Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

James Bond needs no introduction, but you do!

I read an article not too long ago that a friend passed along and felt compelled to share my thoughts about it. The article appeared in Forbes.com and was titled “Why Public Speakers Need To Copy James Bond.” That’s a compelling title for Bond fans and speakers alike – of which I’m both – so I got sucked in and read. The author’s piece was well written and compelling…unless you know something about the psychology of persuasion. The gist of the article was this – Bond movies open with compelling action-packed scenes, not the credits, to immediately hook moviegoers.  Speakers should do the same by starting immediately with a compelling story. I wholeheartedly agree that a speaker starting with a good story hooks the audience but foregoing a brief introduction misses out on a golden opportunity to utilize the principle of authority which will make you more persuasive, according to the science of influence. Imagine going to a conference and getting ready to listen to a speaker you’ve never heard of before. Will you pay more or less attention if you quickly learn beforehand the speaker was the top salesperson in their organization, or had a doctorate, or was one of only a handful in the world who does what he/she does, or had some other fact that established him or her as an expert? I’m willing to bet you’ll be more interested to listen after learning something compelling about the speaker. Several years ago, Joshua Bell, one of the most accomplished violinists in the world, was playing a million dollar Stradivarius violin in a public subway. Despite the fact that people pay several hundred dollars to hear him in concert, hardly anyone paid attention that particular day in the subway. His beautiful music was the equivalent of a compelling story but it wasn’t enough to grab people’s attention. Do you think people would have stopped to listen if they knew he was one of the greatest violinists in the world and that he was playing a million dollar instrument? I’d bet you any amount of money that many, many more people would have paid attention to him and his music. James Bond enjoys a brand very few individuals can claim. Warren Buffett, Bill Clinton and a few others would need no introduction before giving a speech, but you and I do, so here are six tips for your intro when presenting to a group of any size: You write the introduction. Don’t leave this to chance because nobody knows you and your expertise like you do.Keep it short. An intro of 100-200 words is plenty because too long and it’s boring, but too short and you may omit something important.Make sure it’s audience-appropriate. There may be interesting things you’ve accomplished that have nothing to do with the talk so leave out those things.Include something personal. This allows audience members to connect with you on a personal level which invokes the principle of liking.Have a third party introduce you. You do this because someone else can say things about you that will sound like bragging if you say them.Make sure the introduction happens before the talk. Unlike the movies where the credits come later, you want people to feel compelled to listen before you even open your mouth.Talking about Bond as a model for speaking makes for a compelling headline but not everything he does will work for you and me. That’s the difference between movies and reality. So my advice is this; find out what the science says then diligently apply it and you’re sure to give a more persuasive presentation.Brian Ahearn, CMCT® Chief Influence Officer influencePEOPLE Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.As noted last week; Dr. Cialdini has a new book coming out that he’s coauthored with Steve Martin and Noah Goldstein, Ph.D. The book is called The Small Big and can be pre-ordered here.

Study Reveals Origins of Facial Expressions

Why do our eyes widen when afraid and narrow to slits when disgusted?

Research findings by Cornell neuroscientist Adam Anderson suggest that human facial expressions arose from universal, adaptive reactions to environmental stimuli and not originally as social communication signals, lending support to Charles Darwin’s 19th-century theories on the evolution of emotion.

Anderson is an associate professor of human development in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology.

Reading Our Brain’s Emotional Code

w-liedectector   “We discovered that fine-grained patterns of neural activity within the orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with emotional processing, act as a neural code which captures an individual’s subjective feeling,”

purported Adam Anderson, associate professor of human development in Cornell University’s  College of Human Ecology and senior author of the study, “Population coding of affect across stimuli, modalities and individuals,” which was  published online June 22 in Nature Neuroscience.

This STUDY noted that even though feelings are subjective, our brains turn our emotions into a standard code that objectively represents emotions across different senses, situations and even people

Researchers presented 16 participants with a series of images and tastes and analyzed their brains responses to these subjective experiences via functional neuroimaging.  This specialized neuroimaging technology, representational similarity analysis, is able to analyze a the spatial patterns of a person’s brain activity across populations of neurons rather than the traditional approach of assessing activation magnitude in specialized regions.

“It appears that the human brain generates a special code for the entire valence spectrum of pleasant-to-unpleasant, good-to-bad feelings, which can be read like a ‘neural valence meter’ in which the leaning of a population of neurons in one direction equals positive feeling and the leaning in the other direction equals negative feeling,” Anderson explains.

The study was atypically small, but the authors noted that the representation of our internal subjective experience is not confined to specialized emotional centers.

The findings showed that similar subjective feelings – whether evoked from the eye or tongue – resulted in a similar pattern of activity in the OFC, suggesting the brain contains an emotion code common across distinct experiences of pleasure (or displeasure), they say. Furthermore, these OFC activity patterns of positive and negative experiences were partly shared across people.

“Despite how personal our feelings feel, the evidence suggests our brains use a standard code to speak the same emotional language,” Anderson concluded.