Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Influence and Failing Kindergarten

Had a great chat with my friend Drawk Kwast recently that he recorded for his list of users (which was an honor given the people he usually interviews). As expected, we rambled all over the map and talked about a million different topics around influence, living an adventurous and successful life, and always being willing to have fun and do the things that most people won’t do.

The thought that stuck out to both of us during the chat was the idea that we’d fail kindergarten if we were subjected to another year – that the things that has made each of us successful to this point would have caused utter failure in the current school system. We both have a nearly chronic inability to follow the rules, stay in single-file lines, refrain from asking “why?” about a million times too often and ensure that we always make the sky blue when we color.

As Drawk said: “we’d in the corner eating the paste.”

I realized later that I should have corrected him… so I will now… “we’d be in the corner figuring out how to take the paste, turn it in to some crazy 5-star dish involving liquid nitrogen and debating about how to market a nationwide line of “frozen paste” shops.“.

It’s a trait that a lot of my friends seem to share.

The MP3 is worth a listen – Drawk had some great stories on there and I talked about random stuff that some people might find interesting.

(Aside: if you haven’t picked up Drawk’s “Domination Basics” ebook, you need to – it’s free and one of the better reads of the last year. The last person who I convinced to read it immediately sent me the message that “OMG! Drawk Kwast is the UberMan!!!!”. All I can say is that you should read it yourself and find out what all the exclamation points are all about.)


Delusion and Confabulation

The first 2010 issue of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry is a special issue on Delusion and Confabulation and includes the following articles:

: Overlapping or distinct distortions of reality? Robyn Langdon; Martha Turner
Varieties of confabulation and delusion, Michael D. Kopelman
The affective neuropsychology of confabulation and delusion, Aikaterini Fotopoulou
The role of personal biases in the explanation of confabulation, Kasey Metcalf ; Robyn Langdon ; Max Coltheart
Temporal consciousness and confabulation: Is the medial temporal lobe “temporal”? Gianfranco Dalla Barba ; Marie-Françoise Boissé
Novel insights into false recollection: A model of déjà vécu, Akira R. O’Connor ; Colin Lever ; Chris J. A. Moulin
Strategic retrieval, confabulations, and delusions: Theory and data, Asaf Gilboa
Beauty and belief: William James and the aesthetics of delusions in schizophrenia, Vaughan J. Carr
Hypnotic illusions and clinical delusions: Hypnosis as a research method, Rochelle E. Cox ; Amanda J. Barnier
The misidentification syndromes as mindreading disorders, William Hirstein
Abductive inference and delusional belief, Max Coltheart ; Peter Menzies ; John Sutton
Confabulation, delusion, and anosognosia: Motivational factors and false claims, Ryan McKay ; Marcel Kinsbourne
: Mistakes of perceiving, remembering and believing, Robyn Langdon ;T im Bayne
Confabulation and delusion: A common monitoring framework, Martha Turner ; Max Coltheart

Lie-detection biases among male police interrogators, prisoners, and laypersons

I know, I’ve been away a long time, finishing off my doctorate and working hard, so no time for blogging. The doctorate is finally out of the way but I still don’t have masses of spare time. When I can I’ll update these blogs with studies that catch my eye, though I don’t think I’ll be able to comment in depth on many of them in the way that I used to. That’s partly a time issue, but also I haven’t got access to as many full text articles as I did when I was registered at a university. I’ll do what I can.

Here’s a study that sounds like an interesting addition to the literature on what people think of their own lie-detection abilities:

E Elaad (2009). Lie-detection biases among male police interrogators, prisoners, and laypersons. Psychological Reports 105(3 Pt 2): 1047-56.

Beliefs of 28 male police interrogators, 30 male prisoners, and 30 male laypersons about their skill in detecting lies and truths told by others, and in telling lies and truths convincingly themselves, were compared. As predicted, police interrogators overestimated their lie-detection skills. In fact, they were affected by stereotypical beliefs about verbal and nonverbal cues to deception. Prisoners were similarly affected by stereotypical misconceptions about deceptive behaviors but were able to identify that lying is related to pupil dilation. They assessed their lie-detection skill as similar to that of laypersons, but less than that of police interrogators. In contrast to interrogators, prisoners tended to rate lower their lie-telling skill than did the other groups. Results were explained in terms of anchoring and self-assessment bias. Practical aspects of the results for criminal interrogation were discussed.

The full text is behind a paywall – I can’t find a direct link so you have to get there by going to the publisher’s website and searching their e-journals.