But there’s the problem. Ekman was leaning awfully hard on what he saw with the Fore. Yet the emotion-recognition exercise he did with them wasn’t nearly as conclusive as he said it was.
Ekman went to New Guinea with another psychologist, Wallace Friesen, and an anthropologist, Richard Sorenson. Neither Ekman nor Friesen spoke the language of the Fore. Sorenson knew only enough to understand or say the simplest things. (See James Russell, “Is There Universal Recognition of Emotion from Facial Expression? A Review of the Cross Cultural Studies,” Psychological Bulletin 115, no. 1 [1994]: 124.) So there they are, showing headshots to tribesmen of white people making faces—and they are utterly reliant on their translator. They can’t just have each tribesman free-associate about what he thinks is happening in each photo. How would they make sense of that? They have to keep things simple. So Ekman and his group use what’s called “forced choice.” They show each Fore person the pictures, one by one, and for every image they asked the viewer to choose the right answer from a short list of emotions. Is what you are looking at anger, sadness, contempt, disgust, surprise, happiness, or fear? (The Fore didn’t really have a word to describe disgust or surprise, so the three researchers improvised: disgust was something that stinks; surprise was something new.)
Now, is forced choice a good method? For example, suppose I want to find out whether you know which city is the capital of Canada. (A surprising number of Americans, in my experience, have no idea.) I could ask you straight out: What is the capital of Canada? That’s a free choice question. In order to answer it correctly, you really have to know the capital of Canada. Now here’s the forced-choice version of that question.
The capital of Canada is:
Washington, DC
Kuala Lumpur
Ottawa
Nairobi
Toronto
You can guess, can’t you? It’s not Washington, DC. Even someone with no knowledge whatsoever of geography probably knows that’s the capital of the United States. It’s probably not Kuala Lumpur or Nairobi, since those names don’t sound Canadian. So it’s down to Toronto or Ottawa. Even if you have no idea what the capital of Canada is, you have a 50 percent chance of getting the answer right. So is that what was happening with Ekman’s survey of the Fore?
Sergio Jarillo and Carlos Crivelli—the two researchers I write about in Chapter Six of this book—began their research by attempting to replicate Ekman’s findings. Their idea was: let’s correct the flaws in his exercise and see if it still holds up. Their first step was to pick a isolated tribe—the Trobriand Islanders—whose language and culture at least one of them (Jarillo) knew well. That was their first advantage over Ekman: they knew an awful lot more about whom they were talking to than Ekman’s group had. They also decided not to use “forced choice.” They would use the far more rigorous methodology of free choice. They laid out a set of headshots (with people looking happy, sad, angry, scared, and disgusted) and asked, “Which of these is the sad face?” Then they asked the next person, “Which of these is the angry face?” And so on. Finally, they tallied all the responses.
And what did they find? That when you redo Ekman’s foundational experiment—only this time, carefully and rigorously—the case for universalism disappears. Over the past few years the floodgates have opened, which is where much of the research I described in this chapter comes from.
A few additional points:
Ekman’s original Science paper is, upon reflection, a little strange. He argued that what he found in the Fore was evidence of universalism. But if you examine his data, it doesn’t look like he’s describing universalism.
The Fore were really good at correctly identifying happy faces, but only about half of them correctly identified the “fear” face as being an expression of fear. Forty-five percent of them thought the surprised face was a fearful face. Fifty-six percent of them read sadness as anger. This is universalism?
Crivelli made a very insightful remark when we were talking about the people (like Ekman) who so favored the universalism idea. Many of them belonged to the generation that grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War. They were born into a world obsessed with human difference—in which black people were thought to be genetically inferior and Jews were held to be damaged and malignant—and they were powerfully drawn to a theory that maintained we are all the same.
It is important to note, however, that the work of anti-universalists is not a refutation of Ekman’s contributions. Everyone in the field of human emotion is in some crucial sense standing on his shoulders. People like Jarillo and Crivelli are simply arguing that you can’t understand emotion without taking culture into account.
To quote psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett—one of the leaders in challenging the Ekman view—“emotions are…made and not triggered.” (See her book How Emotions Are Made [New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017], p. xiii.) Each of us, over the course of our lives, builds our own set of operating instructions for our face, based on the culture and environment we inhabit. The face is a symbol of how different human beings are, not how similar we are, which is a big problem if your society has created a rule for understanding strangers based on reading faces.
For a good summary of this new line of research, see L. F. Barrett et al., “Emotional expressions reconsidered: Challenges to inferring emotion in human facial movements,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest (in press), as well as Barrett’s Emotions (cited above).
Photos of Pan-Am smile and Duchenne smile: Jason Vandeventer and Eric Patterson, “Differentiating Duchenne from non-Duchenne smiles using active appearance models,” 2012 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS) (2012): 319–24.
Facial Action Coding System units for Ross looking through door: Paul Ekman and Erika L Rosenberg, eds., What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), Second Edition (Oxford University Press: New York, 2005), p.14.
a kind of billboard for the heart: Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: J. Murray, 1872). Ekman has written extensively on Darwin’s contributions to the understanding of emotional expression. See Paul Ekman, ed., Darwin and Facial Expression (Los Altos, Calif.: Malor Books, 2006).
The plaintiff was Ginnah Muhammad (in footnote): Ginnah Muhammad v. Enterprise Rent-A-Car, 3–4 (31st District, 2006).
For an introduction to the Jarillo-Crivelli study on Trobriand islanders, see Carlos Crivelli et al., “Reading Emotions from Faces in Two Indigenous Societies,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 145, no. 7 (July 2016): 830–43, doi:10.1037/xge0000172. Also from this source is the chart comparing success rate of Trobrianders with that of Madrid students.
dozens of videotapes of judo fighters: Carlos Crivelli et al., “Are smiles a sign of happiness? Spontaneous expressions of judo winners,” Evolution and Human Behavior 2014, doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.08.009.
he watched videotapes of people masturbating: Carlos Crivelli et al., “Facial Behavior While Experiencing Sexual Excitement,” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 35 (2011): 63–71.
Anger photo: Job van der Schalk et al., “Moving Faces, Looking Places: Validation of the Amsterdam Dynamic Facial Expression Set (ADFES),” Emotion 11, no. 4 (2011): 912. Researchgate.
Namibia study: Maria Gendron et al., “Perceptions of Emotion from Facial Expressions Are Not Culturally Universal: Evidence from a Remote Culture,” Emotion 14, no 2 (2014): 251–62.
“This is not to say…freighted with significance”: Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), p. 73.
Two German psychologists…ran sixty people through it: Achim Schützwohl and Rainer Reisenzein, “Facial expressions in response to a highly surprising event exceeding the field of vision: A test of Darwin’s theory of surprise,” Evolution and Human Behavior 33, no. 6 (Nov. 2012): 657�
�64.
“The participants…emotion-face associations”: Schützwohl is drawing from a previous study: R. Reisenzein and M. Studtmann, “On the expression and experience of surprise: No evidence for facial feedback, but evidence for a reverse self-inference effect,” Emotion, no. 7 (2007): 612–27.
Walker put a gun to his ex-girlfriend’s head: Associated Press, “‘Real Smart Kid’ Jailed, This Time for Killing Friend,” Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review, May 26, 1995, http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1995/may/26/real-smart-kid-jailed-this-time-for-killing-friend/.
“Whatever these unobserved variables…create noise, not signal”: Kleinberg et al., “Human Decisions,” op. cit.
Chapter Seven: A (Short) Explanation of the Amanda Knox Case
“A murder always…want in a story?”: Amanda Knox, directed by Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn (Netflix, 2016). Also from that documentary are the following: Knox’s list of lovers (in footnote); “She started hitting…suspect Amanda” (in footnote); “Every piece of proof…no doubt of this”; and “There is no trace…not objective evidence.”
“The amplified DNA…borderline for interpretation”: Peter Gill, “Analysis and Implications of the Miscarriages of Justice of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito,” Forensic Science International: Genetics 23 (July 2016): 9–18. Elsevier, doi:10.1016/j.fsigen.2016.02.015.
Judges correctly identify liars: Levine, Duped, chapter 13.
Levine found this pattern: This refers to experiment 27 in Levine’s Duped, chapter 13. See also Timothy Levine, Kim Serota, Hillary Shulman, David Clare, Hee Sun Park, Allison Shaw, Jae Chul Shim, and Jung Hyon Lee, “Sender Demeanor: Individual Differences in Sender Believability Have a Powerful Impact on Deception Detection Judgments,” Human Communication Research 37 (2011): 377–403. Also from this source is the performance of trained interrogators on matched and mismatched senders.
In a survey of attitudes toward deception: The Global Deception Research Team, “A World of Lies,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 37, no. 1 (January 2006): 60–74.
“It wasn’t so much…care about this”: Markopolos, No One Would Listen, p. 82.
“And though it’s risky…Tsarnaev smirked” (in footnote): Seth Stevenson, “Tsarnaev’s Smirk,” Slate, April 21, 2015, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/04/tsarnaev-trial-sentencing-phase-prosecutor-makes-case-that-dzhokhar-tsarnaev-shows-no-remorse.html.
“In the Boston Marathon Bombing…remained stony-faced”: Barrett, How Emotions Are Made, p. 231.
“I’d do things…fall-over hilarious”: Amanda Knox, Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (New York: Harper, 2013), pp. 11–12; “‘You seem really flexible’…full of contempt,” p. 109; “But what drew laughs…accepting of differences” (in footnote), p. 26; “Ta-dah” moment, p. 91.
Just listen to a handful of quotations: John Follain, Death in Perugia: The Definitive Account of the Meredith Kercher Case from Her Murder to the Acquittal of Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2011), pp. 90–91, 93, 94.
Diane Sawyer interview: “Amanda Knox Speaks: A Diane Sawyer Exclusive,” ABC News, 2013, https://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/amanda-knox-speaks-diane-sawyer-exclusive-19079012.
“What’s compelling to me…distance ourselves from” (in footnote): Tom Dibblee, “On Being Off: The Case of Amanda Knox,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 12, 2013, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-being-off-the-case-of-amanda-knox.
“We were able…other kinds of investigation”: Ian Leslie, “Amanda Knox: What’s in a face?” The Guardian, October 7, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/08/amanda-knox-facial-expressions.
“Her eyes…could have been involved”: Nathaniel Rich, “The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox,” Rolling Stone, June 27, 2011, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-neverending-nightmare-of-amanda-knox-244620/?print=true.
Chapter Eight: Case Study: The Fraternity Party
The Jonsson testimony and description of the incident are from People v. Turner, vol. 6 (March 18, 2016), pp. 274–319. Emily Doe testimony about waking in hospital, vol. 6, p. 445; Brock Turner testimony about amount he drank, vol. 9 (March 23, 2016), pp. 836, 838; police estimate of Turner BAC, vol. 7 (March 21, 2016), p. 554; Julia’s testimony about amount she drank, vol. 5 (March 17, 2016), pp. 208–9, 213; Doe and Turner BAC (in footnote), vol. 7, pp. 553–54; Doe testimony about amount she drank, vol. 6, pp. 429, 433–34, 439; Turner testimony about sexual escalation, vol. 9, pp. 846–47, 850–51, 851–53; prosecution’s closing arguments, vol. 11, March 28, 2016, pp. 1072–73; Turner testimony about grinding, vol. 9, pp. 831–32; Doe testimony about blackout, vol. 6, pp. 439–40; Turner testimony about blackout, vol. 11, pp. 1099–1100; Turner testimony about Doe voice mail, vol. 9, p. 897.
An estimated one in five…victim of sexual assault: This figure has been supported by dozens of studies since 1987, including the 2015 Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll. A 2015 study by the Association of American Universities (AAU) found that 23 percent of undergraduate women are sexually assaulted while in college. A 2016 study released by the Department of Justice puts the number even higher, at 25.1 percent, or 1 in 4. See David Cantor et al., “Report on the AAU campus climate survey on sexual assault and sexual misconduct,” Westat; 2015, https://www.aau.edu/sites/default/files/%40%20Files/Climate%20Survey/AAU_CampusClimate_Survey_12_14_15.pdf; Christopher Krebs et al., “Campus Climate Survey Validation Study Final Technical Reports,” U.S. Department of Justice, 2016, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ccsvsftr.pdf.
Poll about establishing consent and defining sexual assault: Bianca DiJulio et al., “Survey of Current and Recent College Students on Sexual Assault,” Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation, June 12, 2015, pp. 15–17, http://files.kff.org/attachment/Survey%20Of%20Current%20And%20Recent%20College%20Students%20On%20Sexual%20Assault%20-%20Topline.
“How can we expect students…as to what they are?”: Lori E. Shaw, “Title IX, Sexual Assault, and the Issue of Effective Consent: Blurred Lines—When Should ‘Yes’ Mean ‘No’?,” Indiana Law Journal 91, no. 4, Article 7 (2016): 1412. “It is not enough…‘too much to drink,’” p. 1416. Shaw quotes from People v. Giardino 98, Cal. Rptr. 2d 315, 324 (Cal. Ct. App. 2000) and Valerie M. Ryan, “Intoxicating Encounters: Allocating Responsibility in the Law of Rape,” 40 CAL. W.L. REV. 407, 416 (2004).
The story of Dwight Heath in Bolivia was first told by me in “Drinking Games,” The New Yorker, February 15, 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/02/15/drinking-games.
Heath wrote…a now-famous article: Dwight B. Heath, “Drinking patterns of the Bolivian Camba,” Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 19 (1958): 491–508.
“Although I probably…embrace each other”: Ralph Beals, Ethnology of the Western Mixe (New York: Cooper Square Publishers Inc., 1973), p. 29.
The myopia theory was first suggested: Claude Steele and Robert A. Josephs, “Alcohol Myopia: Its Prized and Dangerous Effects,” American Psychologist 45, no. 8 (1990): 921–33.
A group of Canadian psychologists…his sober counterpart (in footnote): Tara K. MacDonald et al., “Alcohol Myopia and Condom Use: Can Alcohol Intoxication Be Associated With More Prudent Behavior?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78, no. 4 (2000): 605–19.
“I was hoping…she was enjoying it”: Helen Weathers, “I’m No Rapist…Just a Fool,” Daily Mail, March 30, 2007, www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-445750/Im-rapist--just-fool.html.
“He insisted…she removed them altogether”: R v Bree [2007] EWCA Crim 804 [16]–[17]; “She had no idea…for how long,” [8]; “Both were adults…legislative structures,” [25]–[35]; further quotes from ruling (in footnote), [32], [35], [36].
Memory test with three dead mice: Donald Goodwin, “Alcohol Amnesia,” Addiction (1995): 90, 315–17. (No ethics board would approve this experiment today.) The story about the salesman who experienced a five-day blackout is also drawn from this source.
Polic
e sobriety checkpoints (in footnote): Joann Wells et al., “Drinking Drivers Missed at Sobriety Checkpoints,” Journal of Studies on Alcohol (1997): 58, 513–17.
one of the first comprehensive surveys of college drinking: Robert Straus and Selden Bacon, Drinking in College (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 103.
Aaron White recently surveyed more than 700 Duke students: Aaron M. White et al., “Prevalence and Correlates of Alcohol-Induced Blackouts Among College Students: Results of an E-Mail Survey,” Journal of American College Health 51, no. 3 (2002): 117–31, doi:10.1080/07448480209596339.
In a remarkable essay (in footnote): Ashton Katherine Carrick, “Drinking to Blackout,” New York Times, September 19, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/opinion/drinking-to-blackout.html.
the consumption gap between men and women…has narrowed: William Corbin et al., “Ethnic differences and the closing of the sex gap in alcohol use among college-bound students,” Psychology of Addictive Behaviors 22, no. 2 (2008): 240–48, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0893-164X.22.2.240.
Nor is it just a matter of weight (in footnote): “Body Measurements,” National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, May 3, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/body-measurements.htm.
There are also meaningful differences (in footnote): Numbers found using online blood-alcohol calculator at http://www.alcoholhelpcenter.net/program/bac_standalone.aspx.
“Let’s be totally clear…prevent more victims”: Emily Yoffe, “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk,” Slate, October 16, 2013, slate.com/human-interest/2013/10/sexual-assault-and-drinking-teach-women-the-connection.html.
Adults feel quite differently (in footnote): Statistic is from Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll.
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