Page 165 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Psychological Bulletin 115, no. 1 [1994]: 124.) So there they are, showing headshots to tribesmen of
white people making faces—and they are utterly reliant on their translator. They can’t just have each
tribesman free-associate about what he thinks is happening in each photo. How would they make
sense of that? They have to keep things simple. So Ekman and his group use what’s called “forced
choice.” They show each Fore person the pictures, one by one, and for every image they asked the
viewer to choose the right answer from a short list of emotions. Is what you are looking at anger,
sadness, contempt, disgust, surprise, happiness, or fear? (The Fore didn’t really have a word to
describe disgust or surprise, so the three researchers improvised: disgust was something that stinks;
surprise was something new.)
Now, is forced choice a good method? For example, suppose I want to find out whether you know
which city is the capital of Canada. (A surprising number of Americans, in my experience, have no
idea.) I could ask you straight out: What is the capital of Canada? That’s a free choice question. In
order to answer it correctly, you really have to know the capital of Canada. Now here’s the forced-
choice version of that question.
The capital of Canada is:
Washington, DC
Kuala Lumpur
Ottawa
Nairobi
Toronto
You can guess, can’t you? It’s not Washington, DC. Even someone with no knowledge whatsoever
of geography probably knows that’s the capital of the United States. It’s probably not Kuala Lumpur
or Nairobi, since those names don’t sound Canadian. So it’s down to Toronto or Ottawa. Even if you
have no idea what the capital of Canada is, you have a 50 percent chance of getting the answer right.
So is that what was happening with Ekman’s survey of the Fore?
Sergio Jarillo and Carlos Crivelli—the two researchers I write about in Chapter Six of this book—
began their research by attempting to replicate Ekman’s findings. Their idea was: let’s correct the
flaws in his exercise and see if it still holds up. Their first step was to pick a isolated tribe—the
Trobriand Islanders—whose language and culture at least one of them (Jarillo) knew well. That was
their first advantage over Ekman: they knew an awful lot more about whom they were talking to
than Ekman’s group had. They also decided not to use “forced choice.” They would use the far more
rigorous methodology of free choice. They laid out a set of headshots (with people looking happy,
sad, angry, scared, and disgusted) and asked, “Which of these is the sad face?” Then they asked the
next person, “Which of these is the angry face?” And so on. Finally, they tallied all the responses.
And what did they find? That when you redo Ekman’s foundational experiment—only this time,
carefully and rigorously—the case for universalism disappears. Over the past few years the
floodgates have opened, which is where much of the research I described in this chapter comes
from.
A few additional points:
Ekman’s original Science paper is, upon reflection, a little strange. He argued that what he found in
the Fore was evidence of universalism. But if you examine his data, it doesn’t look like he’s
describing universalism.
The Fore were really good at correctly identifying happy faces, but only about half of them correctly
identified the “fear” face as being an expression of fear. Forty-five percent of them thought the
surprised face was a fearful face. Fifty-six percent of them read sadness as anger. This is
universalism?
Crivelli made a very insightful remark when we were talking about the people (like Ekman) who so
favored the universalism idea. Many of them belonged to the generation that grew up in the
aftermath of the Second World War. They were born into a world obsessed with human difference—
in which black people were thought to be genetically inferior and Jews were held to be damaged and
malignant—and they were powerfully drawn to a theory that maintained we are all the same.
It is important to note, however, that the work of anti-universalists is not a refutation of Ekman’s
contributions. Everyone in the field of human emotion is in some crucial sense standing on his