Haunted by the death of his mother, Paul Ekman was driven to become the world’s premier expert on emotions
Tom Ekman
Paul Ekman woke up in a grass hut in New Guinea to the wet, sticky sensation of human brain fragments splashing on his face.
A grinning tribal was cutting open the skull of a dead man on a table above him. The year was 1967, and Ekman was enduring the unique pleasure of being hazed by a member of the last Stone Age tribe then on the planet.
Ekman is the inspiration for the TV series, “Lie to Me,” in which Tim Roth plays a slightly deranged version of the scientist. But then, that’s showbiz.
Ekman himself is a little more staid. He is a confidant of the Dalai Lama, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2009. One of the most famous psychologists alive today, the Review of General Psychology, a respected journal, put him in the 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th century.
And yet, Ekman is self-deprecating – and honest – to a fault.
“I’ve always been amazed at how many pivotal moments in my career were the result of chance events,” he says.
In a recent chat with Truly Curious, conducted by his stepson Tom Ekman, he shared some of the twists and turns in his career.
A Walk in the Past
It was in 1967 that Ekman first hiked into the mountains of New Guinea to study the Fore tribe, the last Paleolithic culture on the planet. These preliterate people had never seen a bar of soap, a T-shirt – or a white man. They only had a very vague sense of the world beyond their villages in the highlands of Papua. Observing them, Ekman had the rare opportunity to study humans not influenced by the modern world.
Ekman’s area of research was human expressions. He wanted to know whether they were culture-specific or universal. Living with the tribals and studying their expressions, Ekman demonstrated that basic emotions – such as sadness, happiness and fear – are universal.
A Scientist with Too Much Funding?
Ekman says his seminal research in New Guinea was a “total fluke.”
As he tells the story, “The head of behavioral sciences at a branch of the Department of Defense [DOD] told me that he was married to a woman from Thailand, and thought some of their marital problems were due to cross-cultural nonverbal misunderstandings. He asked me if I would like to figure out what is the same, and what is different across cultures in nonverbal behavior? It had to be basic research – with no military application. I would have to do all of the out-of-the-country research myself – no subcontracting it to others. He could fund whatever it would cost!”
It turned out that the DOD was under investigation for using experiments as a cover to overthrow Salvador Allende, then the president of Chile. The DOD needed to fund a legitimate scientific study overseas as soon as possible, and so quickly awarded Ekman the equivalent of $9 million to pursue a possible connection between culture and nonverbal behavior.
“They gave me so much money, I had to give a bunch of it back at the end!” Ekman says with a laugh.
Another World
After surviving a crash landing in a bush plane (“I thought I would die before even starting my research”), Ekman hiked with his federally funded gear up into the highlands. His primary tools were several still and video cameras… and a colossal amount of film.
In a typical experiment, Ekman would ask a villager to imagine a situation.
For example: “You are walking down a trail and see a dead pig rotting in the sun. The smell is disgusting. How does this make you feel?”
Ekman posed the same scenarios to populations in Japan and the U.S. He then compared the filmed responses of the Westerners, whose environment is saturated with media depictions of facial expressions, with those of the completely isolated Fore tribe, whose members had never even seen a mirror. Ekman showed all his test subjects came up with similar facial changes in the face of similar stimuli, regardless of culture, thus establishing the universality of human expressions.
Word got around. On a 1990s TV episode of “Hollywood Squares,” Pamela Anderson was asked the question: “Dr. Paul Ekman of the University of San Francisco has cataloged seven universal facial expressions. What are they? Alas, Anderson didn’t know the answer: happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, contempt, and surprise.
The Fool on the Hill
The New Guinea natives were hospitable – giving Ekman a hut, and even generously offering him the option of a wife.
But they also subjected him to tests of machismo. Ekman recalls having to follow villagers across a felled log over a deep chasm: “One slip, and you’d be dead.” In another incident, villagers led him through a type of tall grass with leaves with blades as sharp as knives. “They knew how to travel though the grass safely. But I got sliced up from head to toe.”
At the end of each day, Ekman would retire to his typewriter to log the day’s events. A crowd of tribespeople would sit outside his hut.
“At first, I couldn’t figure out why they were there,” recalls Dr. Ekman. “Turns out, they loved the carriage return bell! They thought that the reason I kept tapping the keys was to make the bell ring!”
One of the more common pastimes in the village was adultery.
“They were always trying to get someone to sneak behind the bushes,” Ekman says. The Fore tribespeople wore little covering. The women wore grass skirts, while the men wore penis gourds – a conical sheath into which they would nest their genitals.
“I continued to wear clothes,” Ekman says with a chuckle. “I always thought that my major contribution to science was to no longer find bare-breasted women appealing. That was a big sacrifice or science.”
The hardest part for the then 33-year-old, single scientist was the isolation. He was cut off from news of the outside world for months.
“In the evening, I would walk up a hill above the village,” he say. “I had a copy of the just-released Beatles album, ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’ and when I heard ‘The Fool on the Hill,’ I thought the song was talking about me.”
Margaret Mead Attacks
When he finally put out his conclusions, famed anthropologist Margaret Mead was scathingly derisive in a response titled “The Appalling State of the Human Sciences.”
Mead implied that Ekman’s focus on the biological bases for human behavior could be used to support fascism.
“Mead thought that the failure to argue for cultural differences would be implicitly supporting the view of a super-race,” Ekman said.
In the mid-20th century, the eugenics movement and the Holocaust had left some dark associations around the study of biology and human behavior. Anthropologists like Mead and fellow cultural relativists had broken down some of the Euro-centrism that dominated the social sciences by focusing on the vast range of human potential in different cultures around the world. “Mead felt there was a larger issue at stake,” Ekman says. “But I was just trying to focus on what there was evidence for.”
In her article, Mead also attacked Ekman’s methodology of recording test subjects in cued situation (such as the smelly pig scenario), rather than in spontaneous interaction. Mead based her findings on observation, while Ekman based his research on experimentation.
Ekman explains: “The traditions between psychology and anthropology as to what constitutes acceptable findings is completely different. In psychology, you need two different observers who come to the same conclusion. In anthropology, that never happens. It’s one author writing about their observations.”
In fact, Ekman collected a massive amount of pure anthropological data. During the six months he lived in the Fore village, he frequently filmed the tribe going about their daily business, in completely candid circumstances. These hundreds of rolls of 35mm film are now at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.
“Mead never lived among the cultures she studied,” Ekman points out .
Effects of TV Violence on Children
Ekman planned a second major experiment to study a remote population. He wanted to study the effects of TV violence on children by finding remote populations in South Africa and Micronesia that did not yet have access to television.
For years, Ekman struggled for clearance from the South African government, who ultimately blocked him from conducting the study in their country. He traveled to Micronesia and found a suitable study population, but was held up by rival colleagues on an ethics commission who – along with activist and politician Ralph Nader – stalled his attempts to gain approval.
After three years, Ekman finally obtained the approvals and funding to study the effects of TV violence on a population in Micronesia. But it was too late: by the time he arrived, the TV had just been introduced to these remote islands. “I gave up. No more research on TV violence.”
Making Faces
In the late 1960s, Ekman was asked a single question that would lead him on his journey to become the world’s to expert on lying.
The question came from an intern at the UCSF mental hospital who worked with patients admitted for a suicide attempt. Some of these patients would request a weekend pass from the hospital, only to re-attempt suicide right away. The intern asked Ekman if there was any way to use nonverbal cues to determine if one of their patients was trying to deceive them.
According to Ekman, “It raised a fascinating, important set of questions: How convincingly can anyone fabricate emotions they don’t feel? And how well can anyone completely hide very strong emotional feelings? I didn’t know the answers, but I did know that micro expressions and gestural slips would be relevant. It took 25 years to get definitive evidence of how nonverbal behavior can betray very high stake lies. Like in the cross-cultural study in New Guinea, the question wasn’t mine. It was given to me. I recognized how important it was, and I ran with it, as hard as I could.”
The Human Interaction Laboratory
For three decades starting in the 1960s, Ekman maintained a fully-staffed experimental laboratory where he was able to consistently gather and analyze data. The Human Interaction Laboratory was in a two-level house in a residential neighborhood in San Francisco. The front door had a blinking red bulb with a hand-made sign reading, “QUIET: Experiment in Progress.”
Ekman came up with technology for his experiments that had yet to be invented. As he developed his methodology for studying the face in the 1960s, he recalls:
“I needed to compare behaviors that occurred at different times during a clinical interview. So I needed to do high-speed searches of video recordings and automatically edit onto new videos excerpts that I wanted to visually compare them with. I got a grant to interface, for the first time, computers with video recordings, allowing me to hire Tom Tausig, an engineer. The computer, which was taller than me, had 8K of memory and cost $110,000. We had to communicate with the computer by teletype. After 18 months we had the first interface between a computer and video recordings, allowing high-speed search and edits.”
During the 1970s, Ekman developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which breaks down facial expressions into their constituent muscle groups. Still widely used today, FACS allowed Ekman and colleagues to catalog the full range of human facial expressions through a comprehensive numbering system. FACS laid the groundwork for Ekman’s pioneering work in the use of micro expressions to detect deceit.
To Catch a Liar
By the 1980s, Ekman’s work at the Human Interaction Laboratory was primarily dedicated to research on lying. Ekman established the facial clues or “leaks” that can reveal lying, regardless of what the deception is about. As long as there is fear of detection, there is a good chance that something in the face will give away the deceit. But how could Ekman create fear of detection under experimental conditions?
In one experiment, Ekman used a telephone-sized booth labeled “punishment chamber.” Test subjects were placed in it and subjected to one very loud blast of white noise. Then, Ekman lied to the subjects (irony not lost) and told them that if they were caught lying, they would have to spend 60 minutes in the chamber. In another experiment, the subjects were told that they would lose their compensation if they were caught lying.
Ekman found that most people exhibit some detectable facial clues when they are lying. His reliable, replicable system for spotting micro expressions earned him the title of the World’s Expert on Lying. Ekman was suddenly in high demand. Everyone from professional poker players to federal judges wanted him. His clients included the CIA, FBI, TSA and various foreign intelligence agencies. In one test, he showed that TSA officers were 50 times more effective in catching a liar than an untrained person.
“No Science, No Comment”
Dr. Ekman’s work on deceit provided the inspiration for the award-winning TV series “Lie to Me,” which ran on the Fox Network from 2011 to 2013. Ekman initially refused to back the TV show, concerned that too much misinformation would be included. Producer Brian Grazier told Ekman the show would run with, or without, his involvement.
Resigned, Ekman agreed to advise the show based on the condition that he could write a blog in response to each episode called “The Truth About Lie to Me: Separating the Science from the Fiction.” In Ekman’s Critique of Season 1, Episode 7, his comments include sub-headings like “Guilty Knowledge,” “Bite your Lip,” and “Natural Performers.”
The Natural Performers
Despite the adulation he gets, Lightman acknowledges that he can be fooled.
“There were still a few people we could not classify as either liars or truth tellers,” he says. “They are what I call natural performers. They don’t lie more often than other people, but you can’t tell when they do.”
At one point in Season 1, Ekman was alarmed to read a script about the attempted assassination of President Obama. He was concerned that the episode might inspire copycats, so he contacted the head of the Secret Service, who he knew on a first-name basis. The Secret Service informed the TV show that it would issue a press release denouncing the episode on the day of its release. After a week’s standoff with the writers, Ekman received a new script about a threat against the Secretary of Agriculture.
Ekman felt that “Lie to Me” strayed far from his work in its second season. As a result, his commentary on several episodes was limited to four words:
“No science, no comment.”
The Peacemaker
Dr. Ekman’s work with the Dalai Lama in the 2000s was a result of his life-long work in the peace movement. In fact, he became a tenured professor at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) by a chance connection to his work in the area.
In 1970, radical students planned a takeover of UCSF to protest the Cambodian Incursion. The university chancellor feared serious disruption but was called out of town. Because Ekman was known for his work in the Vietnam anti-war moment, the chancellor asked him to mediate the potential crisis. Ekman kept the protest peaceful and free of police.
Ekman recalls, “When he returned, the chancellor called me into his office and asked, ‘Who are you, what do you do?’ Once he heard about my research interests and accomplishments – both on nonverbal behavior and peace research – he said he needed me on his faculty and would appoint me a full professor. I have often boasted that I never climbed the academic ladder from assistant to associate to full professor.”
The Dalai Lama
In 2001, Ekman met with the Dalai Lama for the first time in Dharamsala, India. This fortuitous meeting was a result of another chance event: his daughter Eve, a high schooler being chosen to the meet the Dalai Lama as part of her work for the Free Tibet movement. This connection led Ekman to a group of psychologists from the Mind & Life Institute that was working with the Dalai Lama.
The introduction to the Dalai Lama almost didn’t happen. Dan Goleman, who had a relationship with the religious leader, wrote:
When Richard Davidson and I were considering which scientists to invite to participate in the Mind and Life meeting on “Destructive Emotions,” we had misgivings about Paul, despite his being at the top of our list. Our hesitation had to do with Paul’s tough-mindedness as a scientist. We were unsure what his chemistry might be with the Dalai Lama – and we know that beyond first-class science, personal rapport made these meetings work.”
But they did happen, and the Dalai Lama and Ekman became great friends. The Dalai Lama believes that he and Ekman were brothers in a previous life. In 2006, the Dalai Lama and Ekman spent three days discussing Eastern versus Western perspectives on negative emotions. This conversation was transformed into their book, “Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion.”
The two men also collaborated on “The Atlas of Emotions,” an interactive, spatial guide to better understanding human emotion.
According to Ekman, “The Atlas of Emotions” started with the Dalai Lama’s idea of building a video game to teach children about emotion.”
The Drive to Discover
Dr. Ekman’s dedication to psychology was a result of a childhood tragedy. His mother suffered what he believes was undiagnosed bipolar disorder. When Ekman was 15 years old, his mother took her own life.
“I wanted to know why she killed herself,” he says. “I decided to devote my life to understanding human emotions so that this tragedy would not happen to other people.”
Ekman saw his future in laid out in his first experimental psychology class at the University of Chicago. He recalls of his professor:
“I loved her enthusiasm for learning from an experiment something we didn’t already know,” he says. “I didn’t conceptualize it then, but I can see now that my professor conducted her research to explore – find out something new – rather than to test a hypothesis that she was already relatively certain was correct. That’s a path I have followed, excited more by discovery than by proof. Exploratory research is riskier. You might not find anything. You can’t stand on any one’s shoulders. On the other hand, you can find something that no one knew anything about. You are the discoverer. This is exciting to me.”
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