Rachel Bleiman - Looks (and Dogs) Can Be Deceiving: Student on Student Manipulation

great thank you okay so hi everyone hope everyone's doing well um i'm rachel blyman i'm here today presenting looks and dogs can be deceiving a study of student on student manipulation which is about a social engineering case study that i designed and implemented in the summer of 2019. i'll be giving a summary of this project but if you're interested in learning more about it you can use the reference at the bottom of the screen or feel free to contact me and thanks for choosing attend this talk today a little about me my name is rachel blyman all my contact info is here if you want to reach out to me about anything you can hit me up on my through my email

twitter at my website i just finished my undergrad in criminal justice in may from temple university which is in philadelphia pa i also had minors in psychology and ist which is information science and technology i'm now a first-year phd student still at temple university in the criminal justice department and i plan to focus my research on cyber crimes and online privacy and security concerns including video surveillance uh so for a little over the past year or so i've been a research assistant to dr anshul reggae in the cj department um who works a lot with the human factors and cyber security she'll actually be presenting today too um she helped guide me through this project so i'll be presenting about

today and she actually lent me her dog for this project also which you'll see soon see some pictures of so a few other acknowledgements before starting i'd like to thank temple university's honors program for funding this research project that i did and temple university's ethics board for helping to make this research possible so on the agenda for today i'm first going to talk a bit about social engineering and specifically pre-texting including how it relates to psychological principles of persuasion and specific personality traits i'll then explain the case study which is the main focus for this presentation i'll be detailing some of the strategies i used along with some of the findings and of course some dog pictures will be

included and i'll try and leave some time at the end for any questions you might have okay so social engineering what is it for any of those unfamiliar with it social engineering can be described as any act that influences a person to take an action that may or may not be in their best interests in 2017 roughly 70 percent of organizations in the us experienced social engineering attacks which accumulated in a cost of 2.76 million dollars an average of 20 days per incident to resolve so these high monetary and manpower costs point to the fact that the human factor is often considered the weakest link in cyber attacks which is why it's so important to study it

so while there are many stages and processes that an attacker goes through to reach their ultimate goal of their attack social engineering primarily takes place in the first reconnaissance or recon stage which refers to the process of gathering information about a target so in reference to this recon stage it's been said that 50 to 75 percent of the legwork is to learn about that environment beforehand whether it be through social engineering or calling these people and trying to understand what systems operate in their plan there are many different forms of social engineering i'll just go through a few of them here um first up is dating which refers to when a hacker leaves accessible such as a malware infected usb stick for

targets that pick up and connect to their own computer therefore installing the malware phishing refers to the ways in which an attacker can trick a target into providing personal information usually through email often by posing as a legitimate or trustworthy entity next is spearfishing which is a form of phishing that occurs when an attacker chooses a target within a specific organization then sends seemingly relevant or important emails with malicious links next is email hacking and contact spamming which occurs when an email is hacked and contacts are spammed with malicious emails coming from that account next is wishing or voiced fishing which which refers to the phishing that occurs over the phone where a cyber criminal posing

as a trusted individual such as a bank calls a target requesting personal info um an attacker using quid pro quo typically offers targets something enticing such as a prize or discount in exchange for personal information and last up is pretexting which is a much more general term that refers to the practice of presenting oneself as someone else in order to obtain information and the case study that i'll be describing in this presentation will be centered around this process of pretexting so as i said the specific type of social engineering that this case study focuses on is pre-texting where someone presents themselves as someone else in order to obtain private info attackers will impersonate individuals sometimes those in highly specific and

specialized jobs such as someone in tech support are typically unfamiliar to the general public and the goal of pre-texting is to create a situation where individuals feel safe or comfortable releasing personal information that makes them vulnerable to cyber attacks a key point about pretexting is that a more thorough pretext will result in obtaining higher quality information from the target so the more believable you are and the more trusting you appear uh the more info you'll get so that leads us to some more general principles of pretexting that will make you seem more believable and trustworthy and therefore result in you having some more success so first off the more research you do about your target

and about your pretext the better when creating your pretext try to involve some of your own personal interests so that your story is easier to remember and seems more sincere next you'd want to practice dialects or expressions because remember you want to fit the role of the pretext that you're assuming using phones can also be helpful to reduce the effort instead of doing it in person where you have to worry about body language and clothing this is also helpful during cover times when it's kind of hard to do anything in person so over the phone would work next is that the simpler the pretext the better you don't want to include a million details that you might mix up

or that might confuse the target pretext should also appear spontaneous not like you've been sitting and wait for someone to fall for the trap or for it to seem too staged lastly a good technique is to provide a logical conclusion so tell the target something like if you want to know more reach out at this number or this email so you're basically setting up the next step of the pretext making it continue and gaining more trust before starting on to the next part of it okay then there are also some uh personality traits that make people easier targets for a social engineering or pre-texting attack including conscientiousness extroversion agreeableness and neuroticism so conscientious people tend to follow

the rules making them more vulnerable to a social engineering attack that exploits rules and social norms extroverted people tend to desire more social contact and are more likely than introverts to unknowingly cooperate with someone during a social engineering attack next um agreeable or trusting individuals are more likely to fall victim to a social engineering attack that relies on the attacker establishing trust with the victim and lastly neurotic individuals actually tend to be more cautious in their social interactions and therefore may actually be less likely to fall victim to a social engineering attack okay so next are some principles of persuasion that attackers can target in execution of a social engineering attack in a way to manipulate their

victims so first up is authority which preys on the fact that people tend to comply with the instructions of authority figures such as bosses at work or government agencies even if these instructions go against their personal beliefs they're still going to comply because the instructions are coming from authority figures next is the principle of commitment in which people believe the things they're committed to attackers can use that belief then to manipulate them similarly consistency is the principle that people's behaviors and actions are based on their beliefs which attackers can then exploit the persuasion principle of reciprocity is the fact that people tend to return favors that are given to them sometimes in even greater ways

next is likeness or commonality which is the principle that people are more likely to comply with someone if they share some sort of similarity with them such as being from the same city having the same name or being the same age the principle of scarcity suggests that people seek opportunities or items that are less available to them attackers can manipulate this persuasion principle by pretending to offer something scarce to make it seem more valuable and desirable next up is social proof in which people tend to comply with a request when they know that other people have already done the same the last principle of persuasion is the natural inclination to help in which people tend to want to help those

in need attackers can exploit this by posing as someone who needs some form of assistance so in the upcoming case study you'll soon see the implementation of the persuasion principles of reciprocity and the natural inflation to help in a simulated social engineering attack okay so now on to the case study so the objective of my pre-texting project was to see if college students were susceptible to disclosing sensitive information and if so how much and of what nature to do this i decided that i would try to social engineer people through pre-texting i created a short survey that asked for basic contact information as well as 10 commonly used security questions i walked around my college campus with

this survey and a clipboard i approached people and i asked them to fill it out using one of four different pretexts as the reasoning for doing the survey because this was a student research project i completed ethics training for working with human subjects and after each student completed the survey i disclosed to them the true nature of the project and i interviewed them on their participation from which i gathered some of my findings i also returned the surveys to each student afterwards since they contained some highly sensitive information but i did still record which questions they answered and which questions they skipped so here's a picture of the survey that i social engineered students into filling

out as you can see up at the top is asking for some contact information it has phone number student id email address then the 10 numbered questions are asked in an order of increasing sensitivity so so i expected people to answer the first seven or so questions since they weren't extremely invasive i wasn't really expecting many people to answer the last three questions as they're very common security questions it was what city did your parents meet what's your mother's maiden name and what street did you grow up on which i see over and over again as security questions so these are the four pretexts that i created and used during this case study each week i used

a different pretext and i assumed a character role in order to convince the people to fill out the survey move the pretext exploited the natural inclination to help and the other two pretexts exploited reciprocity those persuasion principles i mentioned a few minutes ago so in the pretext termed student helping student i posed as a college student asking for help with a course project for a research methods class where i needed people to fill out my survey for a better grade in the class i told them that it was more about creating surveys then actually the information on it that's why it was just some general information in the student helping nice pretext i posed as a student who was helping her

young niece with an extra credit school project then in the raffle pretext i posed as a student employee promoting a new apartment building on campus that was looking to learn more about student demographics i told students that if they fill out the survey they'd be entered into a raffle drawing for a gift card and lastly in the therapy dog pretext i was advertising a fake therapy dog club on campus and i said that in order to join students just needed to fill out the survey i actually brought a dog along with me as i mentioned which also served as an additional aspect of reciprocity because the students had the benefit of petting and playing with the dog

if they filled out the survey so next to each pretext you can see the number of people who took the survey each week these numbers varied some due to environmental factors but overall people were more inclined to participate when using the student helping student pretext or the therapy dog pretext but then before i started executing this project i made some guesses on what would happen i expected that the student's susceptibility to disclosing private information would change depending on the pretext and specifically i expected that the therapy dog pretext would see the most successful answer rates because i thought the dog would attract a large number of people and distract the targets from questioning the sincerity of the pretext

um i thought it would make me seem just more trusting overall to have a dog with me i also expected that raffle pretext would be the least successful of the four because i thought it was just the weakest and most elaborate explanation as to why i wanted this information from the targets then a third expectation that i had was that i thought most of the targets would just decline taking the survey or only answer the less sensitive questions and definitely leave the more invasive ones blank this is why i asked the questions in order of increasing sensitivity so that i could kind of ease them into it and not just scare them away immediately by asking for their mother's

maiden name and the last expectation i had was that my gender as a female would play a role and in all the pretexts i would seem more trusting because i'm a girl okay so here we can see some of the question response rates from the student helping student pretext um the questions asking for the phone number and the student id had the lowest response rates at 47 for the phone number and 53 percent for the student id um but all the other questions had at least a 76 76 response rate and that's including those invasive questions like the mother's maiden name and some questions even had um 100 response rate some of the favorite um questions asking

for your favorite sports team food and number so that was for the student helping student pretext for the raffle pretext um we can see that the mother's maiden name had a 57 response rate which was the only super low response rate for this pretext everything else had at least a 71 response rate and again some things even had a 100 response rate

for the student helping niece pretext the question's asking for mother's maiden name student id favorite book and phone number i'll have the lowest response rates for this pretext mother's maiden name was particularly low which was at 45 the other is in the 55 or 64 range but all the other questions for this one still had a 73 response rate which is pretty high and again uh four different of the questions had a 100 response rate and lastly we can see the response rate for the therapy dog pretext um so the question's asking for a favorite book favorite movie mother's maiden name and street name the lowest response rates here um the favorite book the other three

lowest ones still were at 69 which is still kind of high it's not that low um and all the other questions had at least a 75 response rate and this one everybody told me their birthday which i thought was interesting okay so now we can compare the four pretexts side by side i split this up by the type of question um so here we can see the response rates for the contact information and some of the general information questions so the ones that um well some of these were more sensitive than others um so we can see here that the therapy dog pretext had nearly the highest response rate for each question although response rates for all the

questions for each pretext were still relatively high um the student id and phone number did have the overall lowest response rate in this set in a set of questions this wasn't too surprising because of these questions i think they are the most um sensitive ones for example um at least at my school with your student id number you can access dining halls you can use your id number to pay for things so it does have some money value to it next up are the questions that ask about different preferences and favorites so these questions also weren't too invasive so they generally had high response rates the two pretexts that targeted the natural inclination to help

seem to have higher response rates than the ones targeting reciprocity for these questions also um i just want to point out that the question asking about the favorite book at one of the lowest response rates um of all of the questions which i learned from doing the post disclosure interviews that it wasn't because your favorite book is a really sensitive you know information but it was simply because people don't read books anymore and could not name a single book which i thought was kind of funny okay so these three questions asks for the highly sensitive information of in what city their parents met their mother's maiden name and how much truth they grew up so these

questions had some of the lowest response rates from the survey which what was expected however most response rates still ranged from about 60 to 80 percent which is alarmingly high considering how sensitive these questions are and for each of these three questions the highest response rates were received under the student helping student pretext so despite the differences in the number of subjects surveyed and interviewed for each pretext subjects answered approximately the same number of questions regardless of which which pretext was used for each of them the immediate number of questions answered was about 14 it was 13 for the student helping niece this suggests that the pretexts may have impacted how many people agreed to participate in the survey but

it didn't have a great impact on how much information subjects were willing to disclose however we did see some variation in which questions they chose to answer then if we look at the response rates as a whole the lowest response rates were still in about the 60 range so half of the targets still disclosed answers to even the most sensitive questions and all the questions um at about a 70 response rate or higher

um so next we'll move on to some of the findings from the post-disclosure interviews so from these post-disclosure interviews where i asked targets why they trusted me and why they answered or skipped any questions i was able to identify several themes so first was that across all pretexts subjects reported trusting me because of our shared attributes including age gender or life experiences similarities led targets to feel more sympathetic towards me in the student helping student pretext subjects reported feeling uh inclined to help for reasons such as uh having had similar experiences in their own lives for example one person said that they agreed to participate because it was for a class and i know how hard it is to get people to actually

take surveys for classes so they related to me as a college student or had some experience trying to get people to to participate in surveys which made them feel higher levels of trust and a greater inclination to help another subject even explained that if i know it's a fellow temple student i'm more likely to give them my time interestingly in the raffle pretext which if you recall aim to target reciprocity targets actually told me that the pretext triggered for them a natural and a natural inclination to help instead this unexpected response was a result of this likeness factor this raffle pretext not a single student reported that they participated for the chance to win the raffle prize

instead each person reported that they initially agreed to take the survey either out of sympathy towards me or because of their inclination to help me the sympathetic responses came from students experiencing similar life events so for example one person stated that i've been on the other end and i always feel bad when people are rude and walk away another student reported that the chance to win money did not entirely impact their decision instead they said i just like helping out people because i see them get turned down all the time and i know i want to be a researcher one day too so i know one day i'm going to be turned down all the time

so that was more being nice than the money itself last point is that in the student helping nice pretext when i asked why they were able to trust me and felt comfortable giving me their information one person said that they felt more comfortable around me because we were both women she said that she trusted me because you're a young woman i'm a young woman definitely more comfortable than if a grown man came over and asked me so overall it was pretty clear that people felt more inclined to talk to me and trust me when they were able to relate understand my experience or have something in common with me

so another theme that i identified was the importance of the college student role that i was using in my pretext so as i mentioned earlier pre-texting relies on making yourself credible and believable because people were able to believe that i was a college student based on what i said and how i looked um well trusted me more and they had no reason to doubt me i fit the description of who i was pretending to be i exploited my youth and i wore university clothing to blend into my role as targets pointed out in their interviews um one person said that college shirt and younger looking made them believe that i was a college student another person said that i

fit the demographic the demographic because of the youth in my face um in the raffle pretext one person said that i think if you were like super young or even super old and you said you were with the university's marketing team i wouldn't really believe you just because i know it's geared more towards actual students but because you actually look like you're within the range of a student here i believed you so it also helped that i was executing this on campus one student said i feel like the fact that i'm on campus makes me a little more lenient to answering them but definitely if i was on the sub and someone asked me i definitely would not

have answered them like at all but i feel like it's kind of like a safe environment and that's why i didn't think much of it so out of all the people i spoke to with this with this pretext there was only one student who questioned my role as a student um but after the person asked to see my id they agreed to take the survey um and this person said that they trusted me because i saw you with temple shirt and you're in the middle of campus where if you were a scammer you might be around people that might build attention or stop you and then they said once you showed me your id card i knew you were another

temple student let's say if you weren't i probably would have said no so having the student id card to back up my pretext really helped in this case and if i didn't have that they may not probably would not have trusted me um so overall here a large portion of targets said that they were able to trust me simply because they were able to confidently assume that i was a student

so in the post-disclosure interviews i also inquired about how aware the targets were about the sensitive nature of the questions that i was asking them so if we exclude the therapy dog pretext for a moment and just look at the first three pretexts about 26 of the 34 targets that were interviewed reported that they realized while taking the survey their answers could be used to access passwords or security questions many people said that we're not currently using any of those answers so they didn't mind disclosing that information at that moment generally students reported being more uncomf most uncomfortable when answering the questions about their mother's maiden name the street they grew up on and the name of their favorite pet so

despite this people still reportedly answer these with truthful responses as we saw and while most of the subjects recognized that certain questions were highly sensitive the majority of them still answered the questions because they felt they could trust me for example one person said when i started putting down all my information i was like wait i probably shouldn't put that down but i was already halfway done with it so i was like whatever um another person said i thought about it but i just felt like maybe i'm overthinking it maybe it's not that big of a deal uh so in response to whether they use this information for their security questions or password one person

said oh yeah the mother's maiden name the name of the name of your favorite pet that too once i wrote it down i immediately regretted writing it down i was like oh wow one of the that's one i kind of put for my passwords um similarly another subject said that disclosed a favorite food to me which they often use for their passwords um so in the student helping nice pretext a student reported that i didn't look at everything first because you have the question structured i'm like yeah that's what a second grader would ask towards the end i'm like what so while some students did hesitate their doubt wasn't strong enough to stop them from disclosing their information

in order to help me even when they use it for their passwords or their security questions so another question i asked in the post-disclosure interviews was about how people share their information online so most of the subjects reported that they're more cautious online uh such as on social media pages because they're always warned about the dangers of online scammers most of the people i talked to said that they never thought that offline scammers were a threat as well for example one person described this project as a wake-up call to them another person said that they would be more cautious in the future when disclosing their information so after taking the survey all of the subjects who reported not already being

wary of what they post online responded that they would be more mindful when disclosing information in the future one student said um definitely what i give out to people i think i need to be more careful maybe so overall this helped to shed some light on the threats of in-person scammers not just online which a lot of students were not aware of so lastly an interesting point that came up in the interviews was the presence of the dog here you can see me and buster here um he helped a lot with this pretext so most of the people i talked to automatically trusted me when they saw me walking around with buster and they agreed to fill out the survey

without really caring what my pretext was people were just eager to pet the dog so i would wait until the students were already playing with him and then i'd ask them to return the favor by taking my survey of course reciprocity was targeted here by being able to join the therapy dog club if they filled out the survey but most people not even know what they were signing they just wanted to play with the dog and continue playing with him so this preface differed from the others uh in this pretext people didn't say that they disposed their information as a way to help me or because they related to me in a way that made them trust me

rather all of the subjects interviewed in this pretext said that they took the survey so that they could continue petting the dog um 10 of the 15 subjects reported trusting me almost solely because of the dog most also said that they would have trusted me no matter my appearance age or gender as long as i had a dog with me um one subject explained that in general they trust people more if the person has a dog with them and one person even said that somebody who walks around with a dog probably isn't part of a phishing scam which is a little ironic and then one of my favorite quotes from this entire case study was dogs man i'll do anything for them

lastly another subject explained that it doesn't surprise me that this worked it's something about the dog dogs are approachable they're more approachable than people and you offered for me to pet the dog which is more enticing so the lesson learned here is that if you want to try social engineering someone and gaining someone's trust dogs seem to be a pretty good way to go okay so finally some key takeaways so this study suggested that the type of pretext used in a social engineering attack might be fairly insignificant as long as the attacker meets one of two conditions that makes the pretext believable and gains the target's trust the first condition is the adherence to the character role

the person creating and initializing the pretext needs to fit into the character role for the age gender race or any other stereotype of the person they're aiming to impersonate for example uh in the study i fit into how an expected college student would appear mainly based on my age and clothing choice so if i had pretended instead to be a professor i would not have been as believable the second condition is a likeness factor there must be some similarities between the person implementing the pretext and the target which creates an aura of ease and comfort so some possible similarities include age gender or similar interests so it's evident that a pretext can also target more than a single psychological

principle of persuasion so as seen in this study with the raffle pretext i was able to target reciprocity but also the natural inclination to help and inadvertently even likeness and commonality so thanks so much for listening to this talk i have some time now and if you have any questions and also feel free to contact me um afterwards i have my email my twitter my website listed here so thank you awesome thank you so much rachel uh i can see you're in discord how do you want to handle questions do you want to take a look at the channel or do you want me to be reading them off to you um if you want

to read them off to me that would be okay great brilliant i'm just scanning through here to see i see some comments about people liking the dog people thinking that pretexting works or commenting that they've done work i haven't seen any questions yet by the way if anybody does have any questions just use the octathorp ask rachel cool um what about kittens thank you spammy that is good kittens out on leashes that's an excellent question but actually that is that is a great question what prompted you to pick a dog as opposed to say a cat or a hamster or a bunny well i think some of the other ones would be a little hard to walk around

campus but um just being a student on campus whenever somebody was walking around with a dog strangers would always come up to them and want to talk to them um and it was really just obvious that if you had a dog it was just an immediate way to attract attention and get people to talk to you totally makes sense and yeah i i love that quote that you have dogs man i'll do anything for them like i feel like that so perfectly encapsulates most people's attitude people were people who were very excited when they saw me walking around um it was great and i'm not um i don't know that many dolls i don't know things about dogs

that well so um when i when i first got the dog from dr reggae i she told me just some of the basic facts about him his breed his name how old he was and i i don't know dogs at all so i was trying to remember my best to remember this dog breed name because everybody was asking me all these questions about him and that came a little that became a little tricky with the pretext trying to remember that because it's not something that i'm super used to being around dogs or even just walking dogs i was afraid i would seem like an imposter just because i had never really walked dogs before totally totally

well we got another question from osprey this is uh it's getting some plus ones even um did you in the post interview ask about whether or not people answered honestly in other words they filled out answers but they just filled out junk because they didn't want to give you an answer but they didn't want to leave it blank so i didn't ask that directly but a few people um told me that they wrote answers that were not currently true like um like something that used to be true for them but not anymore um but it wasn't something i had thought of beforehand to ask but a few people did bring that up which i thought was

interesting um i think it was maybe um like half a dozen people or so said that they wrote some fake answers oh well interesting that they felt so wrapped with guilt they had to tell you oh it was fake answers um have you done any research or investigation into checking out whether there are differences in responses between oral and written surveys as far as social engineering is concerned i have not but that's a very interesting idea um something that i would i would want to look into so thank you for that yeah and i apologize i've already lost who asked that question uh meow asked that question great question meow um eso's phobic i think i don't know if

i'm saying your name right sorry uh do you think the principle of consistency kicked in through having the questions become gradually more sensitive do you think you would have gotten different results if the questions were randomized in terms of sensitivity interesting um i could see how that may have kicked in yes with them starting off answering them honestly um i do think if they weren't randomized um and they started off seeing some uncomfortable questions that they wouldn't answer honestly for the rest of them um so yeah i think i think that makes sense um to be consistent in our answers that was a good point so uh another question uh what do you think the likelihood is

that students you targeted oh yes sorry i'm i'm reading halfway through students you targeted actually gave real info so just for everybody to to hear um actually do you want to just repeat that because i've actually seen that question pop up in two different ways again twice so do you want to just re-mention your answer uh the the likelihood that people gave you real answers in your questions sure sure so um i didn't directly ask this to the people that i interviewed but um a few people did come out about five or six people came out and said that they wrote answers that weren't currently true for them um for instance somebody wrote instead of

the um address they grew up on they wrote their grandmother's address instead so there were a few people who said that they wrote some fake answers or not currently true answers but for the most part people said that um people didn't mention it which led me to believe that they were true although who knows right right right it's actually i i found this just incredibly fascinating this is a great talk uh and it reminded me of in college when i would see those folks and if i felt like i would give an answer i would only give an answer if i was going to get something and if i gave an answer it was always lies

so i guess i'm just an outlier and super selfish right i mean this um just doing this project made me more aware of what i'm giving out like um sometimes when you're on like a website and google wants to take a survey before you can before you can continue um i'll just break fake answers for all of those now because i'm just super paranoid absolutely or what anecdotes you pass about yourself while giving a talk at a virtual conference um let me see many databases oh yeah um you know it looks like i think we've gotten all the questions that i've seen posted up here but i want to give everybody just a minute more

so let me ask one of my questions while i give everybody just a moment to send in some more where do you want to go next what's the next step for your research with this right so that's a good question um so i am in the phd program now so i'm trying to focus my research ideas i definitely um still want to involve social engineering um i'm also looking more into online privacy concerns um so things like um how you know certain websites might be using or getting your personal information um just being aware of how websites are taking your personal information um and that kind of thing sure yeah that that is a great work and i mean as your

research shows there's plenty of room to help educate folks so that they can understand the consequences of what they're doing and it's really interesting because um i'm in the criminal justice program so i'm not doing anything um technical really but it's still such a a huge field for cyber security research still totally i i see another question has come in and i know your talk spoke around this a bit the question is as an older grad student do you think the results would or if you had looked as though you were an older grad student do you think the results would have been the same do you um so actually i'll just pose that question to you first okay um

so i mean i'm i'm like i'm very short i'm kind of small so i think even if i were older i'd still look young um but i think if i did just overall look older people might not trust me as well if i claim to be a student and i didn't look like a student um it might be for the for the student helping student pre-text where i said i was in a class if i explained that i was a graduate student they might believe me more but i think overall that might just be more intimidating and wouldn't be as you know i would not seem as trustworthy i think if i were too much older

um totally but just a few a few years though i think would be fine sure and i believe you even said that several participants gave you feedback that your appearance of looking young being female made them feel more comfortable made them feel like they were interested in participating yeah exactly they could just tell right away that i was a student they probably thought i was a freshman because i'm really short have you given thought to doing this again with just changing up who the person is so changing just different variables about the the physical appearance of the questioner to see if that uh to see what effect that has on people answering i haven't considered that but

i was um curious if i had done this online rather than in person if i still would have um you know people still would have wanted to help me and if they still would have trusted me as much without being able to see me um but i haven't i haven't considered changing my appearance like that well i i love what you're thinking there i i think that the i would be super interested to read your paper on if it changes in person versus online i have my thoughts but i'd love to see that data yeah maybe um i'll look into that yeah that would be really cool well it looks like we've wrapped all the

questions there's a bunch of kudos in here saying that they enjoyed your talk and great job and i absolutely want to