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?
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 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