Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Chimps Chuckle, Smile Much Like Humans Do: Photos

2015-06-22_12-20-33By Jennifer Viegas for Discovery News

Laughs and smiles in chimps turn out to be far more human-like than previously thought and they date to at least 5 million years ago, suggests a new study on chimpanzee facial expressions and vocalizations.

Laughter is not 100 percent identical between the two primates, but people who hear a chuckling chimp usually have little trouble figuring out what the sound generally means.

Chimps go “h-h-h,” while humans sound more like “ha-ha-ha” or “he-he-he,” said Marina Davila Ross, a senior lecturer in the University of Portsmouth’s Department of Psychology and lead author of the study in PLOS ONE.

Then there is the flexibility of the sounds and related expressions.

“Chimpanzees, like humans, can produce their facial expressions free from their vocalizations,” Ross explained. “This ability is important for humans. For instance, it allows us to add a smile while talking or laughing, and we can also produce smiles silently. Until now, we did not know that non-human primates also have this ability.”

It’s even possible that the skills first emerged in the common ancestor of chimps and humans.

Read more on this fascinating topics and see more pictures here!

Past Blog: 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!

An Education in How to Apply Persuasion to a School Levy

Many years ago I wrote a blog post that was one of my best read. It even caught the attention of Jeffrey Gitomer and he ran it in his weekly Caffeine Ezine. The article was called 700,000 Great Reasons to Use Yellow Sticky Notes. It showed how we took a concept from the book Yes: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive and implemented it to recover from a $700,000 mistake quickly.The person I worked with to make that happen was our home office accounting manager Steve Ruble. Steve recently told me he was taking the concept of personalizing information into a school levy campaign in his town. He said if the levy failed there would be many more cuts than residents realized. Being a big school supporter and having children in the school system, Steve had a vested interest in making sure this didn’t happen. The odds were against the levy as none had passed since 2010.Working with other supporters of the school levy they were able to identify 2,000 people who hadn’t voted in the last levy ballot. A frequently asked questions (FAQs) flier was delivered to these people. On the FAQ was a section highlighted in yellow that read, “Please Vote Yes.” Steve personally signed all 2,000, writing “Thank You” next to the highlighted section. Now you might be thinking something as trivial as a personalized note would have no effect on your decision to vote, let alone to vote yes on the levy. You would not be alone in that thought, but much of persuasion happens at the subconscious level, meaning it impacts you without you actively thinking about it. In the studies cited in Yes,both times signed sticky notes were used the response rate doubled. When a hand written note was used without a sticky note the response rate was still 33% higher. You can’t explain away those results in a controlled experiment.Back to my friend Steve – he had seen the difference it makes to personalize requests to our agents when it came to money and he knew it worked. That’s why he made sure the Please Vote Yes was highlighted in yellow and that’s why he endured writer’s cramp to sign 2,000 FAQs!Quite often elections come down to a few percentage points and in small towns that might mean a few hundred swing voters can make the difference. In Steve’s case the levy passed by a whopping 74% to 26% margin! Did the personalization – an application of the principle of reciprocity – make all the difference? Perhaps not all the difference, but Steve knew it could be a big part of the difference they would need to pass the levy and he was wise enough not to let the opportunity slip by.Whenever you want to persuade someone – to get them to do something they’re not doing at the moment – take a moment to personalize your request and your odds of hearing yes will be much better.Brian Ahearn, CMCT® Chief Influence Officer influencePEOPLE Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.