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The Science of Luck

Jerold M. Lowenstein

In his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, Charles Darwin concluded that the facial muscles are “hard-wired” to the brain, so that most expressions of emotions are very much the same in different human populations.

Darwin wrote, “The movements of expression in the face and body... are in themselves of much importance for our welfare. They serve as the first means of communication between the mother and her infant; she smiles approval, and thus encourages her child on the right path, or frowns disapproval. We readily perceive sympathy in others by their expression; our sufferings are thus mitigated and pleasures increased; and mutual good feeling is thus strengthened. The movements of expression give vividness and energy to our spoken words. They reveal the thoughts and intentions of others more truly than do words, which may be falsified...

“I have endeavored to show in considerable detail that all the chief expressions exhibited by man are the same throughout the world. This fact is interesting, as it affords a new argument in favour of the several races being descended from a single parent-stock, which must have been almost completely human in structure, and to a large extent in mind, before the period at which the races diverged from each other.”

Though this book was popular when first published, it was pretty much ignored during the first half of the twentieth century. Most behavioral scientists thought Darwin was wrong in his conclusions. They argued that Darwin was being “anthropomorphic,” that is, attributing human emotions to animals; that his findings were “anecdotal” and not statistically significant; and that he was attributing too much of human behavior to biological and genetic factors and not enough to culture.

In 1965, Paul Ekman, now a psychology professor at the University of California, San Francisco, started to do research on facial expressions. His goal was to find out what is universal and what is culturally variable. At that time, the intellectual and scientific world was dominated by those who saw culture as determining every important aspect of our behavior.

Any scientist who emphasized the biological basis of social behavior was suspected of being racist. In this climate of opinion, Ekman was so convinced Darwin was mistaken he didn’t bother to read the book, but instead interviewed well-known anthropologists like Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Ray Birdwhistell, who had studied human societies in places like the South Seas and Africa.

These experts agreed that Darwin, who had done so much to put human evolution on a scientific base, had erred badly in his work on emotional expressions. Birdwhistell, a protégé of Margaret Mead, specialized in the study of expression and gesture. He said he had abandoned Darwin’s ideas when he found that in many cultures people smiled when they were unhappy.

Margaret Mead reported that facial expressions differ from culture to culture as much as language. Some scientists claimed the very idea of emotions was an invention of Western culture. Even as recently as 1992, Australian linguist Anna Wierzbicka maintained that investigators like Darwin and Ekman were misled by relying on Western words for emotions which do not exist in many other cultures.

Darwin had made many observations of his children, friends, and associates, and consulted missionaries and others living in foreign lands. But Ekman wanted to apply modern scientific methods to the question whether facial expression was or was not an innate universal human language, as he tells in his book Emotions Revealed (Times Books, 2003).

First he showed photographs depicting happiness, anger, fear, sadness, and disgust to people in five cultures—Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, and the United States—and asked them to judge what emotion was shown in each facial expression. To his amazement, the majority in every culture agreed. He began to consider whether expressions might be universal after all.

Still, there was the remote possibility that all these cultures had been influenced by the West. So Ekman looked for a society that had not been exposed to Western movies and TV. In 1967, he studied the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, a Stone Age tribe that had virtually no contact with outside groups. The Fore had no trouble recognizing the emotions expressed in his photos. He read them little stories that did not rely on the use of words for the emotions themselves but on the situations that evoked the emotions. When asked which picture fit the story, they easily identified the five emotional expressions described.

Humans are social primates, and for us, as well as for apes and monkeys, being able to read the facial expressions of our peers helps us predict what they may do next.

Our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, are often aware that their faces are being read. They can’t control their expression of emotions, but they sometimes try to hide it. Anthropologist Joanne Tanner observed two young gorillas playing boisterously. When the frowning silverback male suddenly appeared, one of the kids covered her smiling “play face” with her hand as though to deny what she was doing. In another example of animal self-awareness, primatologist Frans de Waal reported that a young chimpanzee, frightened by a more dominant male, stroked his own face with his hands trying unsuccessfully to erase the fear grimace—presumably so that the other male wouldn’t see that he was afraid.

Humans also may try to hide their true feelings, and in the late 1960s Ekman was asked by professionals with two very different kinds of interests whether he could detect liars by their facial expressions. Psychiatric colleagues at UCSF were concerned about their potentially suicidal patients, who would often pretend to be feeling better so they could leave the hospital and do themselves in. The FBI wanted to train agents to spot spies. The polygraph, the so-called “lie detector” that measures such physiological changes as pulse rate, blood pressure, and sweating, is only 80 percent accurate, which means it misidentifies one out of five liars and truth-tellers—not very good odds for the criminal justice system. Could reading faces do better than that? Ekman describes his investigations in Telling Lies (Norton, 2001).

He reviewed films of interviews with hospital patients. Mary, a 42-year-old housewife, attempted suicide three times. She told the doctor how much better she felt and asked for a weekend pass, but before receiving it confessed that she still planned to kill herself. The filmed interview with Mary fooled most of the young and even many of the experienced psychotherapists to whom it was shown. Ekman studied it in slowmotion. In the momentary pause before she replied to a question about her future plans, he saw a fleeting facial expression of despair, so quick it could easily be missed without slo-mo. Once aware that concealed feelings might be evident in these very brief micro expressions, he searched and found many more.

To test objectively how well people could spot lying, Ekman had nursing students at UCSF view two starkly contrasting films—one that showed pleasant colorful oceanic scenes and another taken of mutilated burn victims and amputations. While watching these films, the student nurses were interviewed by people who could not see which film they were looking at. The students were instructed to tell the truth about the pleasant film and lie about the gory one. Instead of describing disfiguring burns, they were to try to convince the interviewers that they were enjoying a movie about beautiful flowers.

Although a few nursing students were terrible liars and easily detected, most misled the unsuspecting judges. Yet a few judges did very well, correctly identifying 85 percent of the dissimulators. This level of success showed that the clues were there—Ekman could see them on film in slow motion—but most interviewers couldn’t spot them.

Two major clues to false expressions are facial asymmetry and the timing of expressions. Crooked expressions, which appear stronger on one side of the face than the other, suggest that the feeling displayed is not honestly felt. False smiles are more asymmetrical than felt smiles. Expressions that last longer than 5 to 10 seconds are likely to be false. False smiles, too, may drop off the face abruptly. They do not involve the muscles around the eyes. When used as a mask, the false smile will only involve the lower face and eyelid, and the crinkles around the eyes will be missing. The reliable forehead muscles may still signal fear or distress.

What about the anthropologist’s observation that some people smiled when they were unhappy? There are dozens of different smiles, including those of fear, contempt, and disbelief. Different cultures do have different “display rules” about which emotional expressions are acceptable. In most public sporting contests, for instance, the loser usually tries to mask the disappointment he or she feels. When alone, Japanese and Americans displayed the same morose facial expressions on seeing films of surgery and accidents, but when a scientist sat with them, the Japanese more than the Americans masked negative feelings with a smile.

The smile mask is the easiest facial expression to assume. Well before the age of one, infants can smile deliberately. It is one of the very earliest expressions used to please others. Smiling is part of the standard greeting used in polite exchanges. The negative emotions are harder to falsify. Most people cannot voluntarily move the particular muscles needed to simulate distress or fear.

Nevertheless, whether smiling or frowning, the majority of liars can fool most of the people most of the time. Most people believe they can detect false expressions, but Ekman’s research has shown that most cannot. The lie-spotter can err either in believing a liar or disbelieving an innocent. Some people show signs of fear or distress regardless of how they actually feel. In many scientific tests, there is a “normal control” to compare with the suspected abnormal result. To be true to scientific method, the lie catcher must be able to compare the individual’s normal behavior with that shown when under suspicion, and that comparison is rarely achievable.

Would-be lie catchers often pay too much attention to the least trustworthy sources—words. Words are easy to plan and rehearse, but few individuals are aware of the expressions emerging on their faces. The face often contains two messages: what the liar wants to show and what he or she wants to conceal. The face is directly connected to those areas of the brain involved in emotion, but words are not.

In Ekman’s investigations, it took special training to teach people how to see the giveaway micro expressions that pass over the face in less than a second. He has since trained a number of agents of the FBI, CIA, and Secret Service, so presumably they are now using his techniques for spotting liars.

It is commonly believed that the eyes, the windows of the soul, betray concealed feelings, and that people who are lying won’t look you in the eye. This belief makes it easy for skilled liars to deceive their victims. According to a news report of a bigamy trial, the thing that attracted Patricia Gardner to Giovanni Vigliotto, the man who may have married 100 different women, was “that honest trait” of looking directly into her eyes.

Involuntary expressions of emotion are the product of evolution, just as Darwin posited. Many human expressions are the same as those seen on the faces of other primates, expecially the great apes, so the universal language of facial expressions is an even more fundamental way for us to communicate with each other and with our evolutionary cousins than spoken words and American Sign Language.

Convinced after 30 years of research that Darwin was basically correct after all, Paul Ekman brought out a new definitive edition of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1996 and interspersed his own commentaries throughout the book to bring Darwin’s findings up to date. In an afterword he writes, “We are biosocial creatures, our minds are embodied, reflecting our lives and the lives of our ancestors. Darwin led the way not only in the biological sciences but in the social sciences as well.”