Social Engineering Blogs

Practical Persuasion Blog July 21, 2013

Another Dating/Seduction Blog You Should Be Reading

In Five Dating/Seduction Blogs You Should Be Reading, we introduced you to big-name bloggers Roissy, Susan Walsh, Mark Manson, Rollo Tomassi, and the anonymous author of The Rules Revisited, popular writers whose work we’d been following long before we started our own blog. But there’s another blogger, wholly unique from these, that we never knew existed until we decided to set up our shop in WordPress. His name is Kenny, and you should be reading him. Here’s why:

Kenny’s PUA Thoughts: “Get Laid By Being Social” (@SocialKenny)

We didn’t discover Kenny, of course. He’s been around (no pun intended). No, he discovered us. But we got hooked on his blog immediately, and now we probably spend more time reading and debating his work than all the Big Five blogs’ newest releases combined.

Kenny does three things very well, things rare in blogs from his genre (and blogs in general these days); 1. He has original opinions and backs them up with documented successes, past and present; 2. He admits mistakes and documents them, too, putting them up for all to see; and, 3. He manages to do all this on the move, truly living up to his tagline.

Kenny has unique opinions, which is refreshing. Big blogs and other collaborative sites like Reddit sometimes devolve, turning from open forums to noisy echo chambers, constantly rehashing and reusing the same tired old ideas, censoring or attacking anyone who tries to break the cycle. Kenny’s blog is the anti-echo chamber. His comment threads are still alive (although sometimes we wonder what would happen if Kenny and all his commenters got together for drinks…). How does he keep it going? If you have a question, he will answer it. If you want to disagree, he’ll hear you out. And if you comment, he’ll go out of his way to comment back. That’s blogging, people. We’ve taken that lesson to heart.

Standing by failures and mistakes isn’t a common virtue in the blogosphere, but doing so proves a blogger is authentic, not just another bullshitter. This is especially true for PUA blogs, because some nights you go home alone even though you talked smooth, looked good, and sent just the right signals. It’s a statistical inevitability. After all, when dealing with people, nothing is certain. Unfortunately, many bloggers in this field refuse to show how, why, or when they fail. To them, game shall overcome. “If you fail,” they seem to say, “well, then it’s probably because you’re a beta pussy-boy.” You won’t see Kenny doing that shit. It doesn’t matter to him when he gets thrown out of a bar, has a shitty wingman who ruins his game for three consecutive weeks, or gets screwed over by unfavorable logistics. You’re going to see all of it…and be wiser for it afterwards.

Finally, the strongest aspect of Kenny’s blog is the evidence. He records everything, including himself. Many other bloggers give out tons of advice, but are as scopophobic as “Rick,” the famed operator of Backroom Casting Couch. You never see their names or their faces. Now, don’t get us wrong; we sympathize. HR can fire you for practically anything these days, and we suspect filming one-night-stands and bashing feminism are on many companies’ lists of terminable offenses. But still, we can’t help but admire bloggers that put everything on the line for what they believe, society be damned,* and we can always get behind a blog that eschews op-eds and rambling diatribes.

In addition to these three points, Kenny’s site is packed with content. You can find posts on a wide variety of topics other than pickup. Also, he has a YouTube channel and a podcast. And remember, if you have any questions to ask or insights to share, he’ll actually respond, so feel free.

* We personally don’t advise doing this.

The Ekman Nursing Student Study

Before reading this post, we highly suggest that you read Intro to Deception – Deceptive Dimensions.

Effective deception is an indispensable professional skill. Whatever career you’re pursuing, you will need to lie frequently and convincingly – first to get in, then to stay in, and finally, to rise to the top. But the list of professions that actually teach lying are few. Only lawyers, sales reps, PR managers, and politicians – in other words, society’s quintessential liars – receive truly rigorous training in the science of deception. The average grunt, unfortunately, learns to to lie on the job, in fits and starts, and those who don’t quickly learn quickly disappear.

In Deceptive Dimensions, we introduced you to Paul Ekman’s theory of nonverbal deception. In this post, we’ll examine another Ekman study, one of the first of its kind ever conducted. Not only do the findings largely support the validity of the Ekman model, but it also demonstrates how necessary lying is, even in the most unlikely job fields.

The Study

ER nurses, as some of you may know all too well, are not just assistants for doctors and surgeons; they’re consummate liars. No matter how devastating the trauma or how gruesome the scene, the nurse who greets the victims’ panicking friends and family at the hospital must convey reassurance. If she fails, emotional breakdown results. To keep chaos out of the waiting room, good nurses are quick to lie, and they lie well.

In 1974, Paul Ekman designed psychology’s first nonverbal deception experiment around this fact. Let’s use his deceptive dimensions to break it down.

Deceivers: Nursing students. They’re the subjects in this experiment, and to examine their nonverbal deception behavior, Ekman needs them to lie. The nurses view two positive and two negative film clips, and while the final report doesn’t tell us what the positive videos displayed, the details of the negative videos are vivid: live amputations and scenes of third-degree burn victims receiving emergency treatment, exactly the kinds of scenes ER nurses see every day. Ekman instructs the students to lie and describe the first of these gruesome videos as pleasant, the kind they would feel comfortable showing to small children.

Detector: Naive interviewer. While the nurses are watching their four videos, an interviewer grills them. She asks questions such as, “What kinds of feelings are you having right now?” and, “What kind of mood does the film create?.” For good measure, Ekman instructs her to turn up the heat by asking, “Are you really telling the truth?” and, “Do you think I believe you?”

Stakes: Job success. Ekman convinces the nurses from the very beginning that their success in nursing school and in their future careers depends upon their ability to deceive the interviewer. Ekman explains that if they can convince her they’re seeing pleasant images when in fact they’re witnessing horrible pain, suffering, and bloodletting, then they’re ahead of the curve, already equipped to do the same when under pressure from prying patient families. The Dean of the School of Nursing herself invites them to participate, cloaking the project in her official title, and tells them that prior research showed successful nursing candidates had already passed this ordeal. Not one subject senses the experiment. In their minds, it’s the real deal.

Salience: High, symmetrical. As if the students aren’t under enough pressure, Ekman stacks the deck against them by telling the interviewer to be alert. Some of these nurses will lie to you, he says; try to figure out who. The nurses weren’t completely at a loss, though; they, too, are informed that the interviewer is trying to catch them. But this information comes at a hefty cognitive price; now they must monitor their own internal feedback and interpret their interviewer’s external feedback – difficult tasks by themselves, much more so when done simultaneously.

Leakage: Facial expressions and body language. After the interviews are finished, Ekman sends secret recordings taken by hidden cameras to observers who then look for leakage. Ekman edits the tapes to be mute and to display either the faces or the bodies of the nurses, never both. (As in his prior article, he expects observers to find leakage more accurately in body language than in facial expressions, so separating the two regions is necessary; leaving them combined would confound the results.) First, the observers rate one facial clip and one body clip for half the nurses in the experiment as deceptive or honest. Then, the observers rate the remaining clips the same way, but only after seeing and analyzing two “baseline” clips for each nurse.

Results

In Task A, the observer’s were unable to accurately detect deception in either the face or the body (the group’s success as a whole was random, or nearly 50/50.) Once they had become acquainted with the subjects’ baseline body language in Task B, though, their accuracy jumped for detecting leakage in this category, from 50/50 to 64/36. Nonetheless, even after analyzing the subjects’ baseline facial expressions, they were still unable to detect facial deception; their collective success rate remained random.

Ekman admits that the results “only partially” support his hypothesis. Why “partially?” Because he originally argued that an untrained observer could pick a deceiver through his or her body language alone, excluding all other stimuli. But though the results prove his hypothesis wrong, the most plausible explanation – that observers are terrible at reading body language, either because they just are or because they haven’t practiced it – actually supports his overall argument. We spend so much time looking for lies in faces that the remaining 95.5% of a liar’s body can rob us blind. Its classic misdirection, and it seems to work.

Cause for Relief, Cause for Concern

We’ve said before that you’re probably already a very good liar. Lying is instinctual, reflexive, and after years of practice and repetition, your skills now are beyond the days of your youth. So far, Ekman’s research teaches us that lying is easy (or should be, anyway) because 1. people can’t read your facial expressions; and 2. people always look at your face to find lies. For small, mundane white-lies (technically speaking, these are called asymmetrical/low-salience lies), this is probably true.

But the results of this study should worry you if your lie is life-or-death. The pressure under which Ekman placed these nurses was intense; his scenario forced them into a symmetrical/high-salience scenario intended to squeeze and wring as much deception leakage out of them as possible (5 nurses out of the original 22 cracked and confessed, by the way.) Under observation, the tapes in which they were truthful were mistakenly mislabeled as dishonest half of the time, with no identifiable pattern. This is terrible news. If you screw up big time at work, your livelihood is at the mercy of a coin toss. For big lies, you must lie better, plain and simple.

To Lie Is To Succeed

If you need any convincing that successful high-stakes lying is a skill everyone should learn and practice, consider the following:

“It was reported in the Method section that the subjects had been told that behavior in the honest-deceptive session was relevant to success in nursing…At the time, such claims were based largely on conjecture…The results now show that this is very likely the case…the supervisors’ ratings of the subject’s work with patients one year later was positively correlated with the subject’s being a successful facial deceiver…”

Now, we all know correlation does not imply causation. But we can see where this is headed.

Sources

Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1974). Detecting deception from the body or face. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29(3), 288-298.

The Social Influence Consulting Group Blog July 21, 2013

Dealing with Fear

Have you ever met someone you can honestly say was experiencing fear? In dealing with the concept of fear lets step away from the overused acronym, FEAR: False Evidence Appearing Real. Instead lets look to the science of emotion and understand that fear is triggered by the threat of physical or psychological harm. Research shows us that the expression of fear communicates that we want to reduce the threat; real or perceived.

It is worth noting that fear is one of the most commonly experienced emotions in the workplaces of today. Whether someone is fearful of missing a deadline, getting in trouble for breaking the printer or losing their job, there are multiple expressions of fear in every workplace, every day.

So what does this have to do with the Science of Persuasion?

If someone is fearful, if they are feeling under threat, this is an opportunity for you to influence them. To change their behaviour or the way they consider a particular person, issue or event. If you do not recognise and deal with the emotion of fear appropriately it can potentially be dangerous as the person reacts against the situation, engaging the fight or flight response to avoid or reduce the perceived harm.

Therefore it is important we possess the ability to detect and identify fear. If left untreated the person could easily react against you, as a result of the fear, and shutdown any suggestions you may make.

As sleuths of influence therefore we want to recognise that fear is present and that we have an opportunity to influence others as a result.

Firstly, we know that people are motivated to take action when an opportunity is rare or dwindling in availability; better known as the Principle of Scarcity. Unfortunately however, in communicating what people stand to lose they can sometimes become fearful because of the gravity of the loss. Therefore if you are communicating messages that could create fear through highlighting what people stand to lose, ensure that you always provide clear steps of how to remedy the situation, i.e. provide them with the clear and active steps of how to reduce the threat and in turn reduce the fight/flight response.

Secondly we have another tool at our disposal and it is through the second of the persuasion bookends – Reciprocity. The Principle of Reciprocity says that people feel obliged to give back to those who have given to them first. However we also know that by going first and investing in others we open up a new relationship where one may not have existed previously; we can repair a relationship that is less than optimal; or we can use it just to maintain the relationship at a level we would like.

By recognising that someone feels under threat and providing them the gift of your time to discuss the problem; your experience to help them deal with it; understanding due to the nature of the situation; or even resources to eliminate the threat; by investing in others you assist them in reducing the threat and thereby help them deal with their fear.

In some negotiation programs it is taught that when you detect fear this is an opportunity to hammer home your advantage and seize whatever you can. However I would suggest that instead of backing the other person into a corner, consider the shared goals you have and rather than hammer home an advantage, instead provide a concession, offer the opposing party an opportunity to save face or get something they need. This will pay greater dividends in the overall relationship moving forward rather than simply winning this deal. We have all heard of

Win the battle but lose the war!

One of the basic drivers of humanity is, we are wired to give, to receive and to repay. Therefore if we help someone deal with their fear it is likely they will invest in us at a time we need assistance. If we take this opportunity to make their life worse, beware – “like begets like”. If you nail someone to the wall today or make them feel bad, you can guarantee that when given the opportunity to assist you or return in kind, you may just find yourself on the receiving end.

As a sleuth of influence, you have an opportunity to invest in others, create strong relationships and allow others to flourish. By helping others in successfully dealing with fear you will create a strong and willing ally, one that will be by your side when you are the one seeking to reduce the threat of physical or psychological harm.

The choice is yours.

Have you ever experienced fear? How did you deal with it? Could you have done with the gift of someone’s time or understanding? Let me know your thoughts….