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
Do facial movements broadcast emotions to others? If you think the answer is yes, think again. This question is under debate. Some experts point to hundreds of studies that appear to demonstrate that smiles, frowns, and so on are universal facial expressions of emotion. They also often cite Charles Darwin’s 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals to support the claim that universal expressions evolved by natural selection.
Other scientists point to a mountain of counter evidence showing that facial movements during emotions vary too widely to be universal beacons of emotional meaning. People may smile in hatred when plotting their enemy’s downfall and scowl in delight when they hear a bad pun. In Melanesian culture, a wide-eyed gasping face is a symbol of aggression, not fear. These experts say the alleged universal expressions just represent cultural stereotypes. To be clear, both sides in the debate acknowledge that facial movements vary for a given emotion; the disagreement is about whether there is enough uniformity to detect what someone is feeling.
This debate’s outcome has serious consequences. Today you can be turned down for a job because a so-called emotion-reading system applied artificial intelligence to evaluate your facial movements unfavourably during an interview. In a US court of law, a jury may sometimes hand down a harsher sentence if they think a defendant’s face showed no remorse. Children in preschools are taught to recognise smiles as happiness, scowls as anger and other expressive stereotypes from books, games and posters of disembodied faces. And for children on the autism spectrum, some of whom have difficulty perceiving emotion in others, these teachings do not translate to better communication.
So who is right? Darwin proposed in expression that certain facial movements were universal signs of emotion. Darwin discovered that emotions have innate, biologically based expressions that are made and recognised universally and shared with other animals. That story presents facial movements as a sort of signalling system in which you can look at a person’s face to detect their emotional state.
Or so it would seem. Evidence shows that Darwin was wrong. In real life, people express a given emotion with tremendous variability. In anger, for example, people in urban cultures scowl only about 35 per cent of the time, according to meta-analyses of studies. Scowls are also not specific to anger because people scowl for other reasons, such as when they are concentrating or when they have gas. The same tremendous variation occurs for every emotion studied.
Emotion AI systems, therefore, do not detect emotions. They detect physical signals not the psychological meaning of those signals. The conflation of movement and meaning is deeply embedded in Western culture and in science. There’s considerable evidence that facial movements are just one signal of many in a much larger array of contextual information that our brain takes in. Show people a grimacing face in isolation, and they may perceive pain or frustration. But show the identical face on a runner crossing the finish line of a race, and the same grimace conveys triumph. The face is often a weaker signal of a person’s internal state than other signals in the array.
For questions or suggestions, please send your comments.
Sherif Attar, an independent management consultant/trainer and organisation development authority, delivers seminars in the US, Europe, Middle East and the Far East.
Discussion about this post