Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

BBC Big Brother Programming?

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The BBC Network is taking facial recognition marketing to a new level.   They have employed the use of  facial coding web cameras to gauge viewers’ emotional reactions to their network television shows.

The initial study, reported on by Recombu.com, has been measuring 200 U.K. participants and will soon expand to international markets. Tracked programs include “Sherlock” and “Top Gear.” The technology, provided by startup CrowdEmotion, is the latest technology from facial-coding companies.

The webcam uses facial coding software that detects the viewers’ facial reactions (i.e. emotions) such as fear, surprise, anger, disgust, sadness and happiness.  The software then matches the person’s facial expression to an emotional state from information gathered from 20 years of neuroscience research.

“CrowdEmotion’s ability to capture, record and quantify our audience’s emotional attachment and engagement to our TV shows, places BBC Worldwide at the forefront of global audience research and ultimately determines what our fans love to watch,“ commented David Boyle EVP, BBC Worldwide Insight said.

Boyle went on to point out that this is the first study of its kind for BBC Worldwide to measure people’s emotional responses to programs using a technology-led, neuroscience approach.

CrowdEmotion’s CEO, Matthew Celuszak, says that this software could be used, in the near future, to allow people to interact with TV sets by winking or smiling.  Celuszak noted that their partnership with BBC allows them to push boundaries and help quality content in marketing (branding).

The next set of studies are scheduled to take place in Russia and Australasia.  We are already on the wave of smart T.V’s and more of those are already implementing webcams.

Is this Intelligent Marketing OR Intrusive Propaganda ?

Humiliation Is Our Strongest Emotion?

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New brain research suggests that humiliation is the strongest emotion a human can feel.

Wired.com reports on this claim and delves into the question of, Is humiliation really more intense than other negative emotions such as anger or shame?

The researchers, Marte Otten and Kai Jonas, conducted two studies in which dozens of male and female participants read short stories involving different emotions, and had to imagine how they’d feel in the described scenarios.

The first study compared humiliation (e.g. your internet date takes one look at you and walks out), anger (e.g. your roommate has a party and wrecks the room while you’re away) and happiness (e.g. you find out a person you fancy likes you). The second study compared humiliation with anger and shame (e.g. you said some harsh words to your mother and she cried).

The researchers used EEG (electroencephalography) to record the surface electrical activity of their participants’ brains. They were interested in two measures in particular – a larger positive spike (known as the “late positive potential” or LPP); and evidence of “event-related desynchronization,” which is a marker of reduced activity in the alpha range. Both these measures are signs of greater cognitive processing and cortical activation.

The study’s finding was that imagining being humiliated led to larger LPPs and more event-related desychronization than the other emotions. According to Otten and Jonas, this means that humiliation, more than the other emotions they studied, leads to a mobilization of more processing power and a greater consumption of mental resources. “This supports the idea that humiliation is a particularly intense and cognitively demanding negative emotional experience that has far-reaching consequences for individuals and groups alike,” they concluded.

This does not conclusively support the idea that Humiliation is our strongest emotion.  Further research should be conducted, but this does note that the brain seems to be doing more when a person feels humiliated, but we do not seem to know exactly what yet. One possibility, the researchers acknowledge, is that humiliation requires more mental processing, not because it’s so intense, but because it’s a complex social emotion that involves monitoring loss of social status.

Statement Analysis In Cyber Space

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Ever wonder if the person on the other end of a chat room or email really can’t meet with you for that lunch date OR if they really didn’t receive the email you sent a few days (or weeks) ago?

Well, The Wall Street Journal interviewed Defense Intelligence Agency senior officer Tyler Cohen Wood to discuss how to tell if someone is lying to you when your not interacting on a face-to-face basis.

There is always room for ambiguity and misunderstanding when communication is conducted in spurts and is written rather than face-to-face.  This room for “error” is due to the lack of nonverbal behavior signals called Gestures.  When we communicate face-to-face most of what we say is communicated not in the words but by our body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice and gestures.

According to the article, research has shown that most of us tend to be be suspicious of information we receive online but override our suspicions and trust the information anyway. Experts call this our “truth bias.”

We often have powerful emotional reasons to believe what someone is telling us. We really want to believe the message from the cutie on the dating site is real. Ditto the text saying our spouse is working late.

Ms. Cohen Wood notes, “The majority of people prefer to tell the truth.  That’s why when they are lying, the truth is going to leak out.” She notes that using a modified version of statement analysis will help a person sort out the truths from the untruths.

Some of the things to look for are below:

1) Pay attention to a person’s use of emphatic language. It doesn’t necessarily mean he or she is lying, but rather that he or she really wants you to believe what is being said. This is also the case when a person keeps saying the same thing over and over in slightly different ways.

2)Look for language that distances the writer from the intended reader. That is they omit personal pronouns and references to themselves from a story. Ex: Say the person receives the following text, “Hey I had a great time last night, did you?” and they reply, “Last night was fun.”

3) Watch out for is the unanswered question. You ask, and the other person hedges or changes the subject. Most likely, the person doesn’t like saying no, or doesn’t want to hurt your feelings. But he or she also may also be keeping something from you.

4) Noncommittal statements are red flags—”pretty sure,” “probably,” “must have” and, my least favorite, “maybe.” “These words leave the person an out,“ Ms. Cohen Wood says.

5) Qualifying statements, are another potential tell. Expressions such as “to be honest,” “there is nothing to worry about,” “I hate to tell you this”—often signal that the person is uncomfortable with his or her next statement.

6) Tense Hopping:  Someone describing an event that happened in the past usually uses the past tense. But if midway through the story the person starts fabricating, that material plays out in his or her head and leads to a switch to the present tense.

Ms. Cohen Wood notes that all of this also relies on the person’s baseline behavior.  You have to the norm for someone before you can detect that they are veering away from it, which is a sign that there is more to the story than is being told.

Want to Learn more about Reading Gestures and Nonverbal Communication? 
Attend our “The World of Gestures” LIVE Webinar hosted by psychologist Dr. David Matsumoto this Saturday June 7th at 10:00am PST.