Can you spot a liar? Social Intelligence part 2

in #life7 years ago (edited)

People say you can stop communicating. But it is actually impossible to not communicate.  

This phrase is something most of us never think about. But if you think about it, it’s pretty interesting. If you stop talking, try to avoid showing any emotion or stop moving completely. Then you are still sending signals about yourself towards other people. You have to be dead or unconscious to not do so. 

Micro expressions and intuition 

In what way do we reveal our motives, thoughts and emotion? An interesting one is micro expressions. Which is part of the social consciousness trait we as social beings have. (well, most of us though..) ;) Primary empathy is our ability to spot emotions and motives of others on a unconscious level. 

Do you remember those times when you just intuitively knew something about a person, just.. that something is off. But you have no idea why and can’t explain but you just know. It’s because the behaviour you spotted about a person didn’t go through a conscious pathway in the brain. The brain has evolved itself in a way where it filters information, obviously! Because if you would experience everything in your surroundings at the same time you would go mental! 

Anyway, you might have seen a micro expression of a person and that’s why you intuitively felt something was off. But you weren’t completely aware of it. Most information our brain processes goes via the lower route in the brain which doesn’t visit our prefrontal cortex, considered our crown jewel of consciousness.  

Customs officer's have trained eyes, watch out! 

Although you can get aware of micro expressions if you train yourself in spotting them. Let’s illustrate this with a story of a customs officer. A man comes towards the customs officer because he needs to get a visa to travel. While talking to the man he asked about why he wanted a visa to go to another country. The moment he asked the man had a micro expression of disgust. If a person wanted to another country for.. let’s say holidays? A micro expression would definitely not happen. The officer noticed this and told him to wait. He went to another room to check a database of Interpol. And, yeah several countries were searching for this man. This was an excellent performance of primary empathy, spotting non-verbal emotions. 

It’s also possible to test your own primary empathy and people who score high on those tests perform higher on an appraisal. Woman’s are a little bit better than men at these tests, woman tend to have a bit more empathic ability’s, they score 3% higher than men. Also woman with little children are better in sensing non-verbal que’s compared to woman without children.  

Here we have a little test for you.  These are pictures of people's eyes, you have four options, so which one is the emotion they are showing in their eyes? The anwser is in the down below in the blog.


Thank you for reading this post, I hope you liked it and their will becoming more part to complete the whole series. Not sure how many it will be. 

In my opinion social intelligence is a very important part in our society to function healthy. These are very important subjects that aren't thought at school or only at social studies. If we want to evolve as a whole we need to look out for each other and understand each other emotionally as well. I see so many times event's that escalade so quickly into a heavy argument and people shouting, just because we misinterpret each other on a emotional level. 

Here is the link to part one: https://steemit.com/life/@mysted/can-this-save-your-relationships-social-intelligence-real-part-1

Have an amazing day!


Answer   Playful, upset, desire

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Nice post! I definitely agree that by understanding each other more, a lot of problems could be resolved. It would also help us communicate better with others.

Yeah I know right! ;)

Very Intelligent article! This study is very interesting to me as I am obsessed with humans and the way we communicate. Imagine a full day of only using your facial expressions to communicate? That would be nuts!

hahah that´s a crazy Idea. But what I sometimes did was watch a series and put the audio off. That way you train your non verbal communications it´s pretty funny to do

Ah, I got 2 out of 3! Oh well...

Yeah I can spot a liar. But sometimes I keep giving the benefit of the doubt... Tsk.

Which one did you fail? Hehhe I thought upset was terrified haha

Yeah that one. I thought he was terrified, how come he's upset? Lol maybe the eyebrows? I dunno.

Nooo! I got the first face wrong. I was very close between comforting and playful but went with comforting. It looks almost neutral to me.

Have you watched Lie to Me? (I'm expecting you might've since the the dude on the second picture is the lead actor in it.) I'm totally hooked on that series :D

Haha to bad! I misread the second one though.. But yeah I have seen some episodes it's pretty useful to watch the series. You learn a lot from it. although it sometimes is a bit to much ahah. Thanks for reading yo!

Might be little over the top at times but it's good entertainment :D

The test was cool, wish there was more of these kinds of tests! I got them all right, but sometimes I have difficulties to read peoples faces and know what they think or know whether they're fish or a fowl… Maybe it's because of the "resting bitch face-syndrome" I'm too suffering from. XD

Hey @mysted, thanks for sharing! So many things in life and love to be happy for. Always keep staying positive! Thanks for a nice post! Cheers

You read quick!