Since that night, I’ve had Kyriakos perform for my college students many times. I teach them the science of visual gaze and attention; Kyriakos lets them experience it for themselves. His sleight-of-hand tricks catch us off guard every time, and leave us wondering how what we just saw was possible. Students love him, and I know it’s for far more than just the break he offers from my lecturing.
Asked to explain what makes his audiences swoon, he said, “It’s about knowing how to read people right.” Kyriakos was a shy and awkward kid who had been picked on and bullied, he explained to me. He was in want of a different persona, and found it in magic.
“The books told me that I could be the life of the party. ‘Want to be the center of attention? Learn magic.’ So I did, and what I’ve realized is that we’re all the same to a certain degree. No one wants to be made fun of. No one wants to be made a fool. I didn’t then. And no one should feel that way now. That’s why it’s really important to me to know how people are feeling when I’m working a gig, and find the people who are in the right state of mind to have this experience with me.”
How does he find the willing in his audience? I wondered.
“Some of it is obvious. I’m looking for people who are nodding their heads at me. Not the person with their arms folded with a look saying something like, ‘Yeah, you aren’t going to get me.’ There’s a smile on their face that’s genuine. You can see that in their eyes, not their mouth. Then you’ve got to be on the lookout for the people who are jumping out of their seat, yelling ‘I love magic!’ That’s too much. It’s got to be the right kind of energy.”
Reading other people’s emotions correctly is a surprisingly tricky thing to accomplish, even for people like Kyriakos who quite literally have a trick up their sleeve. Results from the work of vision scientists Shichuan Du and Aleix Martinez bear this out plainly. Du and Martinez showed more than one hundred pictures to a group of university students and staff, and asked them to pick which of six possible expressions appeared on the faces in the photos. Each picture appeared for half a second. Long enough to see it, but not enough time to really study it in depth. The researchers were measuring first impressions and initial perceptions. In general, the group knew what happiness looked like. They were accurate 99 percent of the time. But fear was the hardest to read. Study participants recognized genuine fear only about half of the time. When they made a mistake, it was often because they thought those scared faces were actually surprised.
Beyond confusing these two, participants in this study struggled to identify other sets of emotions as well. The group was wrong about anger around 40 percent of the time. When an angry face appeared, the group was certain they saw sadness or disgust in about a quarter of the instances. The same with disgust; it was a challenge to recognize that emotion too. About half of the time, the group misidentified a look of disgust as one of anger.
Even the people we might suspect would be quite good at reading others’ emotions struggle just as much as the rest of us. About thirty years ago, a social psychologist named Paul Ekman tested how good different groups of people were at reading the expressions of people who were lying or telling the truth. He tested college students, and also those he thought would be particularly adept at identifying deception: psychiatrists, criminal investigators and judges, federal agents at Quantico who conducted polygraph tests, and even U.S. Secret Service agents.
Ekman showed these various groups of would-be lie detectors videos of women being interviewed about their reactions to a movie each had just watched. All the reports were positive, but not all were truthful. Some of those women had just watched nature films and actually felt happy and content. But other women had just watched a gruesome film portraying amputations and burn victims. These women were lying when they said they felt good. Ekman’s respondents knew of these two possibilities, but did not know which film each woman had watched. Their job was just to guess which women were trying to deceive their interviewers and which were telling the truth.
It might come as no surprise that the college students had a hard time telling the difference. On average, they were right at about the same rate that a statistician would expect among people who were just randomly guessing, without any real insight or ability to read emotions.
But some of those people had gone to school or been trained, or just seemed like they should have a natural ability to read people better than the rest of us, right? Psychiatrists are doctors of the human psyche. Polygraph technicians have machinery at their disposal, and their entire job is to pick out indicators of deception. But when tested by Ekman, all of these groups showed accuracy rates indistinguishable from that of the college students, or predicted by chance. In other words, all of these groups were essentially guessing. Guessing poorly.
Except for one.
Only one group of Ekman’s lie detectors could separate truth tellers from liars at rates that exceeded chance. It was the Secret Service. On average, the Secret Service agents were right 64 percent of the time. And some of them were very good. Ten agents were right eight or more times out of ten.
This led Ekman to wonder what it was that distinguished the truth tellers from the liars. What was it that the Secret Service agents were picking up on that the psychiatrists, judges, and investigators were not? It turns out that the agents had been trained to pay close attention to certain facial movements in order to detect lies. When he reevaluated the videos of the women’s emotional confessions, Ekman now found what the agents saw: subtle differences in the ways the women smiled revealed when they were being truthful and when they were lying about experiencing pleasant feelings.
Our corrugator muscles, which sit around the insides of our eyes, fire up when we are actually experiencing suffering. Think about when the sun is bright, and what happens to your eyes around your nose when you squint. That’s the corrugator muscles pulling the tops of your eyelids down to keep out the glare. Or think about the frown lines we all get on our lower forehead—the ones produced by the muscles just on the insides of our eyebrows above our nose that some people treat with Botox. The women who were lying about feeling good gave themselves away with these muscles. They also gave themselves away with their lips. Some liars’ upper lips curled up with disgust ever so slightly, and the corners of their mouths curled down just a bit. The words the women used were equally convincing, and they smiled just as much, but the disgust they’d felt earlier seeped into their expressions of positive regard.
Framing the Shot
We may never find ourselves sitting in front of Paul Ekman or surrounded by Secret Service agents, but we likely will find ourselves at some point wondering if someone we love is really upset. Or if our child is truly happy. Or whether our boss is actually pleased. So how do we know? The key to reading the “tells” of others’ emotions is about framing the shot. If we know where to look, we can teach ourselves to read emotions better.