Social Engineering - Christopher Hadnagy [69]
Unfortunately, malicious social engineers often use this emotional trigger to obtain things from their targets. I once walked into a restaurant and overheard a young man telling a group of older folks who were leaving that he just ran out of gas on the highway and needed to get home because his wife was nine months pregnant. He had been out of work and had just walked a mile off the highway to use the phone to call his wife and wondered if they could give him $20. When I heard some of the story I slowed down and made believe I was on a phone call to observe the rest. He told his tale and then backed it up with, “Look if you give me your address, I will mail you a check for the $20,” concluding with “I swear to God.”
The story had some elements in it that could elicit compassion, especially when his face showed concern, anxiety, and sadness. He didn’t get $20—he was given $20 by each of the three people in that group. He said “God bless you” a few times and gave the group a few hugs and said he was going to go in to call his wife and tell her he was on the way home. He hugged them and they left feeling as if they had done their good deed for the week.
A few minutes later as I’m eating my meal, I see him at the bar drinking a couple of fully paid-for drinks with his buddies. Mixing a sad story with some sad facial expressions, he had been able to manipulate the emotions of those around him.
Happiness
Happiness can have many facets to it—so many that I can probably make a chapter just on it, but that is not my focus. Dr. Ekman’s books cover many excellent points about happiness and similar emotions and how they affect the person with the emotion and those around him or her.
What I want to focus on are just a couple aspects of happiness—most importantly the difference between a true smile and a fake smile. The true and the fake smile are an important aspect of human expressions to know how to read, and as a social engineer to know how to reproduce.
Has there been a time where you met someone who was very pleasant but after you parted ways your spouse or you yourself said, “That guy was a fake…”?
You might not have been able to identify the aspects of a true smile in your head but something told you the person wasn’t being “real.” In the late 1800s a French neurologist, Duchenne de Boulogne, did some fascinating research into smiling. He was able to attach electrodes to a man’s face and trigger the same “muscular” response in the face as a smile. Even though the man was using all the right muscles for smiling, de Boulogne determined that the look of the man was still a “fake smile.” Why?
When a person smiles for real, de Boulogne indicates, two muscles are triggered, the zygomaticus major muscle and the orbicularis oculi. Duchenne determined that the orbicularis oculi (muscle around the eyes) cannot be triggered voluntarily and that is what separates a real from a fake smile.
Dr. Ekman’s research concurs with Duchenne’s and although recent research indicates some can train themselves to think about triggering that muscle, more often than not a fake smile is all about the eyes. A real smile is broad with narrow eyes, raised cheeks, and pulled-up lower eyelids. It has been said that a real smile involves the whole face, from the eyes to the mouth, as seen in Figure 5-14.
Figure 5-14: Dr. Ekman demonstrates a fake smile (left) next to a real smile (right).
If you were to cover the top half of Dr. Ekman’s face you would be hard pressed to tell a real from a fake smile. It is not until you examine the eyes that it becomes clear, side by side, which smile is fake and which is real.
When a person sees a real smile on another person, it can trigger that same emotion inside of them and cause them to smile. Notice in Figure 5-15