Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Paul Ekman put Darwin’s universality thesis to a simple empirical test. The results of this study provoke controversy, ad hominem critique, and sneers at happy-hour conversations at scientific conferences to this day. First, Ekman and his colleague Wallace Friesen took photos of collaborators in Ekman’s lab and actors from the local community, posing the facial muscle configurations of six different emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness (a broad smile involving the twinkle of the eyes), sadness, and surprise—according to Darwin’s detailed descriptions. In a first wave of studies, Ekman and Friesen then asked individuals from Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and the United States to choose the word, from six (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise), that best matched the emotion shown in each photo.

The data gathered in this study would pit two radically different conceptions of emotion against one another (see table below).

A SUMMARY OF CONSTRUCTIVIST AND EVOLUTIONARY APPROACHES TO EMOTIONS

       

QUESTION        

CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH        

EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH        

What is an emotion?        

Language, beliefs, concepts        

Physiological processes in the body        

Are emotions universal?        

No        

Yes        

What are the origins of emotions?        

Values, institutions, social practices        

Natural selection

An evolutionary approach took shape as Ekman started to publish the findings from this first study. The prevailing view of the day—the social constructivist view—emerged out of the influential writings of anthropologists, such as Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. These authors had pioneered thinking about cultural relativism, and the endless variability and moral equivalences of different cultures. Within this tradition, emotions are thought of as social constructions, put together in culturally specific ways according to historically situated values, institutions, practices, and rituals. Emotions at their core are concepts, words, and ideas that shape, and are shaped by, discourse practices such as storytelling, poetry, public shaming, or gossip. What about the expression of emotion across cultures—the question that put Ekman on that wobbly plane to New Guinea? Here the constructivist prediction is that the expression of emotion is analogous in origin, form, and predicted cultural variability to spoken language. Cultures select particular phonemes from the dozens of phonemes the human vocal apparatus can produce to express different concepts in words. The same could be true of emotional expression. Members of cultures, the reasoning held, select different muscle movements to express different emotions. The end result is a prediction of endless cultural variability in the meaning of emotional expression.

The observations, mostly anecdotal, in support of this constructivist view were persuasive. The Inuit were never observed to express anger, even in the most frustrating and unjust circumstances, as when their precious canoes were badly damaged by careless mainland tourists. Upon receiving the news of their husbands dying—nobly—in battle, the wives of seventeenth-century Japanese samurai were observed to smile with pride and love.

In Ekman’s first study, individuals from highly modernized cultures demonstrated considerable agreement in their interpretations of the six kinds of facial expressions. The problem, though—quite obvious in the clarity and comfort of hindsight—is that individuals from all of these cultures had been extensively exposed to Western media. Perhaps in those encounters with Hollywood emotion—John Wayne and Doris Day movies, Howdy Doody and Get Smart reruns—Ekman’s participants in different cultures had learned how to interpret the facial expressions that he had presented.

As a result, Ekman voyaged to Papua New Guinea. There he lived for several months with a hill tribe from the Foré (pronounced foray) language group that lived in hunter-gatherer conditions. After receiving the blessings of a witch doctor, Ekman recruited nearly 5 percent of the tribe to participate in his study. The Foré who participated in Ekman’s study had seen no movies or magazines, they did not speak English or pidgin, they had not lived in Western settlements, and they had not worked for Westerners. Given this history, it would be hard to argue how Western concepts could have penetrated the Foré mind to influence how they would interpret the photos Ekman was to present to them.