Talking to Strangers

by Malcolm Gladwell

  9 This is not a literal transcription of what Spanier said, but rather a paraphrase, based on his recollections.

  Part Three

  Transparency

  Chapter Six

  The Friends Fallacy

  1.

  By its fifth season, Friends was well on its way to becoming one of the most successful television shows of all time. It was one of the first great “hang-out comedies.” Six friends—Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler, and Ross—live in a chaotic jumble in downtown Manhattan, couple and decouple, flirt and fight but mostly just talk, endlessly and hilariously.

  The season begins with Ross getting married to a non-Friends outsider. By midseason the relationship will be over, and by season’s end he will be back in the arms of Rachel. Phoebe gives birth to triplets and takes up with a police officer. And, most consequentially, Monica and Chandler fall in love—a development that creates an immediate problem, because Monica is Ross’s sister and Chandler is Ross’s best friend, and neither of them has the courage to tell Ross what is happening.

  At the beginning of episode fifteen—titled “The One with the Girl Who Hits Joey”—Chandler and Monica’s subterfuge falls apart. Ross looks out his window at the apartment across the way and spots his sister Monica in a romantic embrace with Chandler. He’s thunderstruck. He runs to Monica’s apartment and tries to barge in, but the chain is on her door. So he sticks his face into the six-inch gap.

  “Chandler! Chandler! I saw what you were doing through the window. I saw what you were doing to my sister, now get out here!”

  Chandler, alarmed, tries to escape out the window. Monica holds him back. “I can handle Ross,” she tells him. She opens the door to her brother. “Hey, Ross. What’s up, bro?”

  Ross runs inside, lunges at Chandler, and starts to chase him around the kitchen table, shouting: “What the hell are you doing?!”

  Chandler hides behind Monica. Joey and Rachel rush in.

  Rachel: Hey, what’s going on?

  Chandler: Well, I think—I think—Ross knows about me and Monica.

  Joey: Dude, he’s right there.

  Ross: I thought you were my best friend! This is my sister! My best friend, and my sister! I cannot believe this.

  Did you follow all that? A standard Friends season had so many twists and turns of plot—and variations of narrative and emotion—that it seems as though viewers would need a flowchart to make sure they didn’t lose their way. In reality, however, nothing could be further from the truth. If you’ve ever watched an episode of Friends, you’ll know that it is almost impossible to get confused. The show is crystal clear. How clear? I think you can probably follow along even if you turn off the sound.

  The second of the puzzles that began this book was the bail problem. How is it that judges do a worse job of evaluating defendants than a computer program, even though judges know a lot more about defendants than the computer does? This section of Talking to Strangers is an attempt to answer that puzzle, beginning with the peculiar fact of how transparent television shows such as Friends are.

  2.

  To test this idea about the transparency of Friends, I contacted a psychologist named Jennifer Fugate, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Fugate is an expert in FACS, which stands for Facial Action Coding System.1 In FACS, every one of the forty-three distinctive muscle movements in the face is assigned a number, called an “action unit.” People like Fugate who are trained in FACS can then look at someone’s facial expressions and score them, just as a musician can listen to a piece of music and translate it into a series of notes on the page.

  So, for example, take a look at this photo:

  That’s called a Pan-Am smile—the kind of smile a flight attendant gives you when he or she is trying to be polite. When you give that kind of smile, you pull up the corners of your lips, using what’s called the zygomaticus major muscle, but leave the rest of your face impassive. That’s why the smile looks fake: It’s a smile without any kind of facial elaboration. In the FACS, the Pan-Am smile using the zygomaticus major is scored as AU 12.

  Now take a look at this:

  This is what’s called a Duchenne smile. It’s what a genuine smile looks like. In technical terms, it’s AU 12 plus AU 6—meaning that it is a facial movement involving the outer portion of the orbicularis oculi muscle, raising the cheeks and creating those telltale crow’s-feet around the eyes.

  FACS is an extraordinarily sophisticated tool. It involves cataloging—in exacting detail—thousands of muscular movements, some of which may appear on the face for no more than a fraction of a second. The FACS manual is over five hundred pages long. If Fugate had done a FACS analysis of the entire “Girl Who Hits Joey” episode, it would have taken her days, so I asked her to focus just on that opening scene: Ross sees Chandler and Rachel embracing, then rushes over in anger.

  Here’s what she found.

  When Ross looks through the cracked door and sees his sister in a romantic embrace with his best friend, his face shows action units 10 + 16 + 25 + 26: That’s the upper-lip raiser (levator labii superioris, caput infraorbitalis), the lower-lip depressor (depressor labii), parted lips (depressor labii, relaxed mentalis or orbicularis oris), and jaw drop (relaxed temporal and internal pterygoid).

  In the FACS system, muscular movements are also given an intensity measure from A to E, with A being mildest and E strongest. All of Ross’s four muscle movements, in that moment, are Es. If you go back and watch that Friends episode, and freeze the screen at the moment when Ross looks through the door frame, you’ll see exactly what the FACS coders are describing. He has an unmistakable look on his face of anger and disgust.

  Ross then rushes into Monica’s apartment. The tension in the scene is accelerating, and so are Ross’s emotions. Now his face reads: 4C + 5D + 7C + 10E + 16E + 25E + 26E. Again, four Es!

  “[AU] 4 is a brow-lowerer,” Fugate explains.

  That’s what you do when you furrow your brow. Seven is an eye squint. It’s called “lid-tightener.” He’s kind of scowling and closing his eyes at the same time, so that’s a stereotypic anger. Then the 10 in this case is very classic for disgust. You kind of lift your upper lip, not really moving the nose, but it gives the appearance that the nose is being turned up. The 16 sometimes happens with that. That’s a lower-lip depressor. That’s when you push your bottom lip down so that you can see your bottom teeth.

  Monica, at the door, tries to pretend nothing is amiss. She smiles at her brother. But it’s a Pan-Am smile, not a Duchenne smile: some 12 and the barest, least-plausible whisper of 6.

  Ross chases Chandler around the kitchen table. Chandler hides behind Monica, and as Ross approaches, he says: “Look, we’re not just messing around. I love her. OK? I’m in love with her.”

  Then Monica reaches and takes Ross’s hand. “I’m so sorry that you had to find out this way. I’m sorry. But it’s true, I love him too.”

  There’s a long silence as Ross stares at the two of them, processing a storm of competing emotions. Then he bursts into a smile, hugs them both, and repeats himself, only this time happily: “My best friend, and my sister! I’m so happy!”

  As Monica breaks the news to her brother, Fugate scores her as 1C + 2D + 12D. The 1 and 2, in combination, are sadness: She’s raised the inner and outer parts of her eyebrows. 12D, of course, is the emotionally incomplete Pan-Am smile.

  “She kind of gives—as strange as that sounds—an indicator of sadness,” Fugate said, “but then happiness. I think it kind of makes sense, because she’s apologizing, but then she’s showing Ross that she’s actually okay with this.”

  Ross looks at his sister for a long beat. His face scores classic sadness. Then his face subtly shifts to 1E + 12D. He’s giving back to his sister the exact same mix of emotions she gave to him: sadness combined with the beginnings of happiness. He’s losing his sister. But at the same time, he wants her to know that he appreciates her joy.

  Fugate’s
FACS analysis tells us that the actors in Friends make sure that every emotion their character is supposed to feel in their heart is expressed, perfectly, on their face. That’s why you can watch the scene with the sound turned off and still follow along. The words are what make us laugh, or what explain particular nuances of narrative. But the facial displays of the actors are what carry the plot. The actors’ performances in Friends are transparent.

  Transparency is the idea that people’s behavior and demeanor—the way they represent themselves on the outside—provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside. It is the second of the crucial tools we use to make sense of strangers. When we don’t know someone, or can’t communicate with them, or don’t have the time to understand them properly, we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor.

  3.

  The idea of transparency has a long history. In 1872, thirteen years after first presenting his famous treatise on evolution, Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Smiling and frowning and wrinkling our noses in disgust, he argued, were things that every human being did as part of evolutionary adaptation. Accurately and quickly communicating our emotions to one another was of such crucial importance to the survival of the human species, he argued, that the face had developed into a kind of billboard for the heart.

  Darwin’s idea is deeply intuitive. Children everywhere smile when they are happy, frown when they are sad, and giggle when they are amused, don’t they? It isn’t just people watching Friends in their living room in Cleveland, Toronto, or Sydney who can make sense of what Ross and Rachel are feeling; it’s everyone.

  The bail hearings described in Chapter Two are likewise an exercise in transparency. The judge does not correspond with the parties in a court case by email or call them up on the telephone. Judges believe that it’s crucial to look at the people they are judging. A Muslim woman in Michigan was the plaintiff in a lawsuit a few years ago, and she came to court wearing the traditional niqab, a veil covering all but her eyes. The judge asked her to take it off. She refused. So the judge dismissed her case. He didn’t think he could fairly adjudicate a disagreement between two parties when he couldn’t see one of them. He told her:

  One of the things that I need to do as I am listening to testimony is I need to see your face and I need to see what’s going on. And unless you take that off, I can’t see your face and I can’t tell whether you’re telling me the truth or not, and I can’t see certain things about your demeanor and temperament that I need to see in a court of law.2

  Do you think the judge was right? I’m guessing many of you do. We wouldn’t spend as much time as we do looking at people’s faces if we didn’t think there was something valuable to be learned. In novels, we read that “his eyes widened in shock” or “her face fell in disappointment,” and we accept without question that faces really do fall and eyes really do widen in response to the feelings of shock and disappointment. We can watch Ross’s 4C + 5D + 7C + 10E + 16E + 25E + 26E and know what it means—with the sound off—because thousands of years of evolution have turned 4C + 5D + 7C+ 10E + 16E + 25E + 26E into the expression human beings make when filled with shock and anger. We believe someone’s demeanor is a window into their soul. But that takes us back to Puzzle Number Two. Judges in bail hearings have a window into the defendant’s soul. Yet they are much worse at predicting who will reoffend than Sendhil Mullainathan’s computer, which has a window into no one’s soul.

  If real life were like Friends, judges would beat computers. But they don’t. So maybe real life isn’t like Friends.

  4.

  The cluster of islands known as the Trobriands lies 100 miles east of Papua New Guinea, in the middle of the Solomon Sea. The archipelago is tiny, home to 40,000 people. It’s isolated and tropical. The people living there fish and farm much as their ancestors did thousands of years ago, and their ancient customs have proven remarkably durable, even in the face of the inevitable encroachments of the 21st century. In the same way that carmakers take new models to the Arctic to test them under the most extreme conditions possible, social scientists sometimes like to “stress test” hypotheses in places such as the Trobriands. If something works in London or New York and it works in the Trobriands, you can be pretty sure you’re onto something universal—which is what sent two Spanish social scientists to the Trobriand Islands in 2013.

  Sergio Jarillo is an anthropologist. He had worked in the Trobriands before and knew the language and culture. Carlos Crivelli is a psychologist. He spent the earliest part of his career testing the limits of transparency. Once he examined dozens of videotapes of judo fighters who had just won their matches to figure out when, exactly, they smiled. Was it at the moment of victory? Or did they win, then smile? Another time he watched videotapes of people masturbating to find out what their faces looked like at the moment of climax. Presumably an orgasm is a moment of true happiness. Is that happiness evident and observable in the moment? In both cases, it wasn’t—which didn’t make sense if our emotions are really a billboard for the heart. These studies made Crivelli a skeptic, so he and Jarillo decided to put Darwin to the test.

  Jarillo and Crivelli started with six headshots of people looking happy, sad, angry, scared, and disgusted—with one final picture of someone with a neutral expression. Before they left for the Trobriands, the two men took their pictures to a primary school in Madrid and tried them out on a group of children. They put all six photos before a child and asked, “Which of these is the sad face?” Then they went to the second child and asked, “Which of these is the angry face?” and so on, cycling through all six pictures over and over again. Here are the results. The children had no difficulty with the exercise:

  Then Jarillo and Crivelli flew to the Trobriand Islands and repeated the process.

  The Trobrianders were friendly and cooperative. They had a rich, nuanced language, which made them an ideal test case for a study of emotion. Jarillo explained,

  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: