Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

“Seeing” Happiness”

© Dana Rothstein | Dreamstime Stock Photos

According to Medical Xpress, if you try to see happiness in the facial expressions of others it can reduce your aggressiveness.

Professors Marcus Munafo and Ian Penton-Voak, from the University of Bristol,  delved into the relationship between the recognition of emotions in ambiguous facial expressions and aggressive thoughts and behavior. They looked at healthy adults and at high-risk adolescents (for committing a crime).

What was the result of the study, published in the journal of Psychological Sciences?

The researchers found that they could modify a person’s bias in emotion recognition and encourage them to see Happiness  by showing participants composite images of happy, angry or emotionally ambiguous facial expressions and then asking them to rate them as happy or angry, which allowed the researchers to establish a baseline for how likely a participant was to see an ambiguous face as angry.

Professors Munafo and Penton-Voak then used the results to encourage some of the participants away from this negativity bias by telling them that some of the ambiguous faces they had previously labelled as angry were in fact happy.

Basically, the study conditioned participants to view ambiguous faces as happy faces too. In doing so many participants reported lower levels of anger and aggression in themselves.

“Our results provide strong evidence that emotion processing plays a causal role in anger and the maintenance of aggressive behavior.  This could potentially lead to novel behavioral treatments in the future,” noted professor Munafo

An interesting fact is that in testing this result further, the researchers found that participants shown only angry faces shifted their perceptions and became more likely to see Happiness in ambiguous faces as well as reporting lower levels of anger and aggression in themselves.
What do you see in regular faces; sadness, anger, discomfort, or happiness? 

Assessing Honesty – Who is Better?

© Phil Date | Dreamstime Stock Photos

The workplace is most often or not an amalgam of varying personalities and talents.  It could be difficult, especially in these competitive times, to get an accurate assessment of an employee’s abilities and competence in just a couple of interview sessions.

Often times prospective employees exaggerate accomplishments and/or experience.  It is very important that the company leader (the one who decides who to hire) make well thought out predictions on how a person will perform based on the limited amount of time they have interacted with them.  Hiring managers must make sure candidates can measure up to the requirements of the job description.

Is it the skeptical manager, who is more often than not suspicious about others, or the trusting manager, who assumes that people for the most part are honest, that is better at evaluating truthfulness?

 The Washington Post reported on a study performed by Psychologists Nancy Carter and Mark Weber.

They presented business professionals with a scenario about an organization struggling with dishonesty in its hiring interviews. They had the chance to choose one of two highly competent senior managers to be the company’s job interviewer. The major difference between the two managers wasn’t experience or skill, it was a matter of personality: one manager was skeptical and suspicious, whereas the other manager had a habit of trusting others.

Eighty-five percent chose the skeptical manager to make the hiring decisions, expecting the trusting manager to be naïve and easily duped.

As we know through research Evaluating Truthfulness is a difficult task to master.  Experienced experts continue to brush up on their skills to stay fresh and on top of their game.  Past research has shown that the average person is no better than chance at detecting deception.

So, who is the better lie detector during interviews?

Contrary to popular belief, it is the skeptics that are duped more often than not.   The more trusting evaluators better identified the liars among the group than the skeptics did, and were also less likely to hire those liars.

Why would this be? According to Carter and Weber, it is that lie-detection skills cause people to become more trusting. If you’re good at spotting lies, you need to worry less about being deceived by others, because you can often catch them in the act.  Another possibility is that by trusting others, we sharpen our skills in reading people.

Want to brush up on your Deception Detection Skills?
Join our Evaluating Truthfulness LIVE Webinar, April 27 2013 11-1 pm PST. 

Expressed Sadness

On March 21st 2013 a horrific and tragic event took place in Brunswick, Georgia.

A 13-month old baby boy was shot in the face in a robbery attempt at nine in the morning.  An even more astounding fact in the case is that the assailants were two young kids, the oldest originally thought to be around 15 -years old.

The link below is to a short video before the suspects were caught and show West and her husband’s very raw, genuine emotions.

The video above is of the suspects in court.  The oldest suspect in the case is 17 years old and his cohort only 15.  Neither suspect entered a plea.

Sherry West, baby Antonio’s mom said, “I just hope, you know, that the shooter dies. I mean, I had to watch my baby die and I want him to die. A life for a life.”

Immediately after the shooting, detectives searched West’s home for a gun and conducted gun residue tests on both her and the baby’s father, West said, adding that the tests were negative and the search did not turn up a gun.