What about those head turns and head movements down? Various species, including pigs, rabbits, pigeons, doves, Japanese quail, loons, and salamanders, resort to head movements down, head turns, head bobs, and constricted posture to appease. These actions shrink the size of the organism, and expose areas of vulnerability (the neck and jugular vein, in the case of human embarrassment). These actions signal weakness. Darwin himself arrived at a similar analysis of the shoulder shrug, which typically accompanies the recognition of ignorance (or intellectual weakness) and appears as the opposite of the postural expansion of dominance. At the heart of the embarrassment display, as in other species’ appeasement behaviors, is weakness, humility, and modesty.
The embarrassed smile has a simple story with a subtle twist. The smile originates in the fear grimace or bared-teeth grin of nonhuman primates. Go to a zoo and watch the chimps or macaques, and you’ll see subordinate individuals grin like fools as they approach dominant peers. Yet the embarrassed smile is more than just a smile; it has accompanying muscle actions in the mouth that alter the appearance of the smile. The most frequent one is the lip press, a sign of inhibition. When people encounter strangers in the street they often greet each other with this modest smile. Just as common are lip puckers, a faint kiss gracing the embarrassed smile as it unfolds during its two-to three-second attempt to make peace. Within reconciliation, many primates turn to sexual displays—rump presentations, genital touch and contact, and sexual mounting. While humans are not so bawdy in how they short-circuit aggression, we do show signs of affection—subtle lip puckers—in our embarrassment, to warm hearts and bring others closer. This explains why embarrassment displays and the coy smile are put to good use during flirtation and courtship.
The face touch may be the most mysterious element of embarrassment. Several primates cover their faces when appeasing. Even the rabbit rubs its nose with its paws when appeasing. Face touching in humans has many functions. Some acts of face touching act as self-soothing (the repetitive stroking of hair in the back of the head). Other face touches are iconic (the tragic rub of the inner eye; the flirtatious hair flick, which expands the coif to peacock-tail proportions). Certain face touches seem to act like the curtains on a stage, closing up one act of the social drama and ushering in the next. A psychoanalyst has even argued that we face-touch to remind ourselves that we exist, in the midst of social exchanges where our sense of self feels to be drifting away.
A clue to the origins of face touching in human embarrassment came from one participant from the original startle study. After she had been startled, she pulled her head into a shoulder shrug, and up went the hand, as if it was timed to deflect an aggressive blow. Some face touches (for example, covering the eyes) signal the exiting of the situation; others seem to be the residual actions of defensive postures. An element of embarrassment is self-defense.
In turning to other species’ appeasement displays, the social forces that have shaped this display during the tens of millions of years of primate evolution were there to see. This simple display brought together signals of inhibition, weakness, modesty, sexual allure, and defense all woven together in a two-or three-second display. The mission of the display is to make peace, to prevent conflict and costly aggression, and to bring people closer together, to reestablish cooperative bonds. We may feel alienated, flawed, alone, and exposed when embarrassed, but our experience and display of this complex emotion is a wellspring of forgiveness and reconciliation. The complement would also prove to be true: The absence of embarrassment is a sign of abandoning the social contract.
EVANESCENT SIGNS OF MORAL COMMITMENT
Imagine that our most intimate relationships were arranged like speed dating. You are allowed one question to ask of others to figure out who will become lifelong friends, spouses, and work colleagues. What question would you ask? Do you call your mother regularly? How do you treat your cat? Have you ever thrown your back out trying to avoid stepping on an ant?
This thought experiment may sound absurd but in point of fact has clear parallels in analyses of the evolutionary origins of cooperation. Being good to others has many costs, and exposes the individual to exploitation by those who are less generous. Given the costs and risks of cooperation, we are on the hunt for subtle, unspoken signs of integrity, honesty, kindness, and trustworthiness.
In this strange speed dating moral universe, I would ask people to tell me of their last embarrassing experience. I would then focus my eyes and carefully watch embarrassment ripple across their faces. Why put stock in an emotion so closely associated with the seemingly superficial aspects of social life—politeness, manners, and social conventions regarding the exchanges between strangers? Because the elements of the embarrassment are fleeting statements the individual makes about his or her respect for the judgment of others. Embarrassment reveals how much the individual cares about the rules that bind us to one another. Gaze aversion, head turns to the side and down, the coy smile, and the occasional face touch are perhaps the most potent nonverbal clues we have to an individual’s commitment to the moral order. These nonverbal cues, in the words of sociologist Erving Goffman, are “acts of devotion…in which an actor celebrates and confirms his relation to a recipient.”
One way to test this hypothesis—that embarrassment displays are evanescent signs of moral commitment—would be to study moral heroes, and look to see whether they show extraordinary embarrassment and modesty. That is, is the modesty, deference, and respect they have cultivated seen in their everyday visage? One cannot help but be struck by the deep modesty evident in the smiles of people such as Gandhi or the Dalai Lama, which show elements of embarrassment that I documented—gaze aversion, lip presses, and smile controls.
I chose to study the other end of the continuum—people prone to violence. My thesis was simple: To the extent that embarrassment displays reflect respect for others and a commitment to the moral order, the relative absence of embarrassment should be accompanied by the tendency to act in antisocial ways, the most extreme being violence. In a first study to test this hypothesis, I concentrated on young boys prone to violence, known in clinical science as externalizers (they externalize their inner turmoil by acting out aggressively). These are boys who fight, bully, steal, burn things, and vandalize on a routine basis. I observed ten-year-olds while they were taking a two-minute interactive IQ test, attempting to answer questions whose answers you’d find in an encyclopedia (“What is a barometer?” “Who was Charles Darwin?”). The test is designed to produce some failure in all children. All the boys in this study responded emotionally to these academic misfires, glaring in anger, showing the tightened brow of anxiety, or, most typically, showing the now familiar signs of embarrassment. Consistent with my moral commitment hypothesis, the well-adjusted boys showed the most embarrassment, and in fact this was their dominant response to the test. They in effect were displaying concern over their performance, and perhaps a deeper respect for the institution of education. The externalizing boys, in contrast, showed little or no embarrassment. Instead, these boys erupted with occasional facial displays of anger (one boy gave the finger to the camera when the experimenter momentarily had to leave the testing room). The fleeting, subtle embarrassment display is a strong index of our commitment to the social-moral order and the greater good.
Neuroscientist James Blair has followed up on this work on embarrassment and violence by studying “acquired sociopathy,” that is, antisocial tendencies brought on by brain trauma. One such patient, J. S., was an electrical engineer. One day in his mid-fifties he collapsed and lost consciousness. During his recovery in a hospital, he was known for his outrageous outbursts. He threw furniture at other patients. He pushed a wheelchair-bound patient around at roller-coaster speed and with hairpin shifts in direction despite her shrieks of terror. He groped female nurses on a routine basis and, on another occasion, bodysurfed on a gurney through the hallways of the hospital.
In Blair’s research, J. S. demonstrated a
normal ability to learn, to recognize faces, and to identify whether faces were male or female. He showed normal physiological reactions to a clap and the utterance of his name. He could provide normal explanations of protagonists’ behavior briefly described in vignettes, suggesting that he did not suffer from some general deficit in understanding others’ mental states.
What J. S. proved to be deficient in was embarrassment. In one task, he was asked to attribute emotions to hypothetical characters in various situations. Some were ones of happiness—a person wins an award. Others were of sadness—the protagonist loses a job. Still others were about embarrassment—a protagonist slips in a café and falls prostrate in the middle of some tables. J. S. was near-perfect in his ability to attribute feelings of happiness and sadness to the fictional characters; he could reason about the emotions of gains and losses. He was utterly incompetent in his attributions of embarrassment.
Blair also explored J. S.’s reactions to slides portraying anger and disgust expressions—the kinds of expressions that often signal disapproval and trigger our embarrassment. How did J. S. respond to these signs of moral disapproval? He had great difficulty identifying the emotions conveyed. Unlike comparison participants, he also failed to show a skin-conductance response—the release of sweat from tiny glands underneath the skin of the fingers. His body was not wired to respond to the judgments of others.
J. S. had damaged the orbitofrontal cortex, a region of the frontal lobes that is adjacent to the jagged, bony ridges of the skull’s openings for the eyes. This region of the brain is often damaged in falls and bike and motorcycle accidents, as the brain jostles during the fall and is carved up by the bony backside of the eye sockets. This damage had left J. S.’s reasoning processes intact, but it had short-circuited his capacity for embarrassment. In actuality, he had lost something much larger: his ability to appease, reconcile, forgive, and participate in the social-moral order. More in-depth studies of this region of the brain would tell us what might have changed in Eadweard Muybridge the fateful day he was thrown headfirst into a tree.
MUYBRIDGE’S IMMODEST BRAIN
When Eadweard Muybridge regained consciousness after his injury, he felt strange. He had no sense of smell or taste. He had double vision. In his own muted words, he had “confused ideas.” Most likely those confused ideas centered upon a new disconnect to others, a sudden blindness to the rich web of conventions and subtle acts of cooperation that bind people to one another.
Like J. S., Muybridge had damaged his oribitofrontal cortex, which might be thought of as a command center for the moral sentiments. Anatomically, the orbitofrontal cortex receives information from the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped part of the midbrain, which provides a millisecond, unconscious assessment of whether objects are good or bad. It receives information from the cingulate cortex, which is involved in assessments of pain and harm. Soft, velvety touch to the arm activates the orbitofrontal cortex, suggesting that this portion of the brain tracks physical contact between people so central to the currency of gratitude and compassion and the formation of intimate and egalitarian bonds. It receives information from the vagus nerve, which is activated during our experience of compassion.
Remarkably, damage to the orbitofrontal cortex does not impair language, memory, or sensory processing, as Blair’s study of J. S. revealed. Patients who damage these regions speak with the fluency that would please any grammarian, and the cogence that would satisfy the most persnickety of logicians. Cold reason remains intact. But damage to the orbitofrontal cortex does tend to turn individuals into impulsive, everyday psychopaths.
We know this from case studies of people who have damaged that region of the brain. The most famous is Phineas Gage, who accidentally blew a thirteen-pound tamping rod through his skull while working on the Rutland and Burlington Rail Road in Vermont. The doctor who cared for Gage, John Harlow, offered one of the few recorded observations about Gage, who, prior to the accident, was uniformly considered a considerate, reliable, upstanding man: “He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires.”
In research with Jennifer Beer and Robert Knight on orbitofrontal patients, we sought to document that these patients, so skilled in the tasks of cold reasoning, have lost the art of embarrassment. They have lost the ability to appease, to reconcile, and signal their concern for others. In the study, our participants navigated a veritable obstacle course of embarrassing traps and hurdles. First, they disclosed personal experiences to a relative stranger—an exercise fraught with the possibility of being inappropriately intimate. Participants then teased an attractive female experimenter whom they had just met. They did so by making up a nickname and a provocative story for that person. Finally, patients were presented with slides of different facial expressions of emotions, including one of embarrassment—a trigger of reconciliation and forgiveness.
Our patients barreled through these tasks with the immodest impulse of the wild-eyed, street-corner psychopath. In the emotional disclosure task, comparison participants talked about being embarrassed at forgetting someone’s name or not understanding the punchline of a joke. Orbitofrontal patients, in contrast, recounted experiences that were often sexual and more suitable to a therapy session than an interaction with a stranger. They were unconstrained by the anticipation of embarrassment at having crossed the boundaries of intimacy. One patient’s account of embarrassment to his new acquaintance, the experimenter: “I was embarrassed when I was discovered in a store’s dressing room with my girlfriend.”
When teasing the stranger, the orbitofrontal patients did so in inappropriate and often lewd fashion. The nicknames they devised always contained sexual innuendo directed at the experimenter. One joked about what he and the experimenter might really get down to if given the chance. Unlike the comparison participants, the orbitofrontal patients showed no signs of embarrassment when teasing, even though their provocative efforts were often quite outlandish.
Finally, in judging the emotions of others, our orbitofrontal patients were inept at identifying embarrassment from photos, although they were quite skilled at judging other facial expressions, for example those of happiness, amusement, or surprise. They resembled psychopaths, who prove to be unresponsive to the signs of suffering in others.
Embarrassment warns us of immoral acts and prevents us from mistakes that unsettle social harmony. It signals our sense of wrongdoing and our respect for the judgments of others. It provokes ordinary acts of forgiveness and reconciliation, without which it would be a dog-eat-dog world. Orbitofrontal patients, fully capable in the realm of reason, have lost this art of embarrassment. They have lost the subtle ethic of modesty.
AN ETHIC OF MODESTY
Philosophers turn to metaphors to describe the moral sentiments, and those metaphors often center upon animating natural forces that unite humans in common cause. For the British Enlightenment philosophers, moral sentiments like sympathy made up an invisible force field, binding individuals to one another. For the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, the Tao, or way of virtue, is like water, noncompetitive but touching all. Embarrassment is like an ocean wave: It throws you and those near you into the earth, but you come up embracing and laughing.
The simple elements of the embarrassment display I had documented and traced back to other species’ appeasement and reconciliation processes—the gaze aversion, head movements down, awkward smiles, and face touches—are a language of cooperation; they are the unspoken ethic of modesty. With these fleeting displays of deference, we preempt conflicts. We navigate conflict-laden situations (watch how regularly people display embarrassment when in close physical spaces, when negotiating the turn-taking of everyday conversations, or when sharing food). We express gratitude and appreciation. We quickly extricate embarrassed souls from their momentary predicaments with deflections of attention or f
ace-saving parodies of the mishap.
Embarrassment is the foundation of an ethic of modesty. The display of embarrassment converts events that go into the denominator of the jen ratio (social gaffes, offensive remarks, violations of privacy) and transforms them into opportunities for reconciliation and forgiveness (experiences in the numerator of the jen ratio). It is in these in-the-moment acts of deference that we honor others, and in so doing, become strong. It is often when tender and weak that we are alive, and full of jen. In the words of Lao Tzu:
When man is born, he is tender and weak
At death, he is stiff and hard
All things, the grass as well as trees, are tender and subtle while alive
When dead, they are withered and dried.
Therefore the stiff and the hard are companions of death
The tender and weak are the companions of life
If the tree is stiff, it will break
The strong and the great are inferior, while the tender and the weak are superior.
6
Smile
THE SETI PROJECT is the largest in the world devoted to communicating with intelligent life forms outside of those on Earth. A branch of SETI has brought together anthropologists, mathematicians, physicists, and media and communication experts to solve an intriguing problem: Which symbols should we send out into the infinite expanse of the universe to communicate the altruistic capacities of the human species? Assuming other intelligent life-forms emerged in similar carbon-based chemical processes as we did, how might we, given one shot, communicate our capacity for good to other intelligent minds? The yin-yang symbol? An image of a baby, with round eyes, small mouth, and minuscule mound of a chin? Perhaps, instead, we should rely on sound, given our powerful capacity to communicate vocally. How about the perfect laugh, a soothing sigh, a meditative oohmmmm, or coos between infant and parent?
Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life Page 10