Why are you pessimistic about eyetracking and body language? Although those might not be as helpful in experimental contexts, they’re much less invasive per unit time, and people in high-risk environments can agree to have specific delineated periods of eyetracking and body language data collected while in the high-performance environments themselves such as working with actual models and code (ie not OOD environments like a testing room).
AFAIK analysts might find uses for this data later on, e.g. observing differences in patterns of change over time based on based on the ultimate emergence of high risk traits, or comparing people to others who later developed high risk traits (comparing people to large amounts of data from other people could also be used to detect positive traits from a distance), spotting the exact period where high risk traits developed and cross-referencing that data with the testimony of a high risk person who voluntarily wants other high risk people to be easier to detect, or depending on advances in data analysis, using that data to help refine controlled environment approaches like pupillometry data or even potentially extrapolating it to high-performance environments. Conditional on this working and being helpful, high-impact people in high-stakes situations should have all the resources desired to create high-trust environments.
Thank you—I think these ideas would be fascinating to investigate. I hope my current pessimism wrt eye tracking and body language analysis is misplaced, and I think that your ideas, if it turned out they were feasible to implement, could make these methods more useful than they appear (to me) to be at the moment.
The reason I’m pessimistic about these methods at the moment is that I imagine that some people with high levels of malevolent traits might be able to game them (by faking “normality”), but my concern ~only applies iff they were sufficiently motivated, informed about what body language or gaze behaviors would be considered normal, and if they then successfully practiced until they could go undetected.
I think it would be great if it was possible to study these things without publicizing the results or if it turned out that some normal behaviors are too difficult to practice successfully (or if some abnormal behaviors are too difficult to mask successfully).
Ah, I see; for years I’ve been pretty pessimistic about the ability of people to fool systems (namely voice-only lie detectors facilitated by large numbers of retroactively-labelled audio recordings of honest and dishonest statements in the natural environments of different kinds of people) but now that I’ve read more about humans genetic diversity, that might have been typical mind fallacy on my part; people in the top 1% of charisma and body-language self-control tend to be the ones who originally ended up in high-performance and high-stakes environments as they formed (or forming around then, just as innovative institutions form around high-intelligence and high-output folk).
I can definitely see the best data coming from a small fraction of the human body’s outputs such as pupil dilation; most of the body’s outputs should yield bayesian updates but that doesn’t change the fact that some sources will be wildly more consistent and reliable than others.
I agree that most measures (including the ones that I mentioned being pessimistic about) could be used to update one’s estimated probability that an actor is malevolent, but like you, I’d be most interested in which measures give the highest value of information (relative to the costs and invasiveness of the measure).
I could have done a better job of explaining why I think that pupillometry, and particularly the measurement of pupillary responses to specific stimuli, would be much more difficult to game (if it was possible at all) relative to body language analysis and eye tracking. It’s because the muscles that control pupil size are not innervated by skeletal muscle but by smooth muscle, which is widely accepted as being not under conscious control. (The muscles involved are called the dilator pupillae, activated by the sympathetic nervous system, and the sphincter pupillae, activated by the parasympathetic nervous system). Having said this, there are some arguments (and some case studies) suggesting that one could indirectly train oneself to change one’s pupil size (e.g., via mental arithmetic or other forms of mental effort) or that some people may be able to find other methods of (training themselves to) change their pupillary size at will (here’s a video of someone doing it). But to me the main question is whether the initial response to specific stimuli (e.g., negative emotional stimuli, for which pupil responses are observed [in non-psychopathic people] within 2,000 ms of the stimulus) would be under voluntary control, and this seems very unlikely to me.
Early pupillary responses to certain stimuli are under the influence of subcortical structures, including the amygdala, and I think this point is particularly relevant to psychopathy. When we view faces, there’s a subcortical route to the amygdala which carries that information faster than it can be consciously processed and which allows the amygdala to be one of the first brain areas to trigger a fear response in reaction to someone seeing a fearful face. Why is this relevant? Well, there’s evidence that psychopaths demonstrate hypoactivity in their amygdala (relative to controls) in response to viewing human faces. And it seems that psychopaths’ pupillary responses to negative facial expressions differ[1] from those of controls (in that their pupils don’t dilate in response to negative stimuli [relative to neutral stimuli] like non-psychopaths’ pupils do) within the first 2000 ms of the stimulus being presented, not after.
If someone’s pupillary responses to negative facial expressions differ from non-psychopathic people, even if they somehow became aware of that and tried to alter it, I suspect it would be incredibly difficult (if it was possible at all) for them to voluntarily change their pupil size (in response to emotional stimuli) quickly enough to mimic normality. For these reasons, I think that assessing pupillary responses to viewing fearful faces is worth investigating as a cheap, noninvasive measure of psychopathy that would be much harder to manipulate relative to other cheap, noninvasive measures (if it was possible to manipulate at all, which I don’t think it would be).
Below, I briefly describe two little studies that are too small to be useful on their own but which make me think it’s worth at least exploring pupillometry a little more (as just one potential measure among a set of possible measures).
This little study included 82 males recruited from low and medium secure psychiatric hospitals in the United Kingdom, grouped according to whether they had low or high Factor 1 (interpersonal) factor scores based on the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised. The high Factor 1 group (n = 25) had a score of ≥10 on Factor 1 psychopathy and the low Factor 1 group (n = 27) had a score of ≤ 4. The chart below shows the difference in pupil diameter in response to negatively-valenced emotional images (compared to neutral images) for participants with high Factor 1 psychopathy scores (who had less pupil dilation in the first 2000 ms after the stimulus) compared to those with low Factor 1 psychopathy scores.
This little study included 73 adult male prisoners with histories of serious sexual or violent offenses, and it assessed psychopathy via The Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM; Drislane et al., 2014), which is a 58-item self-report measure with three subscales: Boldness, Meanness, and Disinhibition. They averaged participants’ pupil size measurements across each individual stimulus fixation for the duration of the stimulus display, then calculated an overall mean pupil size for each participant, across all trials, and calculated the percentage difference in pupil diameter for each stimulus category compared to the overall mean. They found weak but significant negative correlations between TriPM meanness scores and pupil dilation in response to a range of emotional stimuli (listed below).
Why are you pessimistic about eyetracking and body language? Although those might not be as helpful in experimental contexts, they’re much less invasive per unit time, and people in high-risk environments can agree to have specific delineated periods of eyetracking and body language data collected while in the high-performance environments themselves such as working with actual models and code (ie not OOD environments like a testing room).
AFAIK analysts might find uses for this data later on, e.g. observing differences in patterns of change over time based on based on the ultimate emergence of high risk traits, or comparing people to others who later developed high risk traits (comparing people to large amounts of data from other people could also be used to detect positive traits from a distance), spotting the exact period where high risk traits developed and cross-referencing that data with the testimony of a high risk person who voluntarily wants other high risk people to be easier to detect, or depending on advances in data analysis, using that data to help refine controlled environment approaches like pupillometry data or even potentially extrapolating it to high-performance environments. Conditional on this working and being helpful, high-impact people in high-stakes situations should have all the resources desired to create high-trust environments.
Thank you—I think these ideas would be fascinating to investigate. I hope my current pessimism wrt eye tracking and body language analysis is misplaced, and I think that your ideas, if it turned out they were feasible to implement, could make these methods more useful than they appear (to me) to be at the moment.
The reason I’m pessimistic about these methods at the moment is that I imagine that some people with high levels of malevolent traits might be able to game them (by faking “normality”), but my concern ~only applies iff they were sufficiently motivated, informed about what body language or gaze behaviors would be considered normal, and if they then successfully practiced until they could go undetected.
I think it would be great if it was possible to study these things without publicizing the results or if it turned out that some normal behaviors are too difficult to practice successfully (or if some abnormal behaviors are too difficult to mask successfully).
Ah, I see; for years I’ve been pretty pessimistic about the ability of people to fool systems (namely voice-only lie detectors facilitated by large numbers of retroactively-labelled audio recordings of honest and dishonest statements in the natural environments of different kinds of people) but now that I’ve read more about humans genetic diversity, that might have been typical mind fallacy on my part; people in the top 1% of charisma and body-language self-control tend to be the ones who originally ended up in high-performance and high-stakes environments as they formed (or forming around then, just as innovative institutions form around high-intelligence and high-output folk).
I can definitely see the best data coming from a small fraction of the human body’s outputs such as pupil dilation; most of the body’s outputs should yield bayesian updates but that doesn’t change the fact that some sources will be wildly more consistent and reliable than others.
I agree that most measures (including the ones that I mentioned being pessimistic about) could be used to update one’s estimated probability that an actor is malevolent, but like you, I’d be most interested in which measures give the highest value of information (relative to the costs and invasiveness of the measure).
I could have done a better job of explaining why I think that pupillometry, and particularly the measurement of pupillary responses to specific stimuli, would be much more difficult to game (if it was possible at all) relative to body language analysis and eye tracking. It’s because the muscles that control pupil size are not innervated by skeletal muscle but by smooth muscle, which is widely accepted as being not under conscious control. (The muscles involved are called the dilator pupillae, activated by the sympathetic nervous system, and the sphincter pupillae, activated by the parasympathetic nervous system). Having said this, there are some arguments (and some case studies) suggesting that one could indirectly train oneself to change one’s pupil size (e.g., via mental arithmetic or other forms of mental effort) or that some people may be able to find other methods of (training themselves to) change their pupillary size at will (here’s a video of someone doing it). But to me the main question is whether the initial response to specific stimuli (e.g., negative emotional stimuli, for which pupil responses are observed [in non-psychopathic people] within 2,000 ms of the stimulus) would be under voluntary control, and this seems very unlikely to me.
Early pupillary responses to certain stimuli are under the influence of subcortical structures, including the amygdala, and I think this point is particularly relevant to psychopathy. When we view faces, there’s a subcortical route to the amygdala which carries that information faster than it can be consciously processed and which allows the amygdala to be one of the first brain areas to trigger a fear response in reaction to someone seeing a fearful face. Why is this relevant? Well, there’s evidence that psychopaths demonstrate hypoactivity in their amygdala (relative to controls) in response to viewing human faces. And it seems that psychopaths’ pupillary responses to negative facial expressions differ[1] from those of controls (in that their pupils don’t dilate in response to negative stimuli [relative to neutral stimuli] like non-psychopaths’ pupils do) within the first 2000 ms of the stimulus being presented, not after.
If someone’s pupillary responses to negative facial expressions differ from non-psychopathic people, even if they somehow became aware of that and tried to alter it, I suspect it would be incredibly difficult (if it was possible at all) for them to voluntarily change their pupil size (in response to emotional stimuli) quickly enough to mimic normality. For these reasons, I think that assessing pupillary responses to viewing fearful faces is worth investigating as a cheap, noninvasive measure of psychopathy that would be much harder to manipulate relative to other cheap, noninvasive measures (if it was possible to manipulate at all, which I don’t think it would be).
Below, I briefly describe two little studies that are too small to be useful on their own but which make me think it’s worth at least exploring pupillometry a little more (as just one potential measure among a set of possible measures).
This little study included 82 males recruited from low and medium secure psychiatric hospitals in the United Kingdom, grouped according to whether they had low or high Factor 1 (interpersonal) factor scores based on the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised. The high Factor 1 group (n = 25) had a score of ≥10 on Factor 1 psychopathy and the low Factor 1 group (n = 27) had a score of ≤ 4. The chart below shows the difference in pupil diameter in response to negatively-valenced emotional images (compared to neutral images) for participants with high Factor 1 psychopathy scores (who had less pupil dilation in the first 2000 ms after the stimulus) compared to those with low Factor 1 psychopathy scores.
This little study included 73 adult male prisoners with histories of serious sexual or violent offenses, and it assessed psychopathy via The Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM; Drislane et al., 2014), which is a 58-item self-report measure with three subscales: Boldness, Meanness, and Disinhibition. They averaged participants’ pupil size measurements across each individual stimulus fixation for the duration of the stimulus display, then calculated an overall mean pupil size for each participant, across all trials, and calculated the percentage difference in pupil diameter for each stimulus category compared to the overall mean. They found weak but significant negative correlations between TriPM meanness scores and pupil dilation in response to a range of emotional stimuli (listed below).