Page 74 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

The Trobrianders were friendly and cooperative. They had a rich, nuanced language, which made
them an ideal test case for a study of emotion. Jarillo explained,
To say that something has really surprised you in a positive way, they say, it “has enraptured my
mind,” or it has “caught my mind.” Then when you repeat that, you say, “Has this thing caught
your mind?” And they say, “Well, no, this one is more like it has taken my stomach away.”
These were not people, in other words, who would be flummoxed by being asked to make sense
of the emotional truth of something. If Darwin was correct, the Trobrianders should be as good as
the schoolchildren in Madrid at making sense of people’s faces. Emotions are hardwired by
evolution. That means people in the middle of the Solomon Sea must have the same operating
system as people in Madrid. Right?
Wrong.
Take a look at the following chart, which compares the success rate of the Trobrianders with the
success rate of the ten-year-olds at the Madrid school. The Trobrianders struggled.

The “emotional labels” down the left side of the chart are the pictures of people making different
kinds of faces that Jarillo and Crivelli showed their subjects. The labels across the top are how the
subjects identified those pictures. So 100 percent of the 113 Spanish schoolchildren identified the
happiness face as a happiness face. But only 58 percent of the Trobrianders did, while 23 percent
looked at a smiling face and called it “neutral.” And happiness is the emotion where there is the
most agreement between the Trobrianders and the Spanish children. On everything else, the
Trobrianders’ idea of what emotion looks like on the outside appears to be totally different from our
own.

“I think the thing that surprised us the most is the fact that what we think of in western societies
is a face of fear, of somebody who’s scared, turns out to be recognized in the Trobriand Islands more
as a threat,” Crivelli said. To demonstrate, he mimed what is known as the gasping face: wide-open
eyes, the face from Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream.
“In our culture, my face would be like, ‘I’m scared; I’m scared of you.’” Crivelli went on. “In
their culture, that…is the face of somebody who’s trying to scare somebody else.…It’s the opposite
[of what it means to us].”
The sensation of fear, for a Trobriand Islander, is not any different from the fear that you or I
feel. They get the same sick feeling in the pit of their stomach. But for some reason they don’t show
it the same way we do.

Anger was just as bad. You would think—wouldn’t you?—that everyone in the world would
know what an angry face looks like. It’s such a fundamental emotion.
This is anger, right?