show up:

First, the resolution of the images is obviously problematic. It is not clear whether the man is frowning with his left eye (since the skin under the eye seems raised), and this means that it’s unclear what his intentions and emotional state are. (I’ll get back to this in a bit.) This is clearly a limitation of low-resolution black-and-white pictures.

Second, the intentionally acted set-up (for clarity, I presume) actually makes it a lot harder to determine what is going on, because there are certain natural clues that are completely missing. You can tell Ben to act confident, and Selena to act discomforted, but without context it is very difficult to get anything meaningful from this display. If you wanted to know if Selena were truly discomforted, you’d have to talk to them first, which creates a situation where analyzing the situation pre-hand is not relevant anymore.

Third, all of the cues can be explained differently, and it became more a matter of consensus than analysis, more vague than concrete. Upon comparing each raised possibility, all participants agreed that they were all likely – so much so, that they could no longer confidently support their own initial interpretation, even though I made no personal attempts to dissuade them. In fact, when asking groups for their member’s individual opinions, which could be quite different, none seemed to challenge the others’ opinions in the slightest, even if their own opinions were different.

This type of ambiguity in an example exercise is inexcusable.

Note, I might be a skilled persuader, but I did not attempt to persuade them into anything but their cooperation with my poll. In fact, I merely asked them to give feedback on certain other interpretations far after they had completed my request and discussed it amongst themselves. I did not serve as an intermediary in their discussion in any way.

Continue Reading – [005] Four of a Different Kind