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Reading Faces

Tom Strong, Princeton University

What can you tell about a person by their facial expressions? Can you tell when they are angry or sad? When they are being deceptive? Can you tell what their culture is like?

In a recent article in The New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell claims extraordinary powers of insight for the practice of face reading. The article profiles Paul Ekman, a psychologist who, in a lifetime of research, has devised a scientific method of reading faces. Dividing the face into forty-three “action units,” Ekman’s system precisely correlates emotional states with facial muscle movements. The Facial Action Coding System takes weeks to learn, but once mastered, enables its users to determine when someone is lying or when they have hostile intentions, among other things. Ekman’s system seems to provide scientific basis for and codification of gut instincts, the hunches that policeman and others use when apprising persons and situations.

Ekman became fascinated with the face and its expressive qualities partly through the work of his mentor, Silvan Tomkins. Tomkins was an analyst of emotion, and held that affect and expression were strongly linked. In an effort to test Tomkins's face-reading skills, Ekman, who had traveled the world over studying facial expressions, presented film footage from remotest New Guinea for Tomkins to assess.

What Tomkins saw has amazed Ekman ever since. Tomkins was able to determine from carefully-cropped footage of faces that the Fore people of New Guinea were “peaceful” and “gentle” and that the neighboring Kukukuku were “murderous” and “hostile.” Tomkins was even able to read from faces the presence of homosexual tendencies among the Kukukuku, who in fact practiced secret homosexual initiations.

For Ekman, this was proof that facial expressions could be read despite the particularities of distinctive cultures. The New Yorker article presents Tomkins’ divination as a moment of discovery, a revelation of truth.

For the anthropologist it is a provocation.

Gladwell’s article neglects to investigate the details of the cultures that Ekman and Tomkins thought was revealed through the facial expressions of people. Had Gladwell consulted an anthropologist, a different story might have emerged.

Since all of the peoples of the eastern highlands of New Guinea experienced endemic warfare prior to colonial “pacification,” the notion that the Fore were essentially “peaceful and gentle” vis-à-vis the supposedly bellicose Kukukuku is groundless. Indeed, at the time that the film footage viewed by Tomkins was shot, the Fore were undergoing an epidemic of “kuru,” a variant of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, which they attributed to the murderous actions of sorcerers lurking amongst themselves. “Kukukuku” is, in fact, not the proper name of a tribe at all, but a colonial-era appellation now regarded as derogatory by the Anga people to whom it refers.

But what about Tomkins’ ability to read homosexuality into the faces of Anga men? Some anthropologists claim that ritualized homosexuality may have been practiced among Fore themselves at points in the past. Neither a “violent” nature, nor “homosexual” tendencies, differentiates Fore from Anga. All of the peoples of the eastern highlands of New Guinea—where I conduct research–are “violent” or “gentle” depending on sociopolitical and historical circumstance.

Gladwell’s article, in uncritically replaying a story of a seemingly amazing scientific discovery, recreates images of the “primitive” that anthropologists have long sought to challenge. Fore and Anga appear remote and ahistorical, unchanging, undynamic. They are also internally homogenous, since one can read the culture of persons equally from each of their faces. If Ekman and Tomkins had conducted the same experiment with film footage of Italians or Swedes, and declared either group to be “violent” or “gentle,” would Gladwell have been so gullible?

Guessing when someone is lying is one thing, but divining the essence of an entire culture based on a few glimpses of film footage is a dubious scientific endeavor at best.

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