By Sherif Attar
In a world of ever-changing ambiguity and uncertainty, executives have to face two challenges: excellent performance and people development. Where many managers think those endeavours are “competing”, this author believes they are “completing”. GET DOWN TO BUSINESS argues.
AI industry is relying on a misunderstanding of Darwin’s ideas.
Adapted from Lisa Feldman Barrett
Darwin suggests that instances of a particular emotion, such as anger, share a distinct, immutable, physical cause or state-an essence-that makes the instances similar even if they have superficial differences. Scientists have proposed a variety of essences, some of which are easily seen, such as facial movements, and others, such as complex, intertwined patterns of heart rate, breathing and body temperature, that are observed only with specialised instruments. This belief in essences, called essentialism, is compellingly intuitive. It is virtually impossible to prove that an essence doesn’t exist.
A solution to this conundrum can be found in Darwin’s more famous book On the Origin of Species, written 13 years before Expression. Ironically, it is celebrated for helping biology “escape the paralysing grip of essentialism,” according to biologist Ernst Mayr. Before Origin was published, scholars believed that each biological species had an ideal form with defining properties that distinguished it from other species. When it came to emotions, however, Darwin fell prey to essentialism, ignoring his most important discovery.
Essentialism appears to lure designers of emotion AI systems to follow Darwin down this comfortable path, with its assumption that emotions evolved via natural selection to serve important functions. But if you actually read Expression, you’ll find that Darwin wrote that smiles, frowns, eye widening and other physical expressions were “purposeless”-vestigial movements that no longer serve a function. For Darwin, emotional expressions were compelling evidence that humans are animals and that we’ve evolved.
Expression has been cited incorrectly for more than 100 years. How did this happen? I discovered the answer lurking in the work of an early-20th-century psychologist, Floyd Allport. In his 1924 book Social Psychology, Allport made a sweeping inference from Darwin’s writing to say that expressions begin as vestigial in newborns but quickly assume useful social functions.
Allport’s idea, though incorrect, was attributed back to Darwin and eagerly adopted by like-minded scientists. Allport misdirected the Western understanding of emotions, not only in science but in law, medicine, the eyes of the public and now emotion AI systems.
Nevertheless, this scientific tale has a happy ending because there is a name for the kind of variation we observe in real-life instances of emotion. It’s the same variation that Darwin himself observed in animal species. In Origin, Darwin described an animal species as a collection of varied individuals with no biological essence at its core. This key observation became known more generally as population thinking, and it’s supported by the modern study of genetics.
Population thinking has been revolutionising biology for the past century, and it is now revolutionising the science of emotion. Like a species, a given emotion such as fear, grief or elation is a vast population of varied instances. People may indeed widen their eyes and gasp in fear, but they may also scowl in fear, cry in fear, laugh in the face of fear and even fall asleep in fear. Variation is the norm, and it is intimately linked to a person’s physiology and situation, just as variation in a species is linked to the environment its members live in.
An increasing number of emotion researchers are taking population thinking more seriously. It is time for emotion AI proponents and the companies that make and market these products to cut the hype and acknowledge that facial muscle movements do not map universally to specific emotions. The evidence is clear that the same emotion can accompany different facial movements. Variety, not uniformity, is the rule.
Darwin’s Expression is best viewed as a historical text, not a definitive scientific guide. That leads to a deeper lesson here: Science is not truth by authority. Science is the quantification of repeated observation in varied contexts. Even the most exceptional scientists can be wrong. Fortunately, mistakes are part of the scientific process. They are opportunities for discovery.
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Sherif Attar, an independent management consultant/trainer and organisation development authority, delivers seminars in the US, Europe, Middle East and the Far East.
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