Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life

by Dacher Keltner

  For Darwin, the frame-by-frame world revealed how human facial expression traces back to the expressions of our primate relatives, and the selection pressures that have produced the human emotional repertoire. It is this frame-by-frame world to which Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen devoted seven years, developing the Facial Action Coding System.

  It was this frame-by-frame world that I entered into in 1990 as a post-doc in Paul Ekman’s Human Interaction Laboratory. The lab is tucked away in a fog-bound, beige, two-story Victorian amid the Mies van der Rohe-style steel-and-glass UC San Francisco campus. My first task, of Talmudic proportions, was to master the Facial Action Coding System, which, as mentioned earlier, takes 100 hours of monastic, vision-blurring study. There is the manual itself, seventy dense pages, in which all visible facial actions are translated to specific action units, or AUs, and combinations of AUs. There is the instructional videotape, in which you watch Ekman move each individual facial muscle and then see important combinations, demonstrating the grammar of facial expression, the periodic chart—the skeptical, bemused, outer eyebrow raise (AU2), the delicate drawing together of the lips (AU8), the tragic raising of the inner eyebrow (AU1), the sulky lip curl (AU22), the hackle-raising tightening of the lower eyelid (AU7).

  As I walked the streets from my apartment in San Francisco to the Human Interaction Laboratory, a frame-by-frame world exploded with AU12s (smiles), AU4s (frowns), AU5s (glares), AU9s (nose wrinkles), and AU29s (tongue protrusions). I began to see still, frozen vestiges of our evolutionary past in the crowded, unfolding world: flirtations between two teens waiting for a tram; festering anger between husband and wife stewing at a table in a café radiant warmth in the shared gaze of a nine-month-old and her mother, lying on a picnic blanket. In these instances I began to see the products of millions of years of evolution, the traces of positive emotions that bind humans to one another.

  Once, I was lacing up my hightops for a game of pickup basketball near some creaky, rusty swings. A tense mother was pushing her eight-year-old daughter on a swing. As the young girl swung by, her face was frozen in the tightened, lifted eyebrows, the remote eyes, and taut, elongated mouth that telegraphed chronic anxiety. As she returned to my field of vision with each backward swing, her face remained frozen in this expression, one faintly mirrored on her mother’s face. In this thin slice of time, the lifetime of anxiety she faced was evident. Inspired by my in-lab and out-of-lab observations, I began to see the origins of the evolution of our ethical sense in brief displays of embarrassment.

  THIN SLICES OF MORTIFICATION

  My first project with Ekman, a rite of passage, really, was to code the facial actions of people being startled. The startle is a lightning-fast response that short-circuits whatever the individual is immersed in—reading a newspaper, snacking on a bagel, daydreaming of warm sand and a novel. That is the orienting function of the startle: it resets the individual’s mind and physiology to attend to the source of the loud noise that has suddenly entered the individual’s phenomenal field.

  The startle response involves seven actions: a blink, cheek tighten, furrowed brow, lip stretch, neck tighten, and shoulder and head flinch, which blaze by in a 250-millisecond blur. Coding them is a form of torture, like watching a sky for shooting stars, knowing they’re going to appear, and being asked to pinpoint the exact instant and place where they appeared and when and where they gracefully dissipated. Why was I devoting precious publish-or-perish time to coding the startle response? Wasn’t there bigger game for me to set my sights on?

  As it turns out, the magnitude of the 250-millisecond startle response is a telling indicator of a person’s temperament, and in particular of the extent to which the person is anxious, reactive, and vigilant to threat and danger. People with intense startle responses, typically measured in terms of the intensity of their eye blink, experience more anxiety and dread. They are more tense and neurotic. They are more pessimistic about their prospects. The startle response is a good bet to capture a veteran’s degree of posttraumatic stress disorder. If you’re worried about moving in with someone who might be a bit too neurotic for your tastes (and this could be justified; neurotic individuals make for more difficult marriages), consider startling him and gathering a bit of data. Sneak up on your beloved as he is settling into a glass of wine, and drop a heavy book on the counter next to him. If he shrieks, with arms flailing and wine glass flying, you have just witnessed a few telling seconds of his behavior that speak volumes to how he will handle the daily stresses and tribulations of life.

  The participants I was coding—UC Berkeley undergraduates—sat alone in a room staring at a monitor. The experimenter asked the participant to relax and wait for the next task. The participant appeared to lapse into a dissociative state, drifting into thoughts about what the Oedipal complex really means, what the schizophrenic poet on the street corner was yelling about, or whether the day’s hot temperature is another sign of global warming. And then—BAM!—an unexpected 120-decibel blast of white noise, as piercing as a pistol shot. There indeed was the startle response in all of its technicolor glory. People’s faces clenched as they flinched uncontrollably, some almost lurching out of their chairs.

  And then I noticed something unexpected. In the first frame after the startle response, people look purified, cleansed, as if their body and mind had been shut down for a second and then turned on—the orienting function of the startle. And then in the next frame their gaze shifted to the side. A knowing, abashed look washed over their faces. People looked as if they had been goosed, or whispered to of something lewd. And then a flicker of a nonverbal display that Darwin had actually missed. Participants averted their gaze downwards, they turned their head and body away, they showed an awkward, self-conscious smile. Some blushed. Some touched their cheeks or noses with a finger or two.

  Hastily I took videoclips of six of these participants to Ekman in his office downstairs. As we reviewed these two-or 3-second snippets, Ekman shook his head, first side to side, and then up and down in brief staccato bursts, smiling. He had seen these expressions in the Foré of New Guinea. He knew the contours of an emotional signal whose evolutionary story one could tell. He turned to me with a gleam in his eye. There was a signal of emotion there, one that the field had ignored.

  CHARTING CRIMSON FACES

  My first step was to embarrass people, a task that has given license to a more mischievous side of researchers’ imaginations. To produce embarrassment in a laboratory, researchers have had college students suck on pacifiers in front of friends. Students have modeled bathing suits for an experimenter, taking notes, clipboard in hand. Young children have been overpraised by adults avidly snapping photographs of the child (prior to eighteen months, children absorb this flood of attention with the aplomb that the removal of a bib might prompt; after eighteen months of age, they show embarrassment). In perhaps the most mortifying experiment, participants had to sing Morris Albert’s song “Feelings” using dramatic hand gestures. At a later date, they returned to the lab to watch a film clip with other students, which turned out to be of their performance of that cloying song.

  Before I began my study of embarrassment, Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania recommended two new paradigms, which I never had the temerity to employ. In a first, participants would ride alone in an elevator. Just prior to a group of people entering into the elevator at the next stop, I would surreptitiously plant the smell of a fart, and watch the participant squirm with embarrassment as new individuals entered with eyebrows raised in disbelief. In a second, I would give the participant a handkerchief filled with gobs of mucous. Then another individual, planted by me in the experiment, would ask the participant for the use of the handkerchief.

  As appealing as these methods were to my more theatrical inclinations, my production of embarrassment needed to be constrained in certain ways. I had to choose a task in which participants’ heads were relatively stationary so that I could code their facial actions in frame-
by-frame analysis (head and body movements can reduce the visible traces of facial muscle actions to impressionistic blurs). I had to ensure that participants did not move their facial muscles after the embarrassing episode, so I could isolate the actions only accompanying embarrassment. In light of these constraints, I had individuals follow muscle-by-muscle instructions to achieve a difficult facial expression, guided by a martinet of an experimenter, all the while being videotaped. The instructions were as follows (try it if no one is looking):

  Raise your eyebrows

  Close one eye

  Pucker your lips

  Puff out your cheeks

  The experimenter quickly noted, with drill sergeant precision, participants’ deviations from the instructions (“keep your eyebrows raised” “your eyes are fluttering, please just keep one eye closed” “now close your mouth, and don’t press your lips together, pucker them” “remember to puff out your cheeks, and don’t stick out your tongue”). Typically, after a valiant, thirty-second struggle, participants achieved the expression and then were asked to hold it for ten seconds. As participants’ facial muscles quivered and they tried to hold their smiles at bay, they showed visible signs, a furtive glance askance, of imagining what their appearance was, permanently recorded on videotape: They looked like Popeye, drunk on ale, puckering up for a smooch from Olive Oyl, sure to be rebuffed. They were part of some weird joke or an act of absurdist theater. After ten seconds of this pose, participants were asked to rest. It was in the milliseconds after resting that I saw my quarry: the embarrassment display.

  With these videos in hand, I spent much of a summer in the coding room of Ekman’s lab, with its cream-colored walls and drawers bursting with electrical plugs, wires, and videotapes. Each fifteen-second snippet of behavior required about half an hour to code, as I charted each twenty-millisecond shift in gaze and discerned the specific muscle actions that define the awkward, embarrassed smile. At the time, most scientists assumed that the display of embarrassment was a jumble of confused actions. In real time my participants did appear rather shaken, uncertain, and disorganized.

  Yet with careful frame-by-frame analysis a different picture emerged, and one in line with Darwin-inspired analyses of emotional displays as involuntary, truthful signs of our commitments to particular courses of actions. Our facial expression of anger, for example, signals to others likely aggressive actions, and prompts actions in others that prevent costly aggressive encounters. Within this school of thought, emotional displays are highly coordinated, stereotyped patterns of behavior, honed by thousands of generations of evolution and the beneficial effects displays have on social interactions. Evolved displays unfold briefly, typically between two and three seconds. The brevity of emotional displays is, in part, due to limits on the time that certain facial muscles can fire. Emotional displays are brief, as well, because of the pressing needs facial expressions are attuned to—the approaching predator, the child catapulting toward danger, the flickering signs of interest shown by a potential mate amid many suitors. Involuntary displays of emotion have different temporal dynamics than nonemotional displays: They are gradual in their onset and offset. More voluntary displays, in contrast, like polite smiles, pouts, dramatic glares, or provocative puckers, can come on the face in milliseconds, and remain on the face for minutes, hours, days, or, for some regrettable souls, a lifetime.

  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 a
nd 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.