Page 76 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Kafka, a team has been hard at work. The corridor was actually made of temporary partitions. Now
they’ve been moved to create a wide-open space. The room has bright-green walls. A single light
bulb hangs from the ceiling, illuminating a bright red chair. And sitting in the chair is your best
friend, looking solemn. You come out, thinking you’re going to be heading down the same narrow
hallway, and BOOM—a room where a room isn’t supposed to be. And your friend, staring at you
like a character in a horror film.
Would you be surprised? Of course you would. And what would your face look like? Well, you
wouldn’t look the same as a Trobriand Islander would in that situation, nor a citizen of ancient
Rome. But within our culture, in this time and place, what surprise looks like is well established.
There’s a perfect example of it in that same Friends episode. Ross’s roommate, Joey, rushes into
Monica’s apartment and discovers two of his best friends trying to kill each other, and his face tells
you everything you need to know: AU 1 + 2 (eyebrows shooting up) plus AU 5 (eyes going wide)
plus AU 25 + 26, which is your jaw dropping. You’d make the Joey face, right? Wrong.
Two German psychologists, Achim Schützwohl and Rainer Reisenzein, created this exact
scenario and ran sixty people through it. On a scale of one to ten, those sixty rated their feelings of
surprise, when they opened the door after their session with Kafka, at 8.14. They were stunned! And
when asked, almost all of them were convinced that surprise was written all over their faces. But it
wasn’t. Schützwohl and Reisenzein had a video camera in the corner, and they used it to code
everyone’s expressions the same way Fugate had coded the Friends episode. In only 5 percent of
the cases did they find wide eyes, shooting eyebrows, and dropped jaws. In 17 percent of the cases
they found two of those expressions. In the rest they found some combination of nothing, a little
something, and things—such as knitted eyebrows—that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with
surprise at all. 3
“The participants in all conditions grossly overestimated their surprise expressivity,” Schützwohl
wrote. Why? They “inferred their likely facial expressions to the surprising event from…folk-
psychological beliefs about emotion-face associations.” Folk psychology is the kind of crude
psychology we glean from cultural sources such as sitcoms. But that is not the way things happen in
real life. Transparency is a myth—an idea we’ve picked up from watching too much television and
reading too many novels where the hero’s “jaw dropped with astonishment” or “eyes went wide
with surprise.” Schützwohl went on: “The participants apparently reasoned that, since they felt
surprised, and since surprise is associated with a characteristic facial display, they must have shown
this display. In most cases, this inference was erroneous.”
I don’t think that this mistake—expecting what is happening on the outside to perfectly match
what is going on inside—matters with our friends. Part of what it means to get to know someone is
to come to understand how idiosyncratic their emotional expressions can be. My father was once in
the shower in a vacation cottage that my parents had rented when he heard my mother scream. He
came running to find a large young man with a knife to my mother’s throat. What did he do? Keep
in mind that this is a seventy-year-old man, naked and dripping wet. He pointed at the assailant and
said in a loud, clear voice: “Get out NOW.” And the man did.
On the inside, my father was terrified. The most precious thing in his life—his beloved wife of
half a century—was being held at knifepoint. But I doubt very much that fear showed on his face.
His eyes didn’t go wide with terror, and his voice didn’t jump an octave. If you knew my father, you
would have seen him in other stressful situations, and you would have come to understand that the
“frightened” face, for whatever reason, was simply not part of his repertoire. In crisis, he turned
deadly calm. But if you didn’t know him, what would you have thought? Would you have concluded
that he was cold? Unfeeling? When we confront a stranger, we have to substitute an idea—a
stereotype—for direct experience. And that stereotype is wrong all too often.

By the way, do you know how the Trobrianders show surprise? When Crivelli showed up, he had
a little Apple iPod, and the islanders gathered around in admiration. “They were approaching me. I
was showing them.…They were freaking out, but they were not doing it like, ‘Gasp!’” He mimed a
perfect AU 1 + 2 + 5. “No. They were doing this.” He made a noise with his tongue against his
palate. “They were going click, click, click.”

6.