Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

A Truly Merry Holiday

As holiday season approaches, many of us must reflect on what exactly will make the holidays most joyous.

In a fascinating study from 2002, a pair of researchers asked over a hundred people about their stress and happiness during the holidays, including questions about consumption behavior. They found that family-based or religious celebrations tended to result in the greatest levels of happiness, as opposed to materialist consumption practices.

While the holidays, and especially in the United States, Christmas have long and complicated histories, Drs. Tim Kassier and Kennon Sheldon explain how they tie together many different strands of tradition.

These include, of course, religious practices, rooted both in Christianity but in a variety of other faiths, but that these practices have also been tied to secular celebrations of Santa Claus, for instance. This isn’t even including the commercialist and materialist elements of the modern holiday season.

It is this historical and cultural framework that motivated their survey study. Specifically, they interviewed participants as to how they spent their Christmas, such as volunteering, worshipping, spending time with family, or exchanging/purchasing gifts.

Similarly, participants were also asked more detailed questions about how much money they spent on gifts and material consumption, how much they donated, and what the material value was of gifts that they had received.

Finally, the researchers inquired into questions of environmental consumption, such as trash produced or energy consumed as a part of their holiday practices. Perhaps counter-intuitively, they theorized that the more sustainable participants’ practices were, the happier they would end up feeling around the holidays.

Each of these questions was included in quantifiable measures in order to test the extent to which they predicted a happier or less pleasant Christmas season. Overall, most people reported a generally satisfactory Christmas, while just under half reported that they experienced a great deal of stress.

In terms of what tended to predict a better holiday, each of the measures of family engagement and religious activity were strong positive predictors.  This may be due to the inherent satisfaction of either activity, or out of the feeling that people are conforming to the socially expected emphasis of the holiday.

However, this latter point is undermined by the strong social pressures to engage in a consumptive and materially-focused holiday season. Neither expenditure, nor receipt, or great sums of gifts consistently predicted positive experiences. Often, the opposite was true. Moreover, environmentally sustainable practices tended to predict positive experiences.

This is not to tell you how to spend your holiday, of course, but given the extreme levels of stress that so many people experience around holidays, this will hopefully give you some sense as to what relieves the stress of others and promotes their happiness.

Cultural Interview Lessons From the Road

Republished with permission from WZ

By Chris Norris, CFI

The WZ Non-Confrontational Interview method has been a part of my career for over 28 years now, and I’m happy to say that I’ve been working for WZ for 19 years. Through the years much has changed for both myself and WZ. One of the biggest changes for WZ is the huge International reach we now provide with our training classes. Did you know WZ has operations in Latin America, UK and Europe?

The International division of WZ has provided interview training courses on six continents (the penguins are next!) and to delegates from over 140 countries! I personally have taught classes translated to French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, German, Mandarin and Arabic. Regardless of your travels, your organization’s global reach or simply the need to interview someone from another country, there is always one common thread to interviewing and teaching interview tactics around the world; the need to develop rapport.

When training Internationally, I always ask attendees, “What makes a good interviewer?” A variety of topics, traits, and characteristics often arise, but one response consistently comes forward no matter what country I’m in; the ability to build rapport. So, what is rapport? Rapport is creating a relationship in a very short period of time. How do you build rapport? Let’s take some lessons from my travels to help understand how to build rapport in a multi-national and multi-cultural environment.

Understand local culture

Understanding a bit about the culture of your subject will help you to understand the dos and don’ts of most interviews. Understanding simple characteristics like anticipated spacial proxemics, eye contact, posturing, potential fears, etc. will benefit your interview and your ability to develop rapport.

I remember my first trip to Kabul, Afghanistan. I was teaching a class of Afghan nationals working in an investigative capacity for the US Government. During the class I asked the group to shut their workbooks, as it was time for teacher to become student. I told them I wanted to talk about their culture and learn about them. We had a great discussion and it altered my training a bit, increasing our interaction and their understanding of the WZ method.

Learning everything you can about someone’s cultural norms and characteristics from on-line resources like the US Department of State can prove to be beneficial, but the best resource is simply talking to people. Getting information from someone raised in that culture can help you to prepare and be more effective in the interview room. Allow them to tell you some common characteristics to anticipate during the interview and even potential fears they may possess; which may be very different than your own.

Learn the language

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying try to conduct an interview in another language you just learned from a “Russian for Dummies” book. I mean, make an effort to say simple phrases and greetings. I’ve always made a point to learn how to say ‘hello’, ‘thank you’, ‘good-bye’, etc. in the local language. This simple, effortless task has huge meaning and is a great way to begin an interaction.

I’ve often been asked the question, “Aren’t people in country X typically rude to Americans?” My reply, “I’ve never experienced that…” and I believe is based upon me starting any greeting with “Buenos dias / Guten-tag / Bonjour / Hi-ya”. I remember once in Koln, Germany I approached an older gentleman sitting in a chair in an open square. In German, I said, “Hi, I’m sorry but I don’t speak German well, do you speak English?” He answered in German and I repeated myself. This happened a couple times until he said in clear English with a big belly laugh, “I said, your German is so good, why must I speak to you in English!?” We laughed and he was quite helpful, and my effort to know a bit of his language helped with rapport in that interaction. In fact, he walked me to my destination and made sure the person I was looking for knew that I only spoke a bit of German.

Know a few colloquialisms

“Yes Eugene it’s a real word!” During a conversation with my brother-in-law (Eugene) I was talking about colloquial language and colloquialisms. His response was “Nice made up word bro!” He didn’t believe either word was real or that most people are able to pronounce them correctly. Colloquial expressions vary from region to region and are an important way people identify with each other. Funny, how he now fits “colloquial” into his conversations and will send me a text afterwards to let me know he used the word!

The use of normal language and understanding of local phrases and more informal speech helps to connect with your subject. If you are interviewing your subject in English, understand some local colloquial English phrases; even if English is a second language. Remember, as a point of rapport, we tend to like people like ourselves. When you are using some colloquial phrases or words you begin to build a bit of a bond and present yourself as being more like your subject.

I’ve learned that telling someone in Ireland that dinner was “grand” or replying with a “thanks a million” can go a long way. Even telling someone I was “knackered” while living in the UK showed I was willing to immerse myself into local customs. Listen carefully and think about mimicking your subject; not patronizing, just altering your presentation and word choices. Taking time to adjust your speech and use simple colloquial phrases will create a more natural communication platform with your subject.

Become more animated

The use of non-verbal communication from an interviewer’s perspective is often overlooked. Think about animating your communication with more illustrators and body posturing that is more engaging. Your use of animation can help overcome many language or communication barriers you may experience. Think about animating your voice as well, putting emphasis on good and bad points and expressing empathy through your tone. These points will add clarity to your message.
Once, on a trip to Egypt, I was trying to order dinner with someone who spoke very little English. By using simple words (not slowing my speech or talking louder) and becoming more animated I was able to describe to him what I wanted. The order was placed and it was one of the best shawarma wraps I’ve ever had…nice and spicy, just the way I like it!

Smile!

One of the most important non-verbal communication tactics you can apply to your interviews is a simple smile. Smile when you initially greet the person. Smile when you begin the interview and attempt to develop rapport. Heck, you might even smile when you ask those difficult questions. Smiling in most cultures creates a connection and reflects and openness on your part. Smiling can defuse confusion, resistance and agitation. I’ve been fortunate enough to smile in 70 different countries in my life. Trust me when I tell you, a smile goes a long way to creating a bond.

The reason these tactics work in terms of rapport-building is they help you share a bit more common bond; even though you might be from different cultures and parts of the world. You begin to develop a sense of who the individual is and you share common traits. By sharing common traits and interests, you tend to build rapport because you become much more like them than they realize. Giving someone an opportunity to discover a common interest with you helps you build that relationship in a very short period of time. It helps you build rapport.

To interact more effectively with people from different cultures, check out our IntelliCulture course!

Universal Laughter and Deception

Is laughter recognized in the same way across cultures? And, if so, can we tell if people in different cultures are faking their laughter?

This is exactly what a team of researchers attempted to answer in a recent publication in Psychological Science. An astoundingly large group of 31 researchers sought to analyze reactions to laughter in 21 societies across six regions in the world. Because laughter is practiced in some form in all cultures, they wanted to know if the subtle cues that tell whether the laughter is real or fake also hold universally.

Fundamentally, they hoped to explore what such universality means for early evolutionary uses of laughter, which they see as basically signaling affiliation or a desire to cooperate. Listeners should be able to note whether the laughter was really an effort to signal this affiliation, or if it was false. This is the distinction between genuine spontaneous laughter and non-genuine volitional laughter.

This is not to say that volitional laughter must be deceptive. Instead, volitional laughs can be used to convey the recognition of a need for cooperation or other social cues. The study authors suggest that this is actually the more common usage of volitional or non-genuine laughter.

If laughter has this deep evolutionary grounding, then it should not matter what culture somebody is from for them to be able to make the distinction. Past research has found that spontaneous and volitional laughter are substantively different, after all.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers asked people as far flung as Los Angeles, Central Europe, Iran, India, and Japan to participate in the study, totaling up to 884 participants. These participants were then exposed to audio recordings that contained either spontaneous or volitional laughter and were asked to identify each as either fake or genuine.

Overall, people could reliably make the distinction, noting changes in intensity or higher pitch in the laugh. This all suggests that listeners pick up on subtle emotional variation in laughter. While past research has found that people are good at this within their culture, this is certainly a profound extension.

There is a lot to learn from this study in terms of how to better read people and detect deception. Initially, it is pretty amazing that people are able to note whether the laughter is a lie or not. As we have noted, deception detection relies closely on comparing people’s behavior to their baseline. Thus, the familiarity that assists lie detection is completely lost in those audio clips.

That said, it does fit with previous research finding that people can rank spoken voices accurately based on their intuition that the speaker is likely to commit infidelity.

Most importantly, perhaps, is the way this study helps tie laughter into a sense of universal emotional expression. While joy is a universal basic emotion, laughter need not be synonymous with joy. However, this research helps show us that laughter, like gestures of triumph, can be a universal expression.