2010 July | Head Hacker

Body Talk… Arms out rah rah rah

Hope everyone is off to a good week, what with Defcon, Blackhat etc I am sure many of you are travelling. I personally had a weekend break in Cardiff and enjoyed doing a little grey matter manipulation, as well as talking about social engineering, mentalism, body language and more.

So with body language on my mind, its time to get into it again, this time we are going to look at the arms. Before anyone asks, yes they are my biceps…… honest.

So why bother with the arms you might be thinking? Well they are a good transmitter when someone is expressing themselves, and they are a good area to observe to pick up on signs of both confidence and discomfort as well as other emotional experiences.

We also rely a great deal on our arms, not only for the obvious things, but for the subconscious actions that occur. Our arms automatically reach out to grab a dropping item, raise to protect us from danger in swinging and blocking motions, even when it may not make sense. This is again the limbic systems carrying out basic primitive survival actions.

So onto the observational stuff. Have you noticed how when we are happy and content our arms move more freely, moving around on the wave of enjoyment, sometimes raising over our heads in excitement, exchanging high fives and cheering. When people are having a good time, content and energised you will really notice an increase in arm movement. When the opposite experiences and emotions are going on, there is a droopy sulky nature to the arms. Hanging down, more rigid and withdrawn. A key observation here is the arms forming very closely to our sides, or closing across our chest in a protective manner. This motions can be observed in relation to both physical and emotional pain or distress, its a guarded and protective reaction.

Another interesting observation, is the statue / frozen type of stance in the arms. This is common reaction that stems back to animalistic survival techniques, we freeze to attempt to remain unnoticed. If you observe someone become statue like / arms fixed to the side in the presence or approach of an individual this is usually a sign that there are bad feelings, or a history of discomfort in the relationship.

The arms also have a story to tell when you are approaching them. If you are approached arms stretched out, in a come here type of look, its pretty clear they are happy to see you. If the upper arms remain rigid in a vertical manner and just the lower arms are extended from below the elbow, then this communicates that you are kinda welcome, but the greeting is more that of a political correctness. Arms placed behind the back locked out of sight, is a clear signal of not being interested, wanting to be left alone, and not to be interacted with. This is somewhat similar to when people have their hands in their pockets, and it a world of there own. If you see these later signs when you approach someone, it is a clear signal of they do not want to interact with your, or depending on the situation have something to hide. Another common display, and I am sure many of us are familiar with the saying “keeping you at arms length”. Well this is true, we will extend an arm to keep people at a distance, that we feel keeps them out of our personal space. You often see this in crowded places, and situations of conflict.

Finally we shall quickly look at the arms language regarding dominance. We have spoken about this a little before, in how humans spread their legs to take up more room, in a sign of territorial stance. The arms can also play a similar role. People spread out there elbows, place them on there hips to take up more space, and show they are dominant in that space. The more or less territory someone takes up is a good sign of how confident they are feeling at that time, in the situation they are in. Another sign of dominance with the arms is when people put there hands behind their head, with elbows pointing out. The is a very confident, laid back approach, signifying authority and that your in charge and mean business. Similar to this is having arms spread out spanning multiple chairs, or a bench. As well as planting your hands with arm splayed out on a desk, in an authoritarian manner.

Hopefully you found this information interesting and insightful. As per usual be mindful, keep your eyes open and watch for what’s happening around you.

Its the little things… Micro Expressions

Many people say its the little things that count, depending on what your talking about your partner may or may not agree with you However when it comes to body language type stuff and reading people there is a little something worth paying attention to, and that’s micro expressions.

Wikipedia Definition – A microexpression is a brief, involuntary facial expression shown on the face of humans according to emotions experienced. They usually occur in high-stakes situations, where people have something to lose or gain. Unlike regular facial expressions, it is difficult to fake microexpressions. Microexpressions express the seven universal emotions: disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, and contempt.They can occur as fast as 1/25 of a second.

Microexpressions where first discovered / documented back in the 60′s, however I didn’t become aware of the studies and research until reading the work of Paul Ekman in the early 90′s. Back then I didn’t look into it to much, and its only been the last 18 months or so that its really peaked my interest, again from a social engineering perspective. I will also say in the last year people have been made a lot more aware of microexpressions due to the TV show Lie To Me with Tim Roth.

There are supposedly 7 universal microexpressions, however like anything its is important to study people to define the baseline of an individual. Below are some examples (from the TV show) of what these 7 microexpressions look like.

So why should you bother looking into microexpressions. Well its simple, its provides you with a guide (educated guess) as to if someone is lying to you, as well as providing additional information as to how people are really feeling when responding to your questions and presence. I am sure you are aware of the tells and expressions of people close to you, and those who you interact with on a regular basis. No doubt it took you some time to become familiar with those expressions and the hidden meanings behind them.

So if you want to go about learning these skills there are a few things you can do. The easiest and cheapest is to study people in your everyday observations and interactions. You could even team up with friends and go through various Q&A sessions study and note the responses. Another option, and I recommend in conjunction to the previous suggestion read various materials on the subject, but also look at videos, political speeches and training sessions to improve these skills. Personally I find I learn a great deal more from videos and images, than text alone, especially with this sort of material it is essential.

The only tools I am familiar with myself are those of Paul Ekmans, both the METT (Micro Expression) and SETT (Subtle Expression) training tools. These tools feature large collections of images, showing quick demonstrations of expressions to learn and test yourself. For more information on Paul’s tools check out his website, I think he used to have some free tools, however now there is a demo option, and then the charged options ranging from $20 – $70.

All the best with honing your human lie detector skills

Setting your motivation… Mind Scripts

Getting into character is an important part of being successful on a social engineering engagement. You may be physically impersonating a sales guy, engineer, employee, or you may be carrying out your fiendish work remotely gathering data, and setting up meetings. Either way you should be clear in your mind who you are, who you are engaging with, and what you want out of the activity, you need to be clear on your motivation.

When I think of this, my immature side (say nothing) hears a rather camp actor shouting at the director asking, “what’s my motivation darling”. OK so I am odd, lets use the above imagery to demonstrate the motivation to run through the opposition to score

So with this in mind I wanted to quickly talk about something a little NLP’esk that I think you will find helpful, and if full embraced will really help with your attitude, approach, body language, facial expression, tonality and more when carrying out an engagement. This little something is called Mind Scripts, and is something I first heard about when studying cold reading and hypnosis, but have also heard similar approaches from an NLP context, and in sales type books on engaging and building rapport with people. (I am not 100% sure who coined this term, I think it may have been Ian Rowland, but please don’t hold me to that).

So what is a Mind Script? Well a mind script is just a simple, short,concise and positive statement about the activity or interaction you are about to engage in. This statement you repeat to yourself mentally before and during the engagement.

Don’t reject this concept just yet please, as some pointless simplistic activity. You will actually find that you make a huge difference as to how you come across to the person(s) you are interacting with when you you run an appropriate mind script. If you think about it we are unconsciously running a mind script of some kind all of the time, simply waking up and telling yourself its going to be a crappy day, then becomes a script you will be running. This then effects how you interact, attitude and the effect you have on others unknowingly.

Here are a couple of example of a mind script to give you an idea of how simple they are. I then encourage you to try running appropriate scripts before going into meeting, interacting with people one to one as a form of practice. If you think about it, it really does make sense, but I would like to hear from people with their thoughts, comments, success and failures. Obviously remember there is NO FAIL

I know you, you know me, I belong here

I like you, you like me, this will go well

I respect you, you respect me, and we will have a good discussion

I am an expert, you know I am an expert, there will be confidence in my recommendations

Hopefully you get the general idea from these brief examples, think positive, be positive. A positive mental attitude, positive things happen to positive people, that’s what I tell myself anyway

Messing with your mind.. Optical Illusions

I have been trouble the last couple of weeks to make the time to come up with some content on a weekly basis (I am still trying though), so if you have suggestions, or things you would like to read about please let me know (suggestion[at]headhacker.net).

For this week I thought I would just share something for amusement. So here are some pictures that might not quite be what they seem. See how your brain first interprets them, they try and see what they really are.