What I charted in the elements of the embarrassment display was a fleeting but highly coordinated two-to three-second signal. First the participant’s eyes shot down within .75 seconds after finishing the pose of the awkward face. Then the individual turned his head to the side, typically leftward, and down within the next .5 seconds, exposing the neck. Contained within this head motion down and to the left was a smile, which typically lasted about two seconds. At the onset and offset of this smile, like bookends, were other facial actions in the mouth, smile controls: lip sucks, lip presses, lip puckers. And while the person’s head was down and to the left a few curious actions: the person looked up two to three times with furtive glances, and the person often touched his or her face. This three-second snippet of behavior was not some bedlam of confused actions; it had the timing, patterning, and contour of an evolved signal, coordinated, brief, and smooth in its onset and offset.
BARED-TEETH GRINS AND NODDING GULLS
To understand the deeper meaning of facial displays, like smiles, sneers, tongue flicks, or eyebrow flashes, researchers can do what Darwin had pioneered: turn to the displays of other species. By looking to other animals we discern the deeper forces that have produced many of the displays that we observe today. We learn about the contexts in which displays emerged—for example, when sharing food, fighting a rival, engaging in rough-and-tumble play, or protecting vulnerable offspring. We learn how displays are really the tip of the iceberg of more complex behavioral systems, such as eating, breastfeeding, attack, or defense.
Consider the kiss or, in Facial Action Coding System terms, the simple lip pucker and lip funnel (AUs 18 and 22), and, in more lascivious moments, the tongue protrusion (AU29). It is well known that people kiss differently in different cultures. In some cultures, kissing in public is rare or nonexistent, as with certain Amazonian tribes or the people of Somalia. There are different kisses for friends, political officials, children, and romantic partners. A visit to kissingsite.com will tell you there are thirteen kinds of romantic kisses, from the suck on the chin to quietly sharing breath. And there are, of course, individual extremes: One Italian couple kissed continuously for 31 hours, 18 minutes, and 33 seconds. In 1991 Alfred Wolfram kissed 8,001 people in eight hours at a Renaissance fair in Minnesota.
This sublime variety might seduce you into thinking that the kiss is a cultural artifact, like the peace sign, BlackBerry, fork, or necktie: Some cultures have it and others do not, and members of different cultures vary widely in their uses of the artifact. In fact, certain anthropologists have made such an argument about the kiss. Based on the absence of portrayals of kisses in cave paintings, they have argued that humans invented the kiss around 1500 BC, and that it spread from India westward. It was widely popularized by the Romans, who integrating kissing into numerous public rituals, such as kissing the ring of the emperor or other sacred objects.
This argument ignores what we learn by cross-species comparisons of the kiss. Our primate predecessors premasticate food to make it more digestible for the young, and deliver this softened caloric mass to the young with a kiss. The same has been documented by Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt of preindustrial human cultures. Parents will chew up food and pass it on to their young offspring, mouth to mouth. Food sharing, then, is the original evolutionary context of the kiss. Primates, in their cooperative ways, have extended this rewarding display to acts of affiliation: They rely on lip smacks and pouts as signals to prompt others to come closer. The human kiss has its roots in the food sharing of our close primate relatives.
What evolutionary forces gave rise to gaze aversion, head turns and face touches, and that coy smile of embarrassment? I found answers from studies of appeasement and reconciliation processes in nonhuman primates. Frans de Waal has devoted thousands of hours to the study of what different primates—macaques, chimpanzees, and bonobos—do following aggressive encounters. Prior to this work, the unquestioned assumption was captured in the dispersal hypothesis: Following an aggressive encounter, combatants would move away from each other as far as possible, a safe, self-preserving, and adaptive thing to do.
Yet de Waal observed the opposite pattern of behavior. Instead of moving away from one another after conflict, the primates he was observing were more likely to spend time in the presence of one another. This would make sense for species that are so dependent upon one another to accomplish the basic tasks of survival and reproduction. With more careful observations, de Waal discovered how primates reconcile during conflict, and reestablish cooperative relations. In the midst of conflict or aggression, the subordinate or defeated animal first approaches and engages in submissive behaviors, such as bared-teeth displays, head bowing and bobbing, and grunts. These actions quickly prompt affiliative grooming, physical contact, and mutual embraces, reconciling the warring parties. In nonhuman primates, these reconciliation processes transform life-threatening conflicts into affectionate, backslapping embraces within seconds.
When I reviewed forty studies of appeasement and reconciliation processes across species, from blue-footed boobies to 4,500-pound elephant seals, the evolutionary origins of embarrassment became apparent: It is a display that reconciles, that brings people together in contexts of distance and likely aggression.
Let’s take it behavior by behavior, in the Darwinian fashion. Gaze aversion is a cut-off behavior. Extended eye contact signals continue what you’re doing; gaze aversion acts like a red light, terminating what has been happening. Our embarrassed participants, by quickly averting their gaze, were exiting the previous situation. They were signaling an end to the situation for obvious reasons: embarrassment follows actions—including social gaffes, identity confusion (forgetting someone’s name), privacy violations (walking in on someone in a bathroom stall), and the loss of body control (the prosaic fart or stumble)—that sully our reputations and jeopardize our social standing.
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.