The emotion AI industry, courts and child educators are unknowingly relying on a misunderstanding of Darwin’s ideas.
Do your facial movements broadcast your emotions to other people? If you think the answer is yes, think again. This question is under contentious debate. Some experts maintain that people around the world make specific, recognizable faces that express certain emotions, such as smiling in happiness, scowling in anger and gasping with widened eyes in fear. They point to hundreds of studies that appear to demonstrate that smiles, frowns, and so on are universal facial expressions of emotion.
So who is right? The answer involves an unwitting physician, a scientific error and a century-long misinterpretation of Darwin’s writing. Ironically, his own observations offer a powerful resolution that is transforming the modern understanding of emotion. Or so it would seem. A preponderance of evidence shows that Darwin was wrong, and his mistake was a doozy. In real life, people express a given emotion with tremendous variability. In anger, for example, people in urban cultures scowl only about 35 percent of the time, according to meta-analyses of studies measuring facial movement during emotion. Scowls are also not specific to anger because people scowl for other reasons, such as when they are concentrating or when they have gas.
Darwin’s Expression 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 specialized instruments.
Essentialism likewise 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 barely mentioned natural selection. He also did not write that facial expressions are functional products of evolution.
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.
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