The Barnum Effect

We'll believe anything, proof of how cold readers, palm readers, mystics, and con artists do it! For more on Barnum see post 8th April 2007 in the archive



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How To Know If Someone Is Lying To You

The following techniques for telling if someone is lying are often used by police, and security experts. This knowledge is also useful for managers, employers, and for anyone to use in everyday situations where telling the truth from a lie can help prevent you from being a victim of fraud/scams and other deceptions.

Liars depend on our gulliblity. They want us to assume that what they say is truthful by accepting their version of things uncritically. They trade on the fact that most people find it socially uncomfortable to challenge some body elses claims because it generates the implied reaction 'how dare you disbelieve what I tell you'

Liars are skilled at constructing alternative versions of events. They become so skilled that they 'enter into the deception' almost becoming convinced of their own fabrications. In this way they defend themselves by appearing authentic.

Probing questions are the key to unlocking the liar. Inconsistencies can be identified in the 'facts' and chronology. Creating space to listen to what the liar has to say rather than jumping in and challenging things is a good method too. Give them enough rope and they will hang themsleves as they say. The liar relies on cues to determine how effective their lies are. By reacting to each and every one of their statements we provide the liar with key information as to 'how well they are doing' and the extent and gaps in our knowledge. They then use this information to improve the deception.

To some extent we are all liars. Erving Goffman in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life describes and explains how we all portray a 'front' a 'persona'. These personae are taken for granted in everyday social situations. They go unchallenged and because of this we are vulnerable to misrepresentation.

Always question the motive and reason people have for saying what they say. What's in it for them? Why are they reluctant to elborate on the things you ask and really keen to elaborate on the things they want you to believe. Are you being asked to take things on face value, place your faith in what they say or are you freely given facts and information in order that ou can judge for yourself. If the other person wants to control the meaning of things rather than you then chances are something is amiss. If you smell a rat then its probably there!


Liar Liar Links:


How To Tell If Someone Is Lying To You
The Book of Tells .com



How To Spot A Liar
How to Spot a Liar - Google Books sample chapters

Is Ignorance Bliss? 6 - On Organisational Learning

Driven partly by the belief that there is a single good answer to the question of ‘what does the market want?’ just waiting to be found by the person who is the most ‘in the know’, the whole subject of making sense of the business environment often becomes personalised and politicised. Discussions on the meaning of data and information become ‘turf wars’ where the political stakes for domination of ‘your’ point of view is extremely high. In this environment the skill of ignoring others becomes very polished and seems to occur as:

Being ignorant of ‘ignorance’ as an organisational phenomenon.

My experience in organisations shows that a significant number of people don’t have the business lexicon (jargon if you prefer), deep and intergrated education in business thinking and approaches, or the reflective skills to enable a productive assessment of management behaviour. Consequently people frequently rely on 'armchair theories', man on his bar stool explanations, and Springer-esque understandings of the process of becoming a succesful organisation.

Having the power to ignore.

A sense of indispensability, and a strong ego reinforced by recent successes encourages people to believe ‘they’ve learned enough’ and that the usefulness of their ‘model of explaining their world is enduring’. These echoes the observations of Bob Garrat in his book ‘Creating a Learning Organisation’ where recently promoted new directors feel that learning and training applies to everyone in the organisation but themselves.

In the gaming business this is especially noticeable in the area of games design where the explicit technical skill of computer programming is welded to the tacit behavioural skill of game creation. Attempts to learn about games design assumptions and their relationship to market information are frequently perceived as a serious threat to interfere with the ‘special knowledge’ of the designers rather than an attempt to build new perspectives and grow the organisations knowledge of the subject. These perceived threats are frequently and skilfully repulsed.

Organisational ignorance therefore seems to possess the dual properties of

deliberateness where a conscious choice is made by the individual to ignore input and suppress feedback, echoing Karl Deutsch’s remark that ‘power is the ability not to have to learn anything’ and the observation of Elias Cannetti in Crowds and Power that ‘freedom is not having to give an answer’.

and

unawareness which is explored in detail by Chris Argyris in ‘On Organisational Learning’ where he refers to those behaviours we unconsciously perform such as:

i) Defensive reasoning e.g. 'I could have done a better job if I'd had more resource'

ii) Predisposition to blame external rather than internal factors for failure e.g.'The suppliers let us down'

iii) A pre-occupation with symptomatic rather than root cause problem solving (single rather than double loop learning) e.g. sorry but the database software we have has a limited query facility. The solution to the problem lies outside the system in which the problem exists. (see post...There is effort...)

iv) Placing management subjects and themes ‘off limits’ so that they are not to be discussed, and making this tacit ‘decision’ in-discussable too!

These behaviours are largely unrecognised because they are so deeply hidden in the character of the individual they are, without considerable reflective effort, taken for granted.

Angles, Hustlers And Suckers

Blogger Robert Greene says - There are only two kinds of people in the whole wide world, grifters and suckers..



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An Experiment in Counter-Stupidity

Interesting site on gullibility related matters



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Gullibile

Gardening, Guarding, Guiding, Generating, Greeting
Usual, Ugly, Unexpected, Usurped
Liaisons
Learning
Inisght, inadequacies, information
By
Lying, Loving, Leveraging
Equally, Ethically, Evolutionary, Eventualities, Education, Effectively, Einstein, Emotionally

This is Andrew's (Gullibility's co-author) quick 'pen characterisation' of Gullibile. You might want to see how yours turn out? Take each letter in turn and jot down the first word that comes to mind connected with Gullible. Why not comment it to us?

Is Ignorance Bliss? 5-On Organisational Learning

The Management Experiences

The games industry is about delivering a constant stream of new game-play experiences for players. (Analogous to blogging and ‘reading experiences I guess) Consequently my management experience has been deeply involved with the process of new product development. This is one of the key processes that links ‘out there’ to ‘in here’ and creates a cycle of doing something and learning from it or not as the case may be. Three generic management experiences associated with new product development stand out as containing transferable learning potential.

Firstly

The patterns revealed in the lessons of change are more easily spotted when the same processes are repeated frequently and quickly. Practice supports learning.

Pay to play games companies (there are 15 in the UK alone) can complete up to 50 projects a year. The design to market cycle is very fast. From ‘marker board’ to ‘consumer experience’ can take as little as 12 weeks. This results in the opportunity for ‘accelerated’ learning through practice. Process ‘patterns’ that show what went right or wrong quickly emerge.

Secondly

People shouldn’t be simply classified as ‘those that want to learn’ and ‘those that don’t want to learn’. The same people operate in modes when they are open to learning and when they are closed to learning.

When game designers and marketers have a run of success or failure this affects what they pay attention to and ignore about changes in their environment. Invariably it takes a dramatic surprise and a threat to cause them to re-evaluate their beliefs about their theories for success.Further light is shed upon why this happens in Diane L. Coutu’s interview with Edgar H Schein to be found in the March 2002 edition of the Harvard Business Review where he comments.

'Learning only happens when survival anxiety is greater than learning anxiety…you can increase the survival anxiety by threatening people…or you can decrease the learning anxiety by creating a safer environment for unlearning and learning'

Going on to say:

“The evidence is mounting that real change does not begin until the organisation experiences some real threat of pain that in some way dashes its expectations or hopes.”

Thirdly

Ignorance and Power are a performance inhibiting combination when exhibited simultaneously by people in organisations

The commercial pressure to design the most appealing products means that there is great kudos and personal reward to be gained for seeming to ‘know’ exactly what customers want. Organisations can be seen to exist in a ‘jungle’ of product performance data, anecdotal customer and consumer information, and commissioned market intelligence with a vast diversity of meaning, and this ‘jungle’ is filled with animals that want to be undisputed ‘Organisational kings of meaning’

Hey Buddy can you spare a dime?

Its happened again!

I was outside work tonight waiting for a lift home when I notice a young woman making a 'bee line' for me.

My first guess is that she wants a light or directions, but no...straight into a story about loosing her purse on a shopping trip.

A few of things to note. The woman spoke articulately and with a southern almost 'public school'accent. She burst into tears as she began to explain that she lived 40 miles away, the last bus was in an hour and she needed £16 for the ticket and her parents were on holiday in Almeria in Spain.

Picture this, girl in tears, saying "Can you help me? I,I, (stuttering) can't bring myself to ask you, I'm not a beggar, I'm really stuck, can you help me" - now how does THAT set you up!

So she had, intelligence, plausibility, and distress. I had £1.35.

I tried a modest attempt at 'getting behind the story' by asking questions like, 'when did she loose the purse', where is she going to get the bus from.Which only served to endorse the story as believeable. She even had a piece of paper with some times and number on it, which were supposedly bus times. Did I scrutinise it? of course not, I read the information as she described it rather than looked at it objectively.

As soon as the girl got the cash, tears stopped, she walked off, pulled hood up and then walked off in the opposite direction to the bus stop in a purposive manner, and I twigged that I'd just been conned!

Curious thing was, I suspected something, but nothing enough to stop the con. Would you have done the same as me?

Messing with Babel Fish

http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr

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