By Dr. David Matsumoto

As the target article mentions, many security measures can and should be put in place in a multi-layer approach to comprehensive security. Security professionals should consider as many different possibilities as possible in order to provide maximum security in order to harden targets. Hardening targets lessens the possibility of being attacked in the first place and makes responses to attacks when they happen more effective. Hardening targets also helps prevent attacks from happening because perpetrators often choose softer targets. All such measures contribute to being what is known as “left of bang” – assessing threats and mitigating them before an incident occurs.

Many (but not all) of the possible layers of security to consider involve the assessment of behavior. These can include the behaviors of attackers as they are actively engaged in committing a malicious act, as they deceive security personnel about their intent, or as they cover their operational tracks and personal security concerns. Thus, the assessment of behavioral indicators becomes of utmost importance in these aspects of security.

But the incorporation of behavioral assessment of threats begs the question of exactly which behaviors to assess. And where can security professionals turn in order to find these behaviors? For us the answer to these and similar questions is simple – security professionals should rely on validated behavioral indicators.

What does “validated” mean? In science, there are many types of validation. For our work in the security field, two types of validation are the most important. One involves the use of carefully constructed experiments that isolate specific behaviors that are consistently and accurately related to mental states related to threats. Laboratory-based, experimental validation is important because these are the only types of efforts that can isolate specific behaviors and their associations with meaningful mental states underlying threat and malicious intent.

But experimentally based, laboratory research is not the only type of validation that is required. What is also required are field validation efforts, in which operators trained in the specific behavioral indicators generated from laboratory research actually use those indicators in the field and document their utility.

We believe that both of these types of validation are important. Some behaviors may be experimentally validated in the laboratory but of no utility in the field. Other behaviors may catch an operator’s eye and suggest to him or her that they “work.” (And there have been many books and other media of former operators claiming they have the goods on THE indicators.) But those potential indicators should really be tested in controlled studies.

One good example is gaze aversion. Many security professionals, and laypersons around the world, believe that people avert their gaze – don’t look you in the eye – when they are lying to you. But this is a myth. Many studies have actually tested this specific behavior, and the vast majority of them have not found and empirical support for this claim. Consequently, training security professionals to be on the alert for gaze aversion in security interviews can be misleading, with potentially deadly consequences.

Our training solutions powered by Humintell rely only on validated behavioral indicators of threat – indicators validated not only in controlled experimental research but also in field use by actual operators whom we have trained. The training solutions we provide are unique because we bridge both worlds – state-of-the-art research and real world, practical experience. We employ both world-renowned scientists and security personnel with decades of experience. It is this unique combination of science and practice that can help us help security professionals be ahead of the curve in identifying threats and mitigating them, keeping them left of bang.

This article originally appeared on https://parminc.com/2018/05/14/threat-assessment-and-management-for-venue-security-the-importance-of-validated-threat-indicators/

While you might not want to think much about something disgusting, our brain’s disgust response may be more revealing than you know.

Previous blogs have emphasized both the existence of universal basic emotions and the evolutionary basis behind many of our expressions. A recent article in Science helps examine these same evolutionary roots with regard to the feeling of disgust. Here, Drs. Weinstein, Buck, and Young draw parallels between the evolution of disgust and fear based on perceptions of the outside world and exposure to parasites.

In this paper, they outline how our feeling of disgust is situated within a fear of parasites. The threat of parasitic infection carries dangerous and significant risks for any individual, but they are simultaneously very hard to detect. This helps result in a series of indirect, almost heuristic, approaches to detecting them, largely relying on the disgust response.

For example, many species will simply categorically avoid feces and carcasses, sidestepping the entire issue. Others can depend on subtle, implicit cues, to try to figure out if a given carcass is infected, drawing from the chemical changes that result in an infected animal’s sweat or feces.

While these observations may stand alone in interesting ways, the analysis gets more nuanced and informative when compared to the cognitive structures that can help prey detect and avoid predators. Dr. Weinstein and her team describe this as the “predator-induced landscape of fear.”

This phenomenon describes the general outlook that many animals can create, where they integrate cues that may reveal the threat of a predator or similar sorts of stimuli. This integrates olfactory cues, for example, into a holistic way of evaluating the world based on a fear response.

Dr. Weinstein’s paper presents the notion of disgust as being part of an overall “landscape of disgust,” where numerous cues and sensory inputs can all be synthesized into a more comprehensive way of evaluating the world according to the risk of parasites.

These landscapes of disgust and of fear are also not completely different phenomena. Detecting predator feces, for instance, helps integrate both fear and disgust into the same picture. We are definitely hoping for more research that shows how perhaps other emotions are integrated in similar ways. And of course, a greater understanding of these emotions in the human context would be invaluable.

This differs, perhaps, from the way humans see themselves as intellectually evaluating the world around them.

However, psychological research helps connect these ideas with how we, as humans, rely on a complex series of heuristics in order to evaluate the world around us. Over the last two weeks, for example, our blogs have examined heuristics related to deception detection and confirmation bias. These cognitive shortcuts are rooted in survival, where we developed innate abilities to evaluate emotions without cognitive effort.

While these are different than a worldview integrated with fear or disgust, they help demonstrate how humans are not completely different. We still rely on subtle heuristics, just like animals, especially for basic emotions like fear and disgust. And critical thinking requires that we acknowledge and evaluate those heuristics.

If you expect someone to be guilty, does that make them more likely to be?

As discussed last week, many implicit biases complicate the process of determining guilt or detecting deception during an interview process. In a comprehensive trio of 2008 studies, a team of psychologists from the University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom found that expectations of guilt have a profound predictive effect on whether or not the interviewer will conclude that their subject is guilty.

Certainly, this has troubling implications on our ability to trust judgment and confront our own cognitive biases. Last week’s blog reviewed the significant impact of other sorts of biases, and these findings further complicate the matter.

Their 2008 paper compiled the results of three studies. In the first, participants were asked to act as interviewers and randomly assigned to either a guilt-expectation or innocence-expectation, which involved priming them to believe that the interviewee was more or less likely to be lying. They were then tasked with rating how confident they were about the interviewee’s guilt or innocence following a brief interview.

From this first study, the results gave clear evidence that expectations of guilt made conclusions of guilt much more likely, as well as driving a more combative “guilt-presumptive” questioning style. The study authors attribute this to the well-known phenomenon of “confirmation bias” wherein our brains tend to emphasize evidence that conforms to our expectations.

The study authors emphasize the importance of their findings on actual law enforcement practices. Many crime-related interviews are conducted when a (often reasonable) suspicion of guilt already exists, and the goal is often more about obtaining a confession than assessing guilt.

The second study varied slightly by actually recruiting participants as interviewees and subjecting them to accusations of guilt, after either assigning them to an actually guilt condition or not. In this case, rates of confession were tracked. Interestingly, presumptions of guilt did not seem to increase the likelihood of securing a confession, though actual guilt did make confessions more likely.

Finally, the third study exposed participants to recordings of previous studies’ interrogations. However, they were not told if the given interview was primed as a guilt-expectation or an actual guilty situation. Instead, they were simply asked to evaluate whether the recorded interviewee was guilty based on their behavior and tone of voice.

Fascinatingly, they found that the chief predictor of evaluations in the third study was the interviewer’s style. Suspects who responded to guilt-presumptive styles were rated as more defensive, more nervous, and more likely to be guilty, regardless of their guilt.

In sum, the first study found that interviewers are more likely to conclude guilt, if they expect it, and this was expanded by the third study’s conclusions that interviewer style contributes to other witness’ perceptions of the interviewee’s guilt. Finally, the second study, while challenging the notion that aggressive interviewing would secure confessions, found that only guilty participants were particularly likely to confess.

There are many ways to deduce whether somebody is lying during an interview process, but it is important that we critically evaluate how we are trying to detect deception. Over the last two weeks, we have outlined some common biases, such as confirmation bias, and this is exactly why having an observational process based on scanning, identifying, interpreting, and evaluating can be beneficial in any interaction.

This is precisely what we teach in our detection deception workshops, as well as in our new Reading People program.