Rachael Denhollander’s statement: “Rachael Denhollander delivers powerful final victim speech to Larry Nassar,” YouTube, January 24, 2018, youtube/watch?v=7CjVOLToRJk&t=616s.
“And unfortunately, I was right…deepest, darkest hole and hide”: “Survivor reported sexual assault in 1997, MSU did nothing,” YouTube, January 19, 2018, youtube/watch?v=OYJIx_3hbRA.
“This just goes to show…patients lie to get doctors in trouble”: Melissa Korn, “Larry Nassar’s Boss at Michigan State Said in 2016 That He Didn’t Believe Sex Abuse Claims,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2018, wsj/articles/deans-comments-shed-light-on-culture-at-michigan-state-during-nassars-tenure-1521453600.
Quotes from Believed podcast: Kate Wells and Lindsey Smith, “The Parents,” Believed, NPR/Michigan Radio, Podcast audio, November 26, 2018, npr/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=669669746.
“He does that to me all the time!”: Kerry Howley, “Everyone Believed Larry Nassar,” New York Magazine/The Cut, November 19, 2018, thecut/2018/11/how-did-larry-nassar-deceive-so-many-for-so-long.html.
“I had to make an extremely hard choice…your dark, broken soul”: “Lifelong friend, longtime defender speaks against Larry Nassar,” YouTube, January 19, 2018, youtube/watch?v=H8Aa2MQORd4.
“I asked the specific question…as far away from him as possible”: Allan Myers interview with Curtis Everhart (Criminal Defense Investigator), November 9, 2011.
The only time Myers ever appeared…he didn’t recall thirty-four times: Commonwealth v. Gerald A. Sandusky (Appeal), November 4, 2016, p. 10.
“Are you sure…like that before” and “Every one of you…would back them up”: Jeffrey Toobin, “Former Penn State President Graham Spanier Speaks,” The New Yorker, August 21, 2012, newyorker/news/news-desk/former-penn-state-president-graham-spanier-speaks.
Chapter Six: The Friends Fallacy
Dialogue is from Friends, “The One with the Girl Who Hits Joey” (episode 15, season 5), directed by Kevin Bright, NBC, 1998.
It was developed by legendary psychologist (in footnote): Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Facial Action Coding System, parts 1 and 2 (San Francisco: Human Interaction Laboratory, Dept. of Psychiatry, University of California, 1978).
In my second book, Blink (Little, Brown and Company, 2005), I devoted a large chunk of Chapter Six, “Seven Seconds in the Bronx: The Delicate Art of Mind Reading,” to a discussion of the work of Paul Ekman, one of the most important psychologists of the last century. He is the coinventor of FACS, which I asked Jennifer Fugate to use to analyze that episode of Friends. FACS has become the gold standard for understanding and cataloging how human emotion is displayed on the face. Ekman’s principal scientific contribution was to demonstrate the idea of “leakage”—that the emotions we feel are often, involuntarily, displayed on our faces in some distinctive configuration of facial muscles. And if you are trained in the “language” of the face and have the opportunity to break down videotape of someone’s expressions millisecond by millisecond, you can identify those configurations.
Here is what I wrote on p. 210 of Blink: “Whenever we experience a basic emotion, that emotion is automatically expressed by the muscles of the face. That response may linger on the face for just a fraction of a second or be detectable only if electrical sensors are attached to the face. But it’s always there.”
Ekman was making two bold claims. First, that emotion is necessarily expressed on the face—that if you feel it, you’ll show it. And second, that these kinds of emotional expressions are universal—that everyone, everywhere, uses their face to display their feelings in the same way.
These propositions had always left some psychologists uneasy. But since Blink was written, there has been growing reaction in the psychology community against Ekman’s position.
For example, why did Ekman believe that emotions were universal? In the 1960s, he and two colleagues traveled to Papua New Guinea, armed with a stack of thirty photographs. The pictures were headshots of Westerners making facial expressions corresponding to the basic emotions: anger, sadness, contempt, disgust, surprise, happiness, and fear.
The New Guinea tribe that Ekman’s group visited was called the Fore. As recently as a dozen years earlier, they had still been effectively living in the Stone Age, completely cut off from the rest of the world. Ekman’s idea was that if the Fore could identify anger or surprise in the photographed faces as readily as someone in New York City or London can, emotions must be universal. Sure enough, they could.
“Our findings support Darwin’s suggestion that facial expressions of emotion are similar among humans, regardless of culture, because of their evolutionary origin,” Ekman and his colleagues wrote in a paper published in Science, one of the most prestigious academic journals. (See P. Ekman et al., “Pan-Cultural Elements in Facial Display of Emotions,” Science 164 [1969]: 86–88.)
This idea—that there is a universal set of human emotional reactions—is the principle that lies behind an entire category of tools that we use to understand strangers. It’s why we have lie detectors. It’s why lovestruck couples stare deeply into