Page 164 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Chapter Six: The Friends Fallacy

Dialogue is from Friends, “The One with the Girl Who Hits Joey” (episode 15, season 5), directed
by Kevin Bright, NBC, 1998.
It was developed by legendary psychologist (in footnote): Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen,
Facial Action Coding System, parts 1 and 2 (San Francisco: Human Interaction Laboratory, Dept. of
Psychiatry, University of California, 1978).
In my second book, Blink (Little, Brown and Company, 2005), I devoted a large chunk of Chapter
Six, “Seven Seconds in the Bronx: The Delicate Art of Mind Reading,” to a discussion of the work
of Paul Ekman, one of the most important psychologists of the last century. He is the coinventor of
FACS, which I asked Jennifer Fugate to use to analyze that episode of Friends. FACS has become
the gold standard for understanding and cataloging how human emotion is displayed on the face.
Ekman’s principal scientific contribution was to demonstrate the idea of “leakage”—that the
emotions we feel are often, involuntarily, displayed on our faces in some distinctive configuration of
facial muscles. And if you are trained in the “language” of the face and have the opportunity to
break down videotape of someone’s expressions millisecond by millisecond, you can identify those
configurations.
Here is what I wrote on p. 210 of Blink: “Whenever we experience a basic emotion, that emotion is
automatically expressed by the muscles of the face. That response may linger on the face for just a
fraction of a second or be detectable only if electrical sensors are attached to the face. But it’s
always there.”
Ekman was making two bold claims. First, that emotion is necessarily expressed on the face—that if
you feel it, you’ll show it. And second, that these kinds of emotional expressions are universal—that
everyone, everywhere, uses their face to display their feelings in the same way.
These propositions had always left some psychologists uneasy. But since Blink was written, there
has been growing reaction in the psychology community against Ekman’s position.
For example, why did Ekman believe that emotions were universal? In the 1960s, he and two
colleagues traveled to Papua New Guinea, armed with a stack of thirty photographs. The pictures
were headshots of Westerners making facial expressions corresponding to the basic emotions: anger,
sadness, contempt, disgust, surprise, happiness, and fear.
The New Guinea tribe that Ekman’s group visited was called the Fore. As recently as a dozen years
earlier, they had still been effectively living in the Stone Age, completely cut off from the rest of the
world. Ekman’s idea was that if the Fore could identify anger or surprise in the photographed faces
as readily as someone in New York City or London can, emotions must be universal. Sure enough,
they could.

“Our findings support Darwin’s suggestion that facial expressions of emotion are similar among
humans, regardless of culture, because of their evolutionary origin,” Ekman and his colleagues
wrote in a paper published in Science, one of the most prestigious academic journals. (See P. Ekman
et al., “Pan-Cultural Elements in Facial Display of Emotions,” Science 164 [1969]: 86–88.)
This idea—that there is a universal set of human emotional reactions—is the principle that lies
behind an entire category of tools that we use to understand strangers. It’s why we have lie
detectors. It’s why lovestruck couples stare deeply into each other’s eyes. It’s why Neville
Chamberlain made his daring visit to see Hitler in Germany. And it’s why Solomon looked hard at
the defendant in the child-abuse case.
But there’s the problem. Ekman was leaning awfully hard on what he saw with the Fore. Yet the
emotion-recognition exercise he did with them wasn’t nearly as conclusive as he said it was.
Ekman went to New Guinea with another psychologist, Wallace Friesen, and an anthropologist,
Richard Sorenson. Neither Ekman nor Friesen spoke the language of the Fore. Sorenson knew only
enough to understand or say the simplest things. (See James Russell, “Is There Universal
Recognition of Emotion from Facial Expression? A Review of the Cross Cultural Studies,”