In viewing photographs of the two types of smiles given to him by Duchenne de Boulogne, Darwin remarked that though people could sense the difference, he found it very difficult to consciously pinpoint what that difference was, remarking, “It has often struck me as a curious fact that so many shades of expression are instantly recognized without any conscious process of analysis on our part.”18 No one paid much attention to such issues until recently, but modern studies have shown that, as Darwin observed, even people untrained in smile analysis have a good enough gut feeling to distinguish real smiles from phony ones when they can observe the same individual creating both.19 Smiles we intuitively recognize as fake are one reason used-car salesmen, politicians, and others who smile when they don’t mean it are often described as looking sleazy. Actors in the Method dramatic tradition try to get around this by training themselves to actually feel the emotion they are supposed to manifest, and many successful politicians are said to be talented at conjuring up genuine feelings of friendliness and empathy when talking to a roomful of strangers.
Darwin realized that if our expressions evolved along with our species, then many of the ways we express the basic emotions—happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise—should be shared by humans from different cultures. And so in 1867 he arranged for a questionnaire to be circulated on five continents among indigenous people, some of whom had had little contact with Europeans.20 The survey asked questions like “Is astonishment expressed by the eyes and mouth being opened wide and by the eyebrows being raised?” On the basis of the answers he received, Darwin concluded that “the same state of mind is expressed throughout the world with remarkable uniformity.” Darwin’s study was biased in that his questionnaire asked such leading questions, and like so many other early contributions to psychology, his were overridden—in this case, by the idea that facial expressions are learned behavior, acquired during infancy, as a baby mimics its caretakers and others in the immediate environment. However, in recent years a substantial body of cross-cultural research has offered evidence that Darwin was right after all.21
In the first of a series of famous studies, the psychologist Paul Ekman showed photos of people’s expressions to subjects in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and Japan.22 Within a few years, he and a colleague had shown such pictures to people in twenty-one countries. Their findings were the same as Darwin’s, demonstrating that people across a diversity of cultures had a similar understanding of the emotional meaning of a range of facial expressions. Still, such studies alone don’t necessarily mean that those expressions are innate, or even truly universal. Adherents of the “learned expressions” theory argued that Ekman’s results conveyed no deeper truth than the fact that people in the societies studied had all watched Gilligan’s Island, or other movies and television shows. So Ekman traveled to New Guinea, where an isolated Neolithic culture had recently been discovered.23 The natives there had no written language and were still using stone implements. Very few had seen a photograph, much less film or television. Ekman recruited hundreds of these subjects, who had never been previously exposed to outside cultures, and, through a translator, presented them with photographs of American faces illustrating the basic emotions.
The primitive foragers proved to be as nimble as those in the twenty-one literate countries at recognizing happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise in the face of an emoting American. The scientists also reversed the research design. They photographed the New Guineans as they acted out how they would respond if they saw that their child had died, or found a dead pig that had been lying there for a long time, and so on. The expressions Ekman recorded were unequivocally recognizable.24
This universal capability to create and recognize facial expressions starts at or near birth. Young infants have been observed making nearly all the same facial muscle movements used by adults to signify emotion. Infants can also discriminate among the facial expressions of others and, like adults, modify their behavior based on what they see.25 It is doubtful that these are learned behaviors. In fact, congenitally blind young children, who have never seen a frown or a smile, express a range of spontaneous facial emotions that are almost identical to those of the sighted.26 Our catalog of facial expressions seems to be standard equipment—it comes with the basic model. And because it is a largely innate, unconscious part of our being, communicating our feelings comes naturally, while hiding them requires great effort.
IN HUMANS, BODY language and nonverbal communication are not limited to simple gestures and expressions. We have a highly complex system of nonverbal language, and we routinely participate in elaborate nonverbal exchanges, even when we are not consciously aware of doing so. For example, in the case of casual contact with the opposite sex, I’d have been willing to bet a year’s pass to a Manhattan cinema that if a male pollster type approached a guy’s date while they were standing in line to buy a ticket at said theater, few of the fellows approached would be so insecure that they’d consciously feel threatened by the pollster. And yet, consider this experiment, conducted over two mild autumn weekend evenings in an “upper-middle-class” neighborhood in Manhattan.27 The subjects approached were all couples, yes, waiting in line to buy tickets to a movie.
The experimenters worked in teams of two. One team member discreetly observed from a short distance while the other approached the female of the couple and asked if she would be willing to answer a few survey questions. Some of the women were asked neutral questions, such as “What is your favorite city and why?” Others were asked personal questions, such as “What is your most embarrassing childhood memory?” The researchers expected these more personal questions to be more threatening to the boyfriend, more invasive to his sense of intimate space. How did the boyfriends respond?
Unlike the male hamadryas baboon, who starts a fight when he sees another male sitting too close to a female in his group,28 the boyfriends didn’t do anything overtly aggressive; but they did display certain nonverbal cues. The scientists found that when the interviewer was nonthreatening—either a male who asked impersonal questions or a female—the man in the couple tended to just hang out. But when the interviewer was a male asking personal questions, the boyfriend would subtly inject himself into the powwow, flashing what are called “tie-signs,” nonverbal cues meant to convey a connection with the woman. These male smoke signals included orienting himself toward his partner and looking into her eyes as she interacted with the other man. It is doubtful that the men consciously felt the need to defend their relationship from the polite interviewer, but even though the tie-signs fell short of a baboonlike fist in the face, they were an indication of the men’s inner primate pushing its way to the fore.