Social Engineering - Christopher Hadnagy [71]
After the user is confident in her abilities she can take the real test. In the final exam no correction is given. The user is shown a microexpression once for a brief one twenty-fifth of a second, and then she must select what the microexpression is and then wait to be graded at the end.
This type of training tool can take years off of your learning curve in becoming proficient at reading microexpressions. One caveat: Dr. Ekman, as well as his contemporaries, state that even though you may become proficient in reading microexpressions, a microexpression is limited. What does that mean?
One of the tricks actors use to be able to successfully show proper emotion is to remember and focus on a time when they truly felt the emotion they need to portray; for example, a moment of happiness that produced a real smile. As mentioned earlier, making a real smile is very difficult to fake if you aren’t truly feeling happy, but if you can bring up a memory when you felt that emotion your muscles will remember and react.
Therefore, although you can become proficient at reading the emotion, you cannot read the why behind it. The why is often lost to science. I had a friend who had some bad experiences as a child with a person who closely resembled a good friend of mine. Whenever my friend would come around she had strong emotional reactions. If you were to read her microexpression you would probably see fear, contempt, and then anger on her face. She did not hate my friend, but she hated the person in her memory who resembled my friend.
This is a good point to remember when you are learning how to read microexpressions. The expression is linked to an emotion, but the expression doesn’t tell you why the emotion is being displayed. I know when I first started learning about microexpressions and then became somewhat “proficient” at reading certain expressions, I felt like I was a mind reader. Although this is far from the truth, the caution is to not be assumptive. You may become very good at reading microexpressions; however, later sections discuss how to combine this skill with interrogation tactics, body language skills, and elicitation skills to not only figure out what targets are thinking, but also to lead them down the path you want.
The question you still may have is, “How can I use these skills as a social engineer?”
How Social Engineers Use Microexpressions
This whole section leads up to this: As fascinating as the research is, as amazing as the science is behind this psychology, how do you utilize microexpressions in a social engineer audit and how do malicious social engineers use them?
This section discusses two methods of how to use microexpressions in social engineering. The first method is using microexpressions (ME) to elicit or cause an emotion, and the second method is how to detect deceit.
Let me start with the first method, using your own ME to cause an emotional response in others. I recently read a research paper that changed my view of ME and opened my eyes to a new area of research. Researchers Wen Li, Richard E. Zinbarg, Stephan G. Boehm, and Ken A. Paller performed a study called “Neural and Behavioral Evidence for Affective Priming from Unconsciously Perceived Emotional Facial Expressions and the Influence of Trait Anxiety” that changes the face of microexpression usage in modern science.
The researchers connected dozens of mini-EKGs to muscle points on their subjects’ faces. The devices would register any muscular movements in their face and head. They then played videos for them that had one-twenty-fifth-second flashes