Manipulation 106: Listening

We talk a little about datamining here and I think some people think it sounds nefarious, like we are going through people's trash or stealing their mail or something.  Not always! Most of the time we are just using the secret tactic of "good listening skills". See also, this NY Times article "At Airports, a Misplaced Faith in Body Language." After going on about for quite a bit about how useless the billion dollar United States' TSA (airport security) body language training program is (an attempt to get TSA workers to identify criminals and terrorists by how they comport themselves physically), I loved this gem:

In experiments at the University of Chicago, Dr. Epley and his colleagues have found that people vastly overestimate how much mind reading they can do by looking at someone’s facial expressions.

“Reading people’s expressions can give you a little information, but you get so much more just by talking to them,” he says. “The mind comes through the mouth.”

Mastermind! The words people say often says more about them than what their body language says about them. That's where most of the datamining is coming from -- what you volunteer. This is especially true with social media. I think people just don't realize this because most of the time they don't care what people are saying, so they assume that no one cares what they are saying either. If you've ever been charmed by someone you have a crush on remembering your birthday, you'll understand how effective it is to listen and remember what people say. Or creepy:

Sociopath quote: the lie as romance

A lie is an allurement, a fabrication that can be embellished into a fantasy. It can be clothed in the raiment of a mystic conception. Truth is cold, sober fact, not so comfortable to absorb. A lie is more palatable. The most detested person in the world is the one who always tells the truth, who never romances… I found it far more interesting and profitable to romance than to tell the truth.

-- Joseph Weil, aka ‘The Yellow Kid’

He knows if you've been bad or good

Am I the only one who has ever been creeped out by the specter of Santa Claus? An all-knowing, one man judge and jury revanchist who allegedly knows everything that goes on, doling out what he thinks people deserve? As a mild-to-moderate dystopian, I am paranoid about things like that, and if Santa gets his way, he is going to be even more efficiently big-brother-ish than before, according to the byline of this article sent to me by a reader:

By using technology to detect guilty expressions, of course. CSIRO is using automated expression recognition technology to tell whether someone is in pain and, according to computer scientist, CSIRO’s Dr Simon Lucey, there’s no reason why Santa couldn’t train the system to find out who’s been naughty or nice.

We've talked about microexpressions before. And apparently "they" have had some success programming computers to read them:

While a guilty person might fool a human with their look of pure innocence, it’s very hard to fool Dr Lucey’s computer.

“There are always some micro expressions that we are unable to control and some of these are associated with deception. It is these tiny facial expression components that the computer can spot.”

The system uses a technique called machine learning. After being programmed with what to look for and what it means, each observation taken or analysis performed is used to refine the computer’s technique so it gets better at its assigned task over time.

“When it comes to finding out who’s been naughty or nice, we show the computer what expressions are associated with good behaviour and it watches for a departure from that” Dr Simon Lucey

One of the applications for Dr Lucey’s research is in detecting whether someone who cannot communicate is in pain and how intense that pain is.

Yeah, that's *one* application for it. Another, perhaps more obvious application also springs to mind.

It's alarming how charming I feel (part II)

I could go either way on this letter (link here). It might have been written by a sociopath, or it may have not. But I always think it's an entertaining exercise to look at other people's communication in a critical way, trying to strip it of all your prejudices and preconceptions.

I think the letter is definitely manipulative. There is a certain lilt to it, a certain charm. There is a relatively good cadence, it is interesting to read. There's not really one point made, and though there is an apology, it's not for nothing specific. The apology, to the reader, could be interpreted as an apology for everything and anything that the reader believes the writer did wrong. This was clever, because the writer may truly be sorry for only one thing ("not behaving better") or may not even know what to be sorry for, so instead keeps things vague and lets the reader fill in the blanks. (Or perhaps doesn't feel any real guilt at all.)

I obviously don't know anything about the target of the letter, but I know it was effective because the reader has reunited with the writer. The letter seems clearly designed for one purpose, and that it accomplished that purpose leads me to believe that despite certain prejudices of mine about what I think people want or do not want to hear, this was obviously what the reader wanted to hear. The most interesting thing about it, though, is that although it is what the reader wanted to hear, the writer doesn't actually say much. Instead, the writer relies on the order, the structure, the format, the very cadence and rhythm of the words to lead to what were probably almost unavoidable logical inferences for the reader.

The writer hits hard with phrases like "I loved you" -- phrases that are sure to stand out in the reader's mind much more than the follow-up qualifiers of the love being selfish or narcissistic. The letter seems like an illusion, relying primarily on misdirection rather than outright deceit. The writer knows that he has to be honest, and has to come clean (so to speak) by actually including the various qualifiers and self-effacing statements he includes. That the reader wants to think he/she is reading honest responses is also apparent by the included phrase, "It's funny that after telling you virtually nothing, now I just want you to know the truth." We have talked before about how good lies typically contain a good deal of the truth, and the writer seems very careful about keeping the letter realistic (e.g., it sounds like these two did not know each other well enough for the reader to believe that the writer genuinely loved him/her, which is why the writer says "of course it was, I barely knew you"). The writer seems to be trying to reestablish a shared reality between the two of them, but a reality based primarily on rewritten history.

Going back to the phrase "I loved you," the past tense of the word loved is curious, but it seems purposeful, perhaps wanting to instill a sense of fear of loss or actual loss in the reader. Also it suggests that the writer is harmless, impotent -- because he/she no longer loves, he/she no longer has an incentive to "behave [poorly]". This seems designed to assuage any fears or misgivings the reader has about letting the writer back into his/her life, all while piquing the reader's interest --wanting the reader to not just think it is harmless to allow the writer back into his/her life, but actively wanting the writer back in his/her life.

The letter is also a Trojan horse, however. It promises love and eternal devotion, but those very promises are designed to guilt the reader into some sort of a response -- the writer's desired goal. The writer says, "It feels like you never really gave me a chance," followed by "I loved you." There are also the recriminations: "I feel like you have given me abandonment issues that I never really had before. I've gained a touch of paranoia. I second guess myself, even second guess the world." This is not only a plea for sympathy but a pointed finger of look-what-you-have-done-to-me-what-did-I-ever-do-to-deserve-this accusation. If the reader sees his or herself as a good, open-minded individual, he/she may have misgivings about his/her actions after reading this.

There is a suggestion that if they start over things will be different ("I guess I just wish that I had known it was coming"), but no direct promises or even a direct suggestion that it would have made any difference to the writer to know that the reader was leaving him/her. Finally, there is a plea to vanity: "I know I'll get over you, but I don't want to." I feel like that must work like a charm with empaths, if only because it sounds like a sappy movie line to me.

Our reader who sent this letter is right to be suspicious, I think. Even if the writer is not a sociopath, I am sure the friend has a very different understanding of the contours of their proposed renewed relationship than does the writer of this letter. Not only that, I believe that was the writer's exact intention.

The ubiquity of bullshit

I was talking to a teenage family member the other day about her anger issues. As is typical of teenagers, she is often melodramatic and self absorbed. She is also unusually perceptive. One of the things she’s having a hard time dealing with is the staggering amount of bullshit she sees all around her. She’s noticed the hypocrisy, inconsistency, and lack of insight that characterize the lives of her parents, grandparents, and the rest of the family in general. These same dullards who have made messes of their lives are now trying to make her ‘behave’ by rules they don’t hold themselves to, and she resents the hell out of it. She asked me why there’s so much lying in the family and I told her what I wish someone had told me at her age. I explained to her that most people lie to themselves. They sell themselves on their own bullshit and they need their family, friends and other ‘loved’ ones to play along, like extras in a poorly scripted B-movie. I told her that we tend to judge ourselves by our intentions and others by the consequences of their actions. I told her that one of the unspoken meanings of ‘family’ is to be considered part of the circle of delusion that those within use to exempt themselves. I told her they resent facts because facts are hard, cold and inhospitable to their ego-boosting fantasies. I told her that it isn’t just the family who swim in a sea of bullshit. I told her that what I am saying is true for almost everyone. And finally, I told her that should she ever find a way to control her anger, she would be able to use her perceptiveness to her advantage. I explained to her that her insight into the ubiquity of bullshit could equal power.

Like I said, she’s a teenager, so much of what I said didn’t really penetrate her endless self justifications. And I'm sure I bored the hell out of her. She's a smart girl though. When she’s older, she’ll remember my words and hopefully find them useful.