Page 75 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

The hard eyes. The tight mouth. But anger baffled the Trobrianders. Just look at the scores for the
angry face. Twenty percent called it a happy face. Seventeen percent called it a sad face. Thirty
percent called it a fearful face. Twenty percent thought it was a sign of disgust—and only seven
percent identified it the way that nearly every Spanish schoolchild had. Crivelli said:
They gave lots of different descriptors.…They would just say, like, “They’re frowning.” Or
they’d use one of these proverbs that say…it means his brow is dark, which obviously can
translate as “He’s frowning.” They wouldn’t infer that that means that this person is angry.

To make sure the Trobrianders weren’t some kind of special case, Jarillo and Crivelli then
traveled to Mozambique to study a group of isolated subsistence fishermen known as the Mwani.
Once again, the results were dismal. The Mwani did marginally better than chance with the smiling
faces, but they seemed baffled by sad faces and angry faces. Another group, led by Maria Gendron,
traveled to the mountains of northwest Namibia to see whether the people there could accurately
sort photographs into piles according to the emotional expression of the subject. They couldn’t.
Even historians have now gotten into the act. If you could go into a time machine and show the
ancient Greeks and Romans pictures of modern-day people grinning broadly, would they interpret
that expression the same way we do? Probably not. As classicist Mary Beard writes in her book,
Laughter in Ancient Rome:
This is not to say that Romans never curled up the edges of their mouths in a formation that
would look to us much like a smile; of course they did. But such curling did not mean very much
in the range of significant social and cultural gestures in Rome. Conversely, other gestures,
which would mean little to us, were much more heavily freighted with significance.
If you staged a screening of that Friends episode for the Trobriand Islanders, they would see
Ross confronting Chandler and think Chandler was angry and Ross was scared. They would get the
scene completely wrong. And if you threw a Friends premiere in ancient Rome for Cicero and the
emperor and a bunch of their friends, they would look at the extravagant grimaces and contortions
on the faces of the actors and think: What on earth?

5.

OK. So what about within a culture? If we limit ourselves to the developed world—and forget about
outliers and ancient Rome—do the rules of transparency now work? No, they don’t.

Imagine the following scenario. You’re led down a long, narrow hallway into a dark room. There
you sit and listen to a recording of a Franz Kafka short story, followed by a memory test on what
you’ve just heard. You finish the test and step back into the corridor. But while you were listening to