As humans, we have this notion that people generally wear their feelings on their sleeve. This is the idea that we, the observer, can infer the feelings of other people through their mannerisms, attitude and actions. If someone is smiling, we tend to believe they are enjoying themselves. If someone furrows their brow, we assume they either do not understand something, or are thinking of something to say. Of course, people are much more complex than this, and even my examples may not be 100% true to you, or in your environment, but this does not keep us from using these “tells” as fact.
And that is the point of transparency and how it can lead us to arrive at the wrong conclusion, and worse, have some deep misunderstandings. The culprit of this miseducation of our understanding of other humans through their facial expressions is the media.
In the early days of film, when the medium was silent, actors, producers and directors had to figure out a way to convey their vision of the film without the benefit of dialog. Film had the potential of playing to audiences much larger than any other art form, yet in its infancy it could only do it through visuals.
How do you communicate happiness? Sadness? Those two may be easy, right? Happiness equates to a big laugh, smiles. Sadness; a frown, tears? Those were the decisions the early pioneers of this new medium had to make. Through no fault of their own, they had to invent facial expressions which, according to them, communicated certain feelings. Of course, they mostly got it right, otherwise silent films would have been a disaster. As such, these facial expressions have grown to be thought of as universal.
The fact is, they are not universal at all. In 2016, in a paper called “Reading emotions from faces in two indigenous societies“, the authors summarized that our ability to read people’s emotions has a lot to do with with whether or not we share similar cultures. From wide array of facial expressions that were presented to a control group of westerners, the control group was able to identify the emotion by looking at the facial expression. However, when these same facial expressions were presented to two indigenous groups of people, the accuracy fell dramatically. For facial expressions representing happiness, the indigenous groups were able to correctly identify it less than half of the time. For all other expressions, the identification average was even more dismal, ranging between 7% to 46%.
This means that if one of us showed up to dinner at one of these indigenous people’s home and expressed our delight, we would have a 50/50 chance of being misunderstood. And worse, if we expressed not liking something, they may very well think we loved it and give us more of it.
The cynic in us will probably say “well, at least I only deal with westerners“. But then we’d be missing the main point. While it is true that our expressions and their meaning diverge largely between cultures, this also tells us there is divergence within cultures. That our assumption that smiling people are happy can lead us to misunderstanding others.
We live in a world that moves fast. A world that requires quick answers to quick questions. Most of the time we get it right. When we don’t, it is important to wonder if that smiling man whom you thought was letting you cut in traffic and later began to honk at you, actually meant to let you through in the first place.
