were much more heavily freighted with significance.
If you staged a screening of that Friends episode for the Trobriand Islanders, they would see Ross confronting Chandler and think Chandler was angry and Ross was scared. They would get the scene completely wrong. And if you threw a Friends premiere in ancient Rome for Cicero and the emperor and a bunch of their friends, they would look at the extravagant grimaces and contortions on the faces of the actors and think: What on earth?
5.
OK. So what about within a culture? If we limit ourselves to the developed world—and forget about outliers and ancient Rome—do the rules of transparency now work? No, they don’t.
Imagine the following scenario. You’re led down a long, narrow hallway into a dark room. There you sit and listen to a recording of a Franz Kafka short story, followed by a memory test on what you’ve just heard. You finish the test and step back into the corridor. But while you were listening to Kafka, a team has been hard at work. The corridor was actually made of temporary partitions. Now they’ve been moved to create a wide-open space. The room has bright-green walls. A single light bulb hangs from the ceiling, illuminating a bright red chair. And sitting in the chair is your best friend, looking solemn. You come out, thinking you’re going to be heading down the same narrow hallway, and BOOM—a room where a room isn’t supposed to be. And your friend, staring at you like a character in a horror film.
Would you be surprised? Of course you would. And what would your face look like? Well, you wouldn’t look the same as a Trobriand Islander would in that situation, nor a citizen of ancient Rome. But within our culture, in this time and place, what surprise looks like is well established. There’s a perfect example of it in that same Friends episode. Ross’s roommate, Joey, rushes into Monica’s apartment and discovers two of his best friends trying to kill each other, and his face tells you everything you need to know: AU 1 + 2 (eyebrows shooting up) plus AU 5 (eyes going wide) plus AU 25 + 26, which is your jaw dropping. You’d make the Joey face, right? Wrong.
Two German psychologists, Achim Schützwohl and Rainer Reisenzein, created this exact scenario and ran sixty people through it. On a scale of one to ten, those sixty rated their feelings of surprise, when they opened the door after their session with Kafka, at 8.14. They were stunned! And when asked, almost all of them were convinced that surprise was written all over their faces. But it wasn’t. Schützwohl and Reisenzein had a video camera in the corner, and they used it to code everyone’s expressions the same way Fugate had coded the Friends episode. In only 5 percent of the cases did they find wide eyes, shooting eyebrows, and dropped jaws. In 17 percent of the cases they found two of those expressions. In the rest they found some combination of nothing, a little something, and things—such as knitted eyebrows—that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with surprise at all.3
“The participants in all conditions grossly overestimated their surprise expressivity,” Schützwohl wrote. Why? They “inferred their likely facial expressions to the surprising event from…folk-psychological beliefs about emotion-face associations.” Folk psychology is the kind of crude psychology we glean from cultural sources such as sitcoms. But that is not the way things happen in real life. Transparency is a myth—an idea we’ve picked up from watching too much television and reading too many novels where the hero’s “jaw dropped with astonishment” or “eyes went wide with surprise.” Schützwohl went on: “The participants apparently reasoned that, since they felt surprised, and since surprise is associated with a characteristic facial display, they must have shown this display. In most cases, this inference was erroneous.”
I don’t think that this mistake—expecting what is happening on the outside to perfectly match what is going on inside—matters with our friends. Part of what it means to get to know someone is to come to understand how idiosyncratic their emotional expressions can be. My father was once in the shower in a vacation cottage that my parents had rented when he heard my mother scream. He came running to find a large young man with a knife to my mother’s throat. What did he do? Keep in mind that this is a seventy-year-old man, naked and dripping wet. He pointed at the assailant and said in