Page 73 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

need to see what’s going on. And unless you take that off, I can’t see your face and I can’t tell
whether you’re telling me the truth or not, and I can’t see certain things about your demeanor and
temperament that I need to see in a court of law. 2
Do you think the judge was right? I’m guessing many of you do. We wouldn’t spend as much
time as we do looking at people’s faces if we didn’t think there was something valuable to be
learned. In novels, we read that “his eyes widened in shock” or “her face fell in disappointment,”
and we accept without question that faces really do fall and eyes really do widen in response to the
feelings of shock and disappointment. We can watch Ross’s 4C + 5D + 7C + 10E + 16E + 25E +
26E and know what it means—with the sound off—because thousands of years of evolution have
turned 4C + 5D + 7C+ 10E + 16E + 25E + 26E into the expression human beings make when filled
with shock and anger. We believe someone’s demeanor is a window into their soul. But that takes us
back to Puzzle Number Two. Judges in bail hearings have a window into the defendant’s soul. Yet
they are much worse at predicting who will reoffend than Sendhil Mullainathan’s computer, which
has a window into no one’s soul.

If real life were like Friends, judges would beat computers. But they don’t. So maybe real life
isn’t like Friends.

4.

The cluster of islands known as the Trobriands lies 100 miles east of Papua New Guinea, in the
middle of the Solomon Sea. The archipelago is tiny, home to 40,000 people. It’s isolated and
tropical. The people living there fish and farm much as their ancestors did thousands of years ago,
and their ancient customs have proven remarkably durable, even in the face of the inevitable
encroachments of the 21st century. In the same way that carmakers take new models to the Arctic to
test them under the most extreme conditions possible, social scientists sometimes like to “stress
test” hypotheses in places such as the Trobriands. If something works in London or New York and it
works in the Trobriands, you can be pretty sure you’re onto something universal—which is what
sent two Spanish social scientists to the Trobriand Islands in 2013.
Sergio Jarillo is an anthropologist. He had worked in the Trobriands before and knew the
language and culture. Carlos Crivelli is a psychologist. He spent the earliest part of his career testing
the limits of transparency. Once he examined dozens of videotapes of judo fighters who had just
won their matches to figure out when, exactly, they smiled. Was it at the moment of victory? Or did
they win, then smile? Another time he watched videotapes of people masturbating to find out what
their faces looked like at the moment of climax. Presumably an orgasm is a moment of true
happiness. Is that happiness evident and observable in the moment? In both cases, it wasn’t—which
didn’t make sense if our emotions are really a billboard for the heart. These studies made Crivelli a
skeptic, so he and Jarillo decided to put Darwin to the test.
Jarillo and Crivelli started with six headshots of people looking happy, sad, angry, scared, and
disgusted—with one final picture of someone with a neutral expression. Before they left for the
Trobriands, the two men took their pictures to a primary school in Madrid and tried them out on a
group of children. They put all six photos before a child and asked, “Which of these is the sad
face?” Then they went to the second child and asked, “Which of these is the angry face?” and so on,
cycling through all six pictures over and over again. Here are the results. The children had no
difficulty with the exercise:

Then Jarillo and Crivelli flew to the Trobriand Islands and repeated the process.