Bamboozled! How Disguises Fool Us



At this point, it’s well-trod territory: why couldn’t star reporter Lois Lane recognize that her nerdy coworker Clark Kent was also Superman? How could simply changing one’s clothes, slipping off a pair of glasses, and brushing one’s hair fool a grown adult? Who could fall for such surface-level changes in appearance?

Well. Plenty of people, as it turns out. Researchers at the University of York and University of Huddersfield recently led an experiment testing the average person’s ability to recognize disguised faces in photos. Models were given resources to change their hair, facial hair, and makeup, but were not allowed to wear common spy movie props like hats or sunglasses, since these are banned in most security settings. To sweeten the pot, a cash reward was offered to the model who could fool the most people.

There was, it turned out, steep competition. The models fooled participants about 30% of the time. In fact, subjects could only reliably see through a disguise if it was being worn by someone they knew in real life.

This last detail was not itself so surprising; when you look at a stranger, you tend to identify them by surface-level traits: the red-haired woman, the bearded man, that fellow in the newsroom with the glasses. However, once you get to know someone, your facial reading software gets more advanced, so to speak. You start to know the shape of a person’s nose and the configuration of their cheekbones, the set of their mouth and the line of their chin, what study co-author Rob Jenkins calls “internal facial features,” which are, he notes, “much harder to alter.”

It’s the reason that when your friend gets a really dramatic haircut, you’re not left completely mystified, asking helplessly, “Who are you?”

The researchers also looked at two different types of disguises: impersonation and evasion. Impersonation, just as it sounds, involves trying to look like a specific other person. For instance, trying to match the photo on a stolen ID. Evasion disguises are simply an attempt to look unlike your usual appearance, which might come in handy if your face ever shows up on a wanted poster. The study found that evasion disguises are generally more effective. This makes sense, because when your only goal is to change your appearance, you have a great many more tools at your disposal: haircuts, curlers, straightening irons, makeup, and yes, even glasses.

This may help to explain why con artists so often get away with obscuring their true identities, even if it doesn’t shed much light on Superman’s very lightweight deception abilities.

The next step for the researchers is to see if computer recognition can be equally fooled. Meanwhile, the next step for Lois Lane is to wonder why she still can’t identify the face of a man she sees every workday when he doesn’t even bother with a blond wig or a fake mustache.




Check out Robb’s new book and more 
content at www.bestmindframe.com.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more