Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Forget the Poker Face…It’s All about the Poker Arms

stockvault-playing-cards129094

Photo from StockVault

Everyone always says don’t forget your “poker” face, but a new study suggests that leaving the poker face behind and concentrating on your “poker arms” might have a better pay off.

“Even though professional players may be able to regulate their facial expressions, their arm movements could betray the quality of their poker hand,” the researchers wrote in the journal Psychological Science.

The Telegraph goes on to report on this study that says the are movements of poker players arms can delineate if they have a winning hand.

Researchers, from Tufts University, found that confident poker players (i.e. due to a good hand) were smoother as they placed their bets and 0bservers were able to spot this in only 2 seconds.

Participant’s, non-experts, guesses were poorer than random when based on the player’s faces.  However, based on players’ arm movements the participants were able to be more accurate when detecting deception.

Learn more about emotions and Poker in our past blog  “Are Anxious People Better Poker Players“.

Do you believe you can tell a players hand better from their arms than their face?

Digital Deception

stockvault-writing-sms99215

Courtesy of StockVault

With smartphones dominating social interaction, texting has become a new way of communicating and for the younger generation it is pretty much the only way of communicating.  Phone conversations are a thing of the past and quick, witty vernacular via texting has taken over communication.

But, can we really believe everything that is texted to us – My phone died, I’m almost there, I’m working right now call you later?

A new Study published this week in the journal ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems purports that there are tell tale signs that a person is probably lying when they text.

Time Health & Family reports that researchers at Brigham Young University delved into the topic of digital deception in their “texting” study that tested over 100 college students.  Tom Meservy, co-author of the study commented,

“Digital conversations are a fertile ground for deception because people can easily conceal their identity and their messages often appear credible.  Unfortunately, humans are terrible at detecting deception. We’re creating methods to correct that.“

The Brigham researchers findings are backed by a 2011 study that suggested people are more likely to lie, stretch the truth and omit important information in written communication opposed to face-to-face interactions.

The participants of this study were asked to respond to 30 questions, via text, that were generated by a computer.  The students were directed to lie in half of their responses.   After collecting 1,572 deceitful and 1,590 truthful chat-based responses, researchers found the false responses took 10% percent longer to create and were edited more than the honest messages.

In a past post “The Future of Deception”  Jeff Hancock talks lies as a relationship that we are all involved in and where they will take us in the future.

Do you ‘Stretch the Truth‘ when texting? 

Teaching Lies in Order to Spot Them

Stan Walters, an interview and interrogation expert, is back in our blog with information on the untruths in deception detection courses.

In the video below, he discusses the various ways in which certain courses being taught on deception detection are full of lies themselves.  He focuses on one particular course and goes through the various ways in how their information is not only misguided but false.

His advice:  “Look for empirical evidence…[and] Look at what is [actually] being taught..“

Remember the importance of knowing  exactly where your getting your information from and make sure that it’s credible.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Have you seen impostors out there, and if so what kind of information were they trying to pass off as credible?