According to recent figures from a New York Health Department survey of safe-sex practices, it seems that the Big Apple is no city of lovers.

Apparently, only eleven percent of New Yorkers reported having more than one sex partner in the past year, according to the report which was released yesterday. So this leaves 89 percent in either the “faithful” or “not having much” categories.

Only five percent of married couples or those in a relationship reported being unfaithful during the past 12 months, although seven percent of men said they had multiple sex partners, and three percent of women reported extra-marital activity. However, officials did concede that married people might be reluctant to confess to affairs.

Health Commissioner Dr. Tom Frieden said he was especially concerned about the 36 percent of gay men who had five or more sexual partners, and didn’t use condoms consistently.

Unsurprisingly, the top lovers were men aged 18 to 24; thirty-four percent of which said they had two or more partners in the past year, which is almost double the percentage of women in the same age group.

However, by age 45, the report found that only eleven percent of men had been with more than one partner in the previous 12 months.

The sex study is part of the larger annual Community Health Survey of 10,000 adults, conducted each year by the New York Health Department.

Posted by Jonathan as Polls & Surveys, Sociology at 8:01 PM EDT

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A Psychologist at Aberdeen University claims to have discovered what women really want in order to be seduced.

If the reports are to be believed, then it seems that this formula does away with all the traditional advice, such as chat-up lines, wealth, good looks and a sense of humour etc. Because his research indicates that a man can significantly increase his pulling power by simply catching a woman’s eye and lightly touching her on the arm.

The study by Aberdeen University’s Dr Ben Jones found that two-thirds of women agreed to dance with a man who rested his hand on her arm for a second or two whilst making the request. However, when the man kept his hands by his side as he asked the same question, his success rate fell by half.

Additionally, women were also more likely to give their phone-number to a man who touched their arm as he approached them in the street.

The study, published in Focus Magazine, suggested that touching makes a man appear dominant, and therefore more attractive to the opposite sex.

Dr Jones claimed that making eye contact also signals interest in a woman, but only if it is genuine:

Smiling can make you more attractive but it is worth bearing in mind that faking a smile is quite tricky

He added:

Men who find it hard to fake a smile could try taking better care of their skin, or surrounding themselves with other women to appear more appealing

At this point, regular readers will no doubt be eager to point out that Focus Magazine isn’t exactly a proper peer-reviewed scientific journal. However, Seduction Labs aims to bring together newer pick-up, dating and relationship related information from a wide variety of sources.

Other points that the reports are somewhat sketchy on were:

• Which area(s) of the woman’s arm did the experimenters touch?
• Why the arm? Why not some other [non-intimate] area of her body?
• Were any specific sections of the woman’s arm more efficacious than others?

• To my mind, touching seems natural, whilst someone keeping their arms straight down by sides seems stilted and unnatural; was this effect controlled for?
• Were other positions aside from ‘touching’ and ‘arms by sides’ tried? (Arms folded or arms behind the back, for example?)

• Were women significantly more likely to give their phone-number to a man who touched their arm as he approached them in the street? (Having a stranger walk up and demand a phone-number doesn’t seem like an especially effective pick-up strategy to me…)
• What percentage of the numbers obtained in the street were fakes?
• How did this compare with women prepared to dance (or otherwise)?
• After touching then dancing, were the women more likely to give their phone-number / go on a date / etc. compared with women who danced but wern’t touched first?

• Do all women really want to be dominated? I’ve seen enough spam to suggest that it’s more likely men who want a dominatrix.

• How do we differentiate between “fake eye-contact” and “genuine eye-contact”?

• Finally, the smiling advice also seems counter to the pimp wisdom of Iceberg Slim, and contemporary research.

If I’ve missed anything, or if you have the answers, please do comment or email.

---

Oliver writes.

---

What I find dubious about the Focus Magazine article’s claims was the suggestion that touching makes a man appear dominant. I remember an old girlfriend of mine who, on meeting me face to face for the first time (in our college library), held my arm as she introduced me to herself. She’d clearly remembered who I was, but I hadn’t recalled meeting her before, so this physical gesture came a bit out of the blue for me. She wasn’t a dominant person, not in behaviour and definitely not in appearance, being diminutive, smiley, and always wearing flowery dresses.

The surprise physical contact romanticized the whole interaction in way that wouldn’t have happened if she’d not made the gesture. Perhaps this was because she had obviously already dropped any shield that she might instinctively hold up to a strange man - so half my work was done. Or more probably because the gesture was one that I had only recently experienced from my previous sexual partner… positive associations.

You can try to break the gesture down and rationalise it as a form of dominance, or a demonstration of bravery… or whatever. But it seems to me that to say this is to try to over-sexualise it. Touching in the right kind of way is simply a demonstration of warmth. Just because adults hold children in such a way to give them a feeling of security doesn’t mean that it is actually a show of strength or power.

Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 1:49 AM EDT

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I’d always believed that porn stars were pretty much unflappable, and up for virtually anything. So, I was quite surprised to see some research over at The Deets, which proved me completely wrong.

Using a porn talent agency’s website, and a ‘cool’ interface that allowed users to filter the actresses, based on what sex acts they’d be willing to perform in a film, Ed Kohler discovered that no girl does absolutely everything. And, while many adult performers are prepared to do a wide variety of different scenes, many others will shy away from things like double anal or interracial scenes, and most surprisingly, actual acting.

You can examine his data for yourself below, and see how many of the over the 900 actresses in the system are willing to give a blowjob or a handjob, and how many are wiling to swallow? But what about the 26 actresses that won’t do solo scenes, surely appearing on film naked is a basic requirement of being a porn star?

Also, out of the standard repertoire of porn scenes, you can now find out which acts are most commonplace (Solo scenes), and which are harder to come by (Double anal). Some of the findings might surprise you: for example ‘Girl/Girl’ outranks ‘Girl/Boy’ – So, does this mean we finally have proof that it’s more difficult finding sex, being a guy.

Situation Girls Solo 875 Girl/Girl 804 Boy/Girl 770 Boy/Boy/Girl 571 Fetish 569 Blowjob 542 Softcore 393 Interracial 375 Boy/Girl/Girl 358 Swallow 318 Toys 291 Anal 242 Girl/Girl/Anal 233 Bondage 220 Handjob 174 Double penetration 151 Creampie 146 Orgy 137 Gangbang 125 Blowbang 80 Squirting 75 Smoking 62 Foot Job 55 Ass-to-Mouth 46 Bukkake 36 Double vaginal 28 Boy/Boy/Girl/Anal 12 Boy/Girl/Girl/Anal 12 Acting 11 Double anal 4     Total girls 901

Posted by Jonathan as Analysis, Sociology at 3:58 PM EDT

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A new survey has revealed that two-thirds of men in the south of England lie to their buddies about topics including their sex lives, when they’re talking in the pub.

The research by Learndirect Careers Advice says 39 percent of men aged 19 to 25 regularly stretch the truth about their sexual relationships to impress their pals.

The results also show that more than half of men claim to posses a skill or talent they don’t have, and 52 percent claim their jobs are more exciting then they really are.

Learndirect is offering careers advice to young men after finding the results showed many men lie when they are unhappy at work, and 59 percent want to throw in their job for a new career.

 

Posted by Jonathan as Sociology at 2:11 PM EDT

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The problem with Science books is that they’re mostly tucked away in Libraries or technical sections of Bookshops; so that many of the more interesting points they make are often lost to the general public, or sometimes the ideas just become twisted to suit the ideals of noisy braggarts with their own private agendas.

In terms of the scientific aspects of seduction, we have already disproved the notion that amongst human society there is some sort of top dog or alpha male. But looking back at that article there is very little mentioned about human hierarchies and rank; while most reasonably intelligent observers of human society would note that human society is much more complex than the simple and often somewhat bizarre alpha / not-alpha theories touted by various commercial seduction operations.

In purely biological terms, relative resource holdings are best and most decisively demonstrated in the struggle between individuals for access to mates. For both humans and other animals, the most intense of these struggles typically involve males, the reason for this lying in the asymmetry of the reproductive strategies of the two sexes. Females, who in most species invest heavily in the gestation and care of offspring, have limited reproductive capacity relative to males, whose only contribution in many instances consists of just a few sperm cells. This asymmetry means that any single male is capable (in theory) of siring an almost unlimited number of progeny. Thus, the result for males is a genetic tournament with enormously high stakes. As an example, in one species of seal, 4 percent of the breeding-age males sire almost 90 percent of all surviving offspring.¹

The variability of male reproductive success in humans, although smaller than in many other animal species, is nonetheless substantial. More than 85 percent of past and present human societies for which data is available were polygynous.² And, in such societies, high-ranking males often take numerous wives, with the biggest winners enjoying prodigious reproductive success. For example, Moulay Ismail (1646-1727), the last Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, fathered more than a thousand children during the course of his lifetime.² But even people who would be delighted if everyone had lots of grandchildren thus have ample reasons to want high relative incomes.

In modern industrial societies, of course, there is no longer a strong link between income and the number of grandchildren one expects to have, since the government generally subsidises families that have numerous children. Even so, there is still evidence that relative earning power continues to be an important factor in mate selection. And, according to various relationship surveys, women consider earning power the most important characteristic when evaluating potential mates; and, apparently recognizing the growing importance of two-earner families in modern society, men in the same surveys usually rank a woman’s earning power second behind physical attractiveness.

Anyway, to continue, over the course of human evolution, if individuals differed in the intensity of their respective desires to achieve high rank, and if those with more intense desires were more likely than others to achieve it, then it would be most unusual if the relentless forces of natural selection had not produced a human brain that strongly motivated its owner to seek high rank.

So, it seems natural to ask why a brain moulded by natural selection would urge us to seek relative rather than absolute wealth, as in most cases, a person who maximizes their absolute wealth will have maximized their relative wealth as well. We might also ask why our inner voices don’t simply urge “Do the best you can,” rather than “Try to achieve high rank.” After all, most of us are destined to be outranked by at least some people in virtually every domain of life, making a relentless focus on relative position seem more like a formula for misery than a useful motivational tool.

Evolutionary Psychologists stress, however, that the purpose of human motivation is not to make us happy, but to make us more likely to succeed against the competition. Someone who is unhappy about his low relative position in one arena may be more motivated to compete in a different arena. For instance, a talented entrepreneur who is not willing to put in 80-hour work weeks will have a better chance of becoming a success in a small regional town than in Central London.

There is also the linguistic problem that a command like “Do the best you can” is hopelessly vague. Each of us has a unique mix of talent, ability and experience, so in most cases, doing the best we can doesn’t yield much fruit, unless we first discover just what it is that we’re good at. For example, once you’ve chosen to become an Accountant, it may be sensible to say try to become the best Accountant you can; but how did you know that becoming an Accountant was the right choice in the first place?

Much of human learning takes place as a result of the positive or negative reinforcement we receive from different actions. Slowly, and often by trial and error, we purge our mental inventories of behaviours that don’t work, and then replace them with ones that do. If you’re tone deaf, your relatively poor performance in primary school music classes will have spared you the trouble of seeking a career as a Pianist. If you are a slow runner, your poor performance in early races will have steered you away from training for the Olympics. Then, with a little luck, your strong early performance in some other field will have helped guide you towards a career that provided a more fertile ground for your talents. Thus, when it comes to finding the right field to compete in, an inner voice urging “Try to achieve high rank” is likely to be far more informative than an inner voice urging “Do the best you can.”

There is yet another important reason for being concerned about rank per se, and this is that rank serves as a convenient benchmark for us to use in regulating the amount of effort we expend. To use the military as a vivid illustration, we know that human beings under duress can accomplish extremely demanding physical tasks with little sleep for weeks at a time, even when faced with imminent threats of death. However, there are limits, because each persons struggle for survival typically plays out over many decades, and the expenditure of maximum possible effort at every moment is almost certain to be a losing strategy. So, to avoid burning out, we also need to set aside time to reflect and restore ourselves.

A far better general strategy is therefore to conserve energy for the occasions when threats to survival are greatest. Here, also, an intrinsic concern about relative position appears almost tailor-made for the task at hand. So, as a general rule, the farther an individual fell in her local pecking order, the more serious were the threats to her survival. A decline in rank typically provokes distress and anxiety, and these feelings can often spur the additional effort it requires to recover lost ground.

This is not to say that anxiety vanishes once someone achieves a threshold level of high rank. On the contrary, we all know people whose drive to advance remains unsatisfied no matter how much they may have achieved. This could be explained in part by the fact that individuals differ in their respective drives to succeed, and those with the highest drives are more likely than others to have made it near the top.

But the Evolutionary Psychologist’s perspective suggests the additional possibility that we ought not to have expected the relationship between subjective well-being and relative income to have been a simple, static one in the first place. From an evolutionary design standpoint, the most successful organisms will be concerned not just with their relative position but with changes therein, since in competitive environments, complacency about high rank often results in losing it.

Thus, psychological well-being seems attuned to relative income in roughly the following way: Increases in relative income increase wellbeing, and reductions in relative income reduce wellbeing, but both effects tend to decay at least partially over time.³ Once people become adapted to their new circumstances, these constitute a new norm against which further changes are reckoned. (Hence the folk wisdom that “Life is a journey, not a destination”)

The Evolutionary Psychologist’s framework also calls attention to the fact that the relevant reproductive battles were typically decided by competitive balance in highly local environments. For instance, an ape’s reproductive success depended not on how strong he was relative to the entire population of apes on the African continent, but on his strength relative to rivals in his immediate vicinity. Similarly, the economic and psychological rewards of today’s tennis player depend not on his performance vis-à-vis all other athletes, but on how well he performs relative to other tennis players in the particular arena in which he competes. Achieving high or improving rank in this ‘local hierarchy’ will make him feel good, and the reverse will be true for low rank or downward movements.

People in each different category are involved in their own competitions to move forward in their local hierarchies. But in each case, only half of the contestants can rank in the top half.

References:

1. Dawkins, R., ‘The Selfish Gene‘ (1989) United Kingdom: Oxford University Press
2. Wright, R., ‘The Moral Animal‘ (1994) New York: Pantheon
3. Diener, E. & R. Lucas, ‘Personality and Subjective Well-Being’ in Understanding Well-Being: Scientific Perspectives on Enjoyment and Suffering (1998) eds. Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener & Norbert Schwartz, New York: Russell Sage

Posted by Jonathan as Sociobiology, Sociology at 3:02 AM EDT

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A new sexuality survey has confirmed what women know and some men fear - single females have far more luck achieving orgasm than those partnered off.

Taking men out of the picture allows women to “better connect with themselves”, according to sex therapists behind the Queensland study of 500 older women.

The research found that 56 per cent of sexually-active women with no current partner could reach orgasm every time with masturbation compared with only 24 per cent of women with partners.

“That’s a significant difference and I’d imagine there are few men out there a little surprised and unimpressed that women have better luck without them,” said medical sex therapist Dr Jane Howard.

The findings come from the study What Does Sexuality Mean To Older Women?, which assessed the sex lives of women in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s to find trends over the ages.

Dr Howard said she believed women on their own were better at achieving orgasm because they don’t have the “distraction” of having to please a man or subscribe to male-type sexual fantasies.

“Arousal is a lot about what erotic thoughts go through the mind, and for women that’s very different to men,” Dr Howard said.

“It may be focusing on Colin Firth’s smouldering eyes, some romantic novel or a waterfall or whatever.”

The therapist said the most outstanding aspect of the study was the variety of ways people lived their lives.

“Some people are in relationships and having sex, some are in relationships with no sex, others are single and are having sex … it was just so varied,” Dr Howard said.

She said her results destroyed the cultural myth that people stay in life-long relationships and are sexually functional until they die.

“We like to think of people having wild sex for their whole lives but the reality isn’t quite like that,” Dr Howard said.

More than 80 per cent of women in their 40s were sexually active, but this figure declined to 27 per cent for those in their 70s.

The fact that 70 per cent of men in their 70s were not capable of having an erection could affect this figure.

But results showed that three quarters of women over 70 were indifferent to sex.

While their libido dropped off and arousal was less, their capacity to orgasm was seemingly unaffected by age.

“That was quite surprising, actually,” Dr Howard said.

She said the results would help people understand the true impact that ageing had on sex.

The findings are part of the Longitudinal Assessment of Ageing in Women, conducted by the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital.

Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 10:59 PM EDT

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A few people have asked about covert hypnosis, which they seem to believe might be some sort of seduction magic bullet that gets people to lose all inhibition and jump into bed with them straight away.

However, this notion does seem to be rather too optimistic, because hypnosis is not all about altering someone’s state. In actual fact, the effective element in hypnosis is that you can increase a person’s responsiveness to suggestions.

One of the most regularly suggested ideas is the belief that you can confuse people into a trance. Even though this idea falls at the first hurdle, and is one of the legion of reasons that NLP practitioners are so irritating. These people do not seem to have realized that Confusion is not covert, and most people are not daft - they know that something weird is happening, and they know who is doing it!

If you’ve ever tried confusion techniques, you will notice that subjects tend to retreat. And this is fine if you’re doing therapy in a therapeutic setting, since in this situation there is nowhere to retreat to. The client is caught in a double bind because they choose to be in your therapy room, and so they have no exit. Therefore, they must deal with the confusion at that moment, and this opens the gateway to an enjoyable trance experience.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, people will cite performers like Derren Brown; pointing out that he appears to be using a lot of confusing doublespeak, getting away with it, and producing remarkable results to boot.

So, it certainly is possible to use confusion techniques in public; but it should be noted that to pull this off requires an incredibly charismatic personality. Should you to try to duplicate those effects, and then show any signs of incongruity or hesitation, the chances are extremely high that you will lose all therapeutic rapport, and the subject would decide that you are an escaped lunatic / criminal / sex-pest or some other type of deviant, before trying to get away from you as fast as they can.

Now, if you haven’t already been dissuaded from experimentation with confusion techniques in public, then you need to present yourself as very safe and very friendly, simply because people need a lot of trust in order to stay confused long enough to go into a trance.

Thus, were you to take part in one of Derren Brown’s TV shows, he would most likely appear with a TV camera crew; and as anyone who has ever pointed a home video camera at a friend or family member will attest, that person suddenly comes under intense social pressure, and their higher brain functions and reasoning skills tend to shut down. However, a professional TV camera crew also implies trust because you know that a major national TV network cannot be seen to let innocent members of the public come to harm, so therefore everything must be safe.

To continue, you might assume that there are millions of people watching your every move, and then you may become very compliant, doing and saying things that you wouldn’t ordinarily do or say, because unconsciously you’d like the approval of the audience - This is an old trick of stage hypnotists and TV evangelists.

Next, the very friendly and very charismatic Mr Brown is, amongst other things, a Magician and a Showman; so not everything he does is hypnosis, and much of the language is just for show. Part is psychological, and part is trickery or misdirection – but even in this situation, you know that you are going to be fooled, so it’s a fun and entertaining experience. As an aside, I might also add that he will also tend to play the odds, so that he can be seen to succeed more often than he fails; if necessary, too many failures could even be edited out of the TV show, to make his hit rate even better than it already is.

So, if you want people in trances in public places, then firstly you need to create an atmosphere where people want to go into a hypnotic state. Therefore, it’s much easier and safer (and probably most ethical) just to get their permission first. You could, for example, tell everyone you meet that you’re a hypnotist, and then step back and wait for their reactions - half the people you meet will be intrigued and frightened - while the other half will just be intrigued. Offer people from this second group a demonstration, and emphasise that they’ll be safe – the experience will be fun – talk up how good they’ll feel, and promise not to have them running round with a lampshade on their head, talking to their shoe or pretending to be a chicken.

The reason this idea works well is because you are using the power of expectation, the atmosphere, mood, timing, catching the moment, preparing the subject, and creating a unique condition in the person’s mind - all of which will help make their going into the hypnotic state a breeze. Of course, this isn’t the only way to do it: You just need to set an appropriate context for the sort of trance experiences that you want to create.

If you’re trying to be covert, then you will find that getting people to close their eyes is a problem, especially if they don’t realise what you are up to. Whereas if they knew, they’d go straight into a trance, as soon as they realised something was happening.

When trying to put someone into a trance in a public place, what you will typically see is that they get fascinated and begin showing the classic signs of trance (breathing becomes deeper and more rhythmic, body becomes more rigid, blink rate slows, eyes becomes fixed, pupils dilate and the subject becomes more reluctant to talk, etc.) basically, imagine your co-workers at a really boring meeting. Now, if you try to deepen this state, very soon, just like in the meeting mentioned above, they’ll shake themselves awake and continue to interact with the conscious world.

So, with straightforward hypnosis, you have the problem that public locations set an expectation of conversation, your subject will be expecting to pay attention and contribute something to the discussion, or they will feel like they’re being rude, and therefore it would be completely out of context for them to shut their eyes and drift into a deep trance.

In this situation, your options are to either overwhelm the person; and a few people who are unconsciously enjoying going into the trance you’ve started (even though they don’t realise it) may just slip deeper into that trance, before their social programming can caution them to be good citizens, and rationality kicks them back to consciousness. However, these people are pretty rare.

With other people, especially if they’re already aware that you know something about hypnosis, it’s probably best to follow Milton Erickson’s example, and switch from a covert trance to an overt style about halfway through. This is indirect hypnosis as seen in the available footage of Milton Erickson - The subject knows something is going on, they know who’s doing it, they just don’t know how to respond - so they give Dr Erickson the lead.

You could still keep your hypnotic conversations covert, but then you’ll need to make allowances for the person’s social programming, and fractionate the conversation i.e. you induce a light trance, and let them become fully conscious, create another deeper trance and let them rouse, then continue fractionating until they’re in a much deeper state of hypnosis. If you’re coaching a small group or dealing with a number of people at the same time, this can be particularly useful as you’ll get indirect feedback about their mental state each time they come out of trance.

However, once your subject is in a state of trance, don’t just throw random suggestions at them and hope for the best. When you get to this stage, be kind and give some pleasant, life-enhancing suggestion that they can carry with them for the rest of their day.

Finally, you should also keep in mind that whilst you may be able to reduce someone’s inhibitions etc., if that person didn’t have any desire for you in the first place, then they might only be less inhibited in telling you where to go, if you later suggest something more sexual to them.

Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 11:40 AM EDT

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Over half of Australian women have difficulties getting sexual satisfaction, according to a new survey of more than 400 women, by Deakin University Psychology professor Marita McCabe, and PhD student Katie Giles, who studied Australian women’s sex lives and sexual feelings.

The researchers found that rates of sexual desire were similar to those shown in international studies; however, Australian women appeared to have more problems with arousal and orgasm.

Professor McCabe, who recently presented the data at a sexuality conference on Australia’s Gold Coast said:

All up we found 55 percent of women had a difficulty with sexual satisfaction

It seems women go into the bedroom and expect it will happen quickly, automatically, with orgasm, even be multi-orgasmic, but without spending the time to do so. They’re busy and stressed and not taking the time for their sexual expression.

Further, according to Professor McCabe, the survey revealed that 65 percent of women had some form of sexual dysfunction and half had a diagnosable sexual desire disorder.

Anxiety and depression were found to be contributing factors, but stress and poor body image had the biggest influence on sexual interest and response.

Other scientists were more critical, and Jane Ussher, a women’s health psychologist at the University of Western Sydney, said while she did not dispute the statistics, to label a quarter of the Australian population sexually dysfunctional was ‘not helpful‘.

Professor Ussher was quoted as saying:

To talk about dysfunction implies some abnormality within the women, and whilst many women do have issues around sexual desire, especially in heterosexual relationships, that is very likely to be about the relationship rather than the woman herself.

She went on to say that there was strong evidence to suggest that women with low desire regained their interest in sex once they re-partnered. And, there was also an argument that pharmaceutical companies were trying to position a lack of desire as dysfunctional, so that it could be treated.

Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 12:18 PM EDT

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Any piece of writing with a title as bold as the one given to this article had better start with a massive disclaimer, or it’d be very hard for you to believe anything written in it.

So, firstly, I should note that despite what Body Language charlatans, and other people trying to sell books, DVDs and courses etc. might claim, there are no infallible guides to spotting liars. Think about it - if there was some foolproof guide, Police, Prison Guards, Customs Officers and other people whose jobs involve professional lie-catching would have very much higher detection rates. We can therefore conclude that most people are often pretty good at lying, and a very short article certainly won’t act as any sort of magic bullet.

In fact, in professional scientific studies examining college student’s abilities to detect lies, accuracy rates of about 54% are generally obtained (when an accuracy of 50% would be obtainable purely by chance). However, DePaulo and Pfeifer (1986) studied experienced and newly recruited law enforcement officers; Ekman and O’Sullivan (1991) studied members of the secret service, federal Polygraphers and Police officers; Garrido, Masip, Herrero, Tabernero and Vega (1998) studied Police students from a Spanish Police academy; Köhnken (1987) studied Police officers; Vrij (1993a) studied Police detectives; Vrij and Graham (1997) studied Police officers; while Vrij and Mann (1999) also studied Police officers. In each of these investigations, accuracy rates were in the range 45-60%.

Vrij (1993a) used regression analysis to determine which cues the Police detectives in his study were using to attempt to determine whether people were lying or telling the truth. His breakdown was as follows:

Socially anxious - 6%
More hand movements - 8%
Less co-operative - 8%
Less smiling - 10%
Untidily dressed - 12%
Public self-consciousness - 14%
Unexplained - 42%

These choices all seem pretty much arbitrary, and that somewhat explains why the Detectives achieved such low accuracy in the research.

Luckily, as seducers, we don’t have to detect thieves or murderers etc. And in some cases, you probably don’t even want to know if someone is lying. For example, if I spend some time and money choosing you a present, I’m setting myself up for a fall if I try to determine whether you are telling the truth, when you say that you like what I’ve given you. Equally, you would likely be fairly reluctant to allow me to attach you to a Polygraph, or film you while I searched for micro muscle movements.

On the other hand, a dysfunctional man might try to impress a woman by inventing stories about taking part in unusual sports, to compensate for his lack of an interesting life, or else claim that he drives a Ferrari, when in fact he has only borrowed one, or possibly doesn’t have one at all. Just as likely is a scenario where a deceptive woman may claim that she is interested in a man, simply to try to gain some material benefit; or she may state that she will meet a man at a certain time and place, when in actual fact she plans to be elsewhere at that time.

Clearly, in each of these cases, someone will be making an effort to start a relationship, only to be greatly disappointed later on, after they have expended time, money and effort. Obviously, these people would be better off being able to detect lies and protect themselves against deceptive people, so that their time and energies might be more profitably applied elsewhere.

So, why is this all so difficult?

1) Difference between liars and truth-tellers are usually very small, and human behaviour can be very complex and at times confusing.

2) Contrary to what Body Language charlatans might tell you, there is no such thing as ‘Typical deceptive behaviour’. That is to say, there is no one behaviour or set of behaviours that all liars exhibit, because there is no such thing as generic behaviour.

3) Conversation rules prevent people from analyzing the person talking in detail, and head-to-foot observation would be very unusual in conversation. Further it would be terrible to accuse a truthful person of being a liar.

4) Persons attempting lie detection may depend upon mindless decision making rules, following garbage spouted by Body language salespeople, or just spuriously deciding that any odd or complex behaviour constitutes deception.

5) People have a tendency to interpret nervous behaviour not simply as nerves, but as deception. (q.v. Bond and Fahey, 1987)

6) People often fail to take individual differences into account. For example, introverts and socially awkward people often make a dishonest impression, as do black people (to white observers at least). The behaviours that these groups of people show are often incorrectly interpreted as indicative of lying.

Where does all the crap come from?

• Old wives tales
• Body Language charlatans
• Neuro-linguistic programming

Old wives tales: are basically folk wisdom or folk law; and it’s pretty easy to find people who will tell you that “Liars can’t look you in the eye“, “Liars have shifty eyes“, “Liars fidget” or “Liars say ‘ah,’ ‘er,’ ‘uh,’ or ‘um’ a lot“. All no doubt reinforced by years of old Detective movies. Someone may have spotted this behaviour once or twice, and it happened to coincide with a moment during which a person was being deceptive, and the idea stuck.

Body Language charlatans: are basically greedy people trying to make a living by inventing their own field of study (much like Astrologers). These people would have you believe that everyone behaves the same way, all the time, in all situations, or that there is some standard set of behaviours that all people exhibit. In spite of the fact that people who want to be deceptive will have taken the trouble to familiarise themselves with this body of literature, and will therefore be monitoring their behaviour to make sure they don’t conform to this pattern.

According to these “unqualified experts” everyone feels guilty when they lie, and it doesn’t matter that “Professionally qualified Psychologists” have found that many people actually experience a sense of pleasure while lying. A behaviour known as “duping delight” (possibly because they see deception as part of a game that they believe that they are winning, at that point). However, that doesn’t matter, because the Body Language charlatans won’t have to deal with a situation where an innocent person is accused of being a liar, on the basis of arbitrary rules.

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP): is more interesting, and in this case, the idea seems to be that you can tell whether someone is lying solely from whether the person breaks eye contact to the right or left. The belief that liars break to the left is popular, although there is absolutely no scientific evidence to support this theory.

The idea seems to be derived from the NLP “eye accessing cues” model, which holds that a persons preference for thinking visually, auditorily or kinaesthetically (emotionally) can be determined by watching the direction of their eye movements during communication. To be fair to Bandler and Grinder, I cannot recall any literature in which they have suggested a correlation between lying and looking to the left, so the idea seems to have been invented by some of their more over-enthusiastic students.

What can help you spot liars?

It’s important to take a balanced view, when it comes to determining whether you’re being lied to or not. If you assume that everyone is honest all the time, you’re more likely to be duped by a liar. But on the other hand, assuming that everyone is lying is unlikely to win you many friends, and ultimately leads to paranoia.

Next, in more recent years, Psychologists have developed a checklist of criteria collectively known as Reality monitoring theory (See Johnson, Hashtroudi & Lindsay (1993) and Johnson & Raye (1998) for a more academic overview of this subject). According to Reality monitoring theory, people rely on qualitative characteristics of memories to decide whether a memory is based on an actual experience or not. So, it is assumed that externally derived memories contain more references to sensory information (visual details, colours, sounds, smells, taste, and touch), contextual information (about space and time), emotions and feelings, and semantic information. On the other hand, internally derived memories are supposed to contain more references to cognitive operations at the time of encoding i.e. a person will reason “I must have dreamt this, because I know I’ve never been to China.”

One piece of information to look out for when trying to detect a liar is whether or not the person describes inferences that they made at the time of the event e.g. “His reactions gave me the impression that he was angry” or “It seemed to me that he didn’t know where he was going”. This criterion would also include repeated thinking about they are describing, and is probably the least helpful and most contentious part of Reality monitoring theory.

So, rather than detect liars, it’s actually much easier to determine people telling the truth, and in fact, the other criteria from Reality monitoring theory, are all concerned with judging whether people are more likely to be telling the truth. Thus, the more of these criteria that you can identify, the more likely the information being given to you is the truth:

Clarity/Vividness: The information that the person gives you should be clear, sharp and vivid (instead of dim and vague).

Realism: The information that the person gives you should be plausible, realistic and make sense.

Sensory information: This criterion is present if the statement includes perceptual information such as visual details (e.g. “I saw the man get into the car”), sounds (e.g. “She really shouted at me”), physical sensations (e.g. “It really hurt”), smells (e.g. “It had a smell of bacon”) and tastes (e.g. “The wine was very fruity”).

Emotions and feelings: This criterion is present if information is included about how the person felt during the event (e.g. “I was very anxious”)

Spatial information: This criterion is present if the statement includes information about locations (e.g. “It was in the park”) or the spatial arrangement of people and / or objects (e.g. “The man was sitting to the left of his girlfriend” or “The radio was obscured by the curtains”)

Temporal information: This criterion is present if the statement includes information about when the event happened, either from the time of year or time of day, (e.g. “It was early in the afternoon”) or explicitly describes a sequence of events (e.g. “When she heard the noise, she became nervous and left” or “As soon as the man entered the pub, the girl started smiling”)

Reconstructability of the story: This criterion is present if, despite the complexity of the story, it is possible to reconstruct the events on the basis of the information told to you.

How well does this work?

In laboratory studies of Reality monitoring theory using adults, Sporer was able to detect 75% of truths, 68% of lies and 71% overall. Then Vrij, Edward, Roberts and Bull managed 77% of truths, 74% of lies and 72% overall. So, whilst not perfect, this method is a massive improvement in accuracy over all the methods detailed above.

Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 2:35 AM EDT

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Last year, researchers at Durham University published a paper revealing that “Daddy’s girls” choose husbands that look like their fathers, whilst those who had difficult relationships with their fathers tended to go for men with very different looks.

Now, according to a new study from the University of Iowa, it seems that if a man’s mother is highly educated, the chances are that the woman he marries will also have equivalent qualifications.

Researchers found that nearly 80% of high-achieving men, whose mothers held a bachelor’s degree, married women with a similar education. And 62% of men, whose mothers had a master’s degree or doctorate, tied the knot with an equivalent degree holder.

Sociologist, Dr Christine Whelan and her colleague, Christie Boxer studied data from 3,700 people who took part in a survey about men and the educational level of the women close to them. All the men surveyed were considered to be high achievers, in their 20s and 30s, who earned salaries in the top 10 percent for their age group.

The researchers discovered that more than 70% of the men had mothers who worked while they were growing up, and that the same group was twice as likely to marry a woman who made $50,000 or more per year.

Of course, the results might be explained by social class, but the U.S. based researchers believe they help explain the old adage that ‘men tend to marry their mothers’.

Dr Whelan (who obtained her degree from Oxford University) said:

These young men look up to their mothers as role models. They grew up in a family where their mothers were educated women

When they make their own choices about someone who they think will be a good wife in the future, or a good mother, they go back to their role models.

They are increasing excited about the idea that they won’t have to be the only bread winner in the family, so these men are attracted to women who have a job and express a continuing interest to work

Although the research focused on high-earners, the phenomenon is expected to apply more generally, with men of all incomes being influenced by their mother’s attitude towards work and education.

Possibly, modelling their choice of wife on a parents’ successful marriage may help a child increase their own chances of a happy partnership.