EMOTIONAL IMPOSTORS, EMPATHY, AND UNCLE EZRA’S POKER FACE
THE EFFICACY OF RATIONAL EMOTIONS DEPENDS TO A GREAT EXTENT on the capacity of others to recognize such emotions and, even more importantly, to be convinced of their sincerity. No one can prevent us from feeling angry during the course of lengthy negotiations, but if we harbor hidden anger that the other party does not notice, that will give us only an ulcer, not a negotiating advantage. Artificially expressing anger that the other party will immediately spot as faked is also of no advantage to us; in fact it may work against us. Authenticity is the name of the game.
My former student, Meir Meshulam, once visited a friend of his, along with several others. As the evening prolonged, they decided to order a pizza. But the pizza failed to appear, and the young men sat around waiting, becoming increasingly frustrated. When one of the boys’ father came by, he calmly asked if they had called the pizzeria to get things moving more quickly. The boys replied that they had called, but were told that the pizza was still being prepared.
The man decided to teach these young men a lesson in “how to get things done.” He immediately called the pizzeria himself. His previously calm demeanor was suddenly replaced by visible anger as he shouted into the telephone, informing the person on the other end of the line that if the pizza did not arrive within five minutes, it would be the last pizza his household would ever order from that pizzeria. It might appear as if the anger he exhibited during the telephone call was entirely manufactured, especially given the calmness that he had exuded only seconds earlier, but just after ending the call he could clearly be heard saying quite angrily “those bastards!” The pizza arrived safely within the next fifteen minutes.
The point here is that we are sometimes able consciously to summon authentic emotions, even though we are doing it for strategic reasons. A few years ago Al Jazeera News interviewed me for a broadcast they were preparing on science and education in Israel. I recall that I was glad for the opportunity to create a bit of sympathy for Israel among the television station’s Arab viewers. This, in fact, was my main interest in the interview.
The interview took several hours, starting with questions relating to game theory and continuing with questions regarding success of the Center for the Study of Rationality, which I directed at the time. At some stage, however, they moved into questions of a more personal nature. The interviewers were eager to learn about my family: Where were my parents born? When did they move to Israel? Was I exposed to the Palestinian history as a child? I found myself boasting that on my mother’s side my family had been in Jerusalem for six generations, but I elaborated on my father’s history and the way he fled from Nazi Germany. I recounted how my father and his brother were forced to leave Germany without their parents in 1933, traveling a rough and difficult route alone through Europe until they managed to get to the port of Trieste where they boarded a ship sailing to Palestine; how my father had to struggle to survive in unfamiliar surroundings that were very different from the life he knew as a child in his wealthy Jewish family in Germany. Finally I mentioned the trauma he later suffered as he received news of how the relatives he left behind were murdered in the Nazi death camps.
I had already told that same story dozens of times before to friends and relatives with hardly any emotional reaction. But as I sat across from the Al Jazeera cameras, I could not stop the tears flowing from my eyes. In retrospect I realized that I had subconsciously made myself more emotional in order to arouse sympathy among the television audience. But none of it was artificial; the grief that filled my eyes with tears was entirely authentic.
Recently, I jointly conducted a lab experiment with Meir Meshulam at the Center for the Study of Rationality.1 For this experiment we used a device that collects data from electrodes attached to the skin, mainly relating to pulse rates and skin conductance, in order to measure the amount of emotional tension that the experiment’s subjects were experiencing.
We had the subjects play a simple, two-player game called the dictator game. One of the players is given a sum of money, say $100. Both players are then told that the player holding the money has the option of sharing some of the money with the other player or keeping it all for herself—the decision is entirely hers, depending on how generous she wants to be. We were interested in the emotional reaction of subjects who were in the passive role in this game; these were the players who were connected to the skin conductivity measuring device.
Subjects were divided into three groups, with each group treated differently. We told the first group that our device could measure the anger level of the person to whom it was connected. Subjects in this first group were also told that they would be compensated if they received only a small amount from the dictator player. In addition, they were told that the amount of compensation we would give them would be proportional to the anger level we measured in them in response to a small amount offered by the dictator player. The angrier they got, they more money they would receive.
We explained to the second group that our device would measure the amount of happiness they felt as a result of receiving a generous amount of money from the dictator player. In addition, they were told that they would be rewarded if we measured them feeling happy, with the reward proportional to their happiness level. The third group was similarly incentivized to remain calm upon learning how much money they were offered by the dictator player.
Figure 1 depicts the emotional reactions of the subjects in our experiment. Emotional reactions were measured both by the skin conductivity device and by the use of questionnaires. These questionnaires contained indirect questions that have been successfully used for decades to identify emotional states.
As Figure 1 shows, subjects clearly responded to the incentives. The subjects in the first group exhibited anger in a pronounced manner when they received low offers; on the other hand, low offers did not generate much anger when players were incentivized to be happy. Interestingly, we also found that the abilities of subjects in the second group to create expressions of happiness in response to incentives were much weaker. This finding might be because the skin conductance device is less sensitive to expressions of happiness, but it might also point to greater human capacity to produce outward signs of anger rather than happiness on demand. Although anger is far less pleasant than happiness, it is much more effective in creating commitment in social situations. This may in turn mean that evolution selected for people whose brains were adept at expressing anger, thus making people angrier on the whole.
We all have the capacity to recognize emotional states in others. Without this capacity we would be severely limited in our ability to interact socially. Our ability to reproduce would be curtailed if we were unaware of whether or not others found us attractive. Even our sheer physical survival, which to a great extent depends on our social interactions, would be jeopardized without an ability to read emotions in others. Our capacity to pick out emotions from the faces of others apparently developed quite early in the evolution of human cognitive abilities. This processing occurs in the amygdala, which is part of the limbic (emotional) system of the brain and is located in the most interior and primal part of the human brain.
In the 1990s brain scientist Antonio Damasio and his colleagues conducted several research studies focused on subjects who had suffered injuries to their amygdalae. These subjects could easily recognize faces and could match photographs of faces with people whom they knew, but they failed utterly in recognizing facial expressions and matching those expressions to emotional states.
One of the most interesting discoveries in the field of brain science relates to a specific part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus, which is responsible for facial recognition.2 Faces are the ultimate tool we use to broadcast our emotional states to our environment. You can try the following short and simple experiment next time you are on a public transport bus or in line at a bank: stare at a person who is not looking at you, and notice that within several seconds that person will look straight back at you. Our reaction to a smile is also quite amazing. Most of us are very skilled at recognizing a forced smile, which utilizes a different set of muscles from naturally occurring smiles, but at the same time most people cannot explain why a forced smile looks different from a natural smile.
It became particularly clear how powerful a facial expression is in an interesting experiment recently conducted in Britain. The experimenters placed a coffee machine in a crowded public office and hung a sign above the coffee machine asking those pouring themselves a cup of coffee to insert a pound in a nearby box as payment. When the experimenters compared the number of cups that were poured from the machine with the amount of money in the box a week later, they discovered, unsurprisingly, that many people ignored the sign and made use of the machine without paying.
The second week, the experiments added a photograph of a pair of eyes looking directly at users of the coffee machine. This simple change had a large behavioral effect. A week later the amount of money in the box was very close to the number of cups of coffee poured from the machine.
To estimate the human capacity to identify the mental state of another individual, one researcher conducted an interesting experiment using the well-known British television game show called Split or Steal. The game involves a pair of players challenged to answer a series of trivia questions. For every correct answer the players receive a sum of money.
At the end of the round of questions, a decision has to be made regarding how to divide the accumulated money (which can sometimes be in excess of a hundred thousand pounds) between the two players. This involves each of the players secretly choosing one of two options, “split” or “steal.” If both players choose split, they divide the accumulated sum equally. In contrast, if one player chooses split while the other chooses steal, the player who chose steal gets the entire sum of money while the other player goes home empty-handed. If both players choose steal, they both get nothing. Prior to choosing between split and steal, the players are instructed to conduct a thirty-second face-to-face conversation about what they intend to choose. This game is very similar to the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma, which we will return to later in this book.
If you are a player on Split or Steal, from a purely monetary perspective it is always advantageous for you to choose steal. If the other player chooses split, then if you choose steal, you double your payoff. On the other hand, if the other player is planning on choosing steal, then you won’t get any payoff no matter what you choose, in which case you might prefer that your greedy erstwhile partner also go home without a penny. Absurdly, however, if both players fully understand this reasoning and act accordingly, neither of them will receive any money and will be forced to walk away from the hundred thousand pounds that they worked together to accumulate.
I highly recommend taking a look at video clips of the game show that are available on YouTube; they can be found by searching for the show’s name, Split or Steal. During the short conversation between the players, they each make great efforts to persuade the other that they would never even conceive of choosing steal, since doing so would bring about the opprobrium of hundreds of thousands of television viewers, irreparably sullying his or her reputation. Many of the players on the show make this claim in a very convincing manner—only to reveal a few seconds later that they choose steal.
Einav Hart, a colleague of mine at the Center for the Study of Rationality, asked whether players could improve their ability to identify the mental states of others, thus increasing their chances of correctly predicting the choice of the other player. She showed video segments of the game to subjects who volunteered to participate in the experiment. Each subject was asked to predict the choice of one of the players, based on what was said during the conversation round, and was given a monetary reward for every correct prediction. After making their predictions, the subjects were further asked to predict the choice of the other player, but this time they were not incentivized with a reward. Hart showed that subjects were significantly better at making correct predictions when they received monetary incentives.
This result contrasted with several other research studies (mostly conducted by psychologists) that had concluded that people cannot reliably distinguish between authentic and faked emotional states. But if it were true that there is nothing that can be done to improve our ability to tell when emotional states are being faked, then monetary incentives should not have any effect. The fact that there was a significant difference in subject’s capacity to make correct predictions as a result of giving them monetary rewards indicates that we do have hidden abilities to identify authentic emotions. These abilities apparently require a large effort of concentration and attention, which we are more willing to apply if we believe that a reward will follow the effort. It is possible that previous studies that failed to uncover our capacity to distinguish authentic from faked emotions did not sufficiently incentivize the subjects participating in the studies. In contrast to most experiments conducted by economists, including those run by the Center for the Study of Rationality, psychologists usually do not use monetary incentives in their experiments.
In the real world outside of laboratories, individuals receive a reward if they recognize inauthentic emotions correctly and receive a penalty if they are wrong (even if the reward is not necessarily monetary). This is why using incentives, as Hart did, is very important for studying human capacities for recognizing emotions. Hart’s experiment tested the ability of observers of the game to recognize emotions; it is reasonable to suppose that players in the game should exhibit even sharper emotion-recognition capabilities.
Empirical research conducted several years ago in the United States by Avner Kalay also studied this topic.3 Kalay studied data on the behavior of players in an American television game show called Friend or Foe, which is very similar to Split or Steal. In the course of his research he looked at hundreds of episodes of the game played over several years and noted the relative frequencies of the four possible outcomes in the game: (steal, split), (split, steal), (split, split) and (steal, steal).
Kalay discovered two striking phenomena. First, the frequency with which both players simultaneously made the same choice was high. In other words, (split, split) and (steal, steal) were chosen often and the other two possibilities were chosen infrequently. The second finding, which was even more striking, was that those players who chose steal earned—on average—almost the same as those who chose split. (I should emphasize that this is strictly an average. In any given game, the two players only get the same payoff if they make the same choice.)
This seems puzzling, since a few lines above we established that choosing steal gives you a higher payoff if the other player chooses split, while if he chooses steal it does not matter what you choose. How then is it possible for there to be no difference in the average payoff that the two choices provide the players in Kalay’s study? The answer is simple. If you decide to play steal, you will not be able to conceal this decision fully from your partner. As a result, he will be more likely to choose steal as well, and you will be more likely to walk home with nothing. The net effect of all this is that, as Kalay’s research showed, the two players tend to end up making the same decision, either split or steal. Even though both of them naturally claim during the conversation round that they have every intention to choose split, what they are really doing is making up their minds in the course of the conversation, while trying to read each other’s thoughts. It is the human ability to judge emotions correctly that leads to the synchronization of the players’ choices. As we have shown, this ability is very important in many situations, but as with many human abilities, not everyone is endowed with this talent in equal measure. Several years ago a well-known lawyer contacted me with a request that I serve as an expert witness on game theory for a company he was representing, which intended to establish a Web site for poker games. The law forbidding Internet gambling specifically prohibits games that involve chance as the main determinant of winning, but the law permits games in which skill is the main element of victory. If I could help persuade the court that poker is a game of skill rather than a game of chance, the legal prohibition on establishing a poker Web site would be lifted, and in return I would be paid a hefty fee.
I declined the offer, rather instinctively and decisively, but this decision might have been more emotional than rational. The truth is that poker is indeed a game of skill with a relatively small component of chance determining the winner of the game. The name of the game in poker is correctly judging the emotional state of your opponents.
When I was a child, my family, along with the families of my mother’s seven siblings, would visit my maternal grandmother every holiday for a meal. After the meal the men in the family would all adjourn to the balcony to play a game of poker. We children would follow the game with great interest. At first we would conduct little wagers among ourselves over who would be the big winner and the big loser of the day. But we quickly realized that there was no point to wagering: Uncle Ezra was almost always the winner, while my father was losing almost as consistently.
Although the sums of money changing hands were insubstantial, the tension and emotions the game elicited were profound. Each round of the game ended with the players loudly expressing joy or anger. The game itself was played in absolute silence, with even the children holding their breaths.
My father barely glanced around him. He was entirely immersed in the cards, deciding which to play and which to discard, how much to raise the stakes, and when to fold. He nervously shifted in his seat while drumming his fingers on the table, waiting for the decisions of the other participants. Uncle Ezra, in contrast, was always calm and collected. He barely glanced at the cards in his hands, staring instead at my father as if he were curiously taking in his every move.
Sometimes my father tried to adopt Uncle Ezra’s methods, but he never managed to mask his face with Uncle Ezra’s coolly neutral expressions, nor did he ever succeed in reading Uncle Ezra’s facial muscles to the point of being able to get a clue regarding Uncle Ezra’s cards. Uncle Ezra was a much better poker player than my father was, due to his ability to identify the mental states of others while being able to hide his own.
The World Rock Paper Scissors Society is a similar case. It conducts a yearly international tournament drawing over five hundred participants who compete for cash prizes of up to $10,000. Most of us would think of the game rock paper scissors as a pure game of chance, but there are players who win at it consistently The determining factor here is again the ability to recognize and hide intentions.
In social situations, which are much more complex than games of poker or rock paper scissors, the ability to identify the intentions of others requires much finer emotional insight and is strongly related to the ability to feel empathy for others.
Empathy, the capacity to experience the emotional experiences of others even when we are not acquainted with them (and even when they are fictional characters, as in a film or novel) is a wonderful phenomenon that has very ancient evolutionary roots. In 2004, an interesting research study was conducted in Italy, showing that monkeys tend to imitate the actions of other monkeys immediately after their birth, with no need for a lengthy learning process.4 This ability was traced to “mirror cells” in the brain, which are responsible for imitation. Mirror cells are neurons containing electrical activity fired during the course of actions (especially motor actions). Interestingly, when another individual is seen undertaking the same actions, electrical activity is also triggered in the same mirror cells. For example, when a chimpanzee lifts his left arm, that action is brought about by electrical activity in neurons. In some of these neurons, identical electric activity is triggered when the chimpanzee sees another chimpanzee lifting his left arm, even if the watching chimpanzee is not lifting an arm and has no intention of doing so.
Scientists conduct more invasive research experiments on the brains of monkeys than can be conducted on humans. Electrodes implanted into the brains of monkeys can identify electrical activity down to the level of individual cells. The experimental evidence for the existence of mirror cells in humans is more indirect but still very persuasive. The evidence is mainly based on fMRI imaging indicating elevated oxygen consumption in various areas of the brain. The fMRI images show that the brain areas that exhibit activity when a person undertakes a particular motor action are also active when that person watches someone else undertaking that same action.
There is a broad consensus among brain scientists that empathy is a result of mirror cell activity. But in contrast to motor mirror cells, which are responsible for physical actions, empathy arises from emotional mirror cells. A research study conducted in 2009 using fMRI imagery showed that when children watch films depicting a person suffering pain, their brains exhibit activity in the same areas that would be activated if they themselves were feeling it. Research conducted on adults reveal similar phenomena involving brain activity when the subjects are shown pictures of people suffering sadness or fear.
The capacity for empathy is related to a very important concept used in philosophy and psychology called Theory of Mind (ToM). ToM is not a scientific theory; it refers to the human ability to have beliefs regarding the emotional states, beliefs, and intentions of another person. ToM is regarded as a very important characteristic distinguishing humans from other living creatures. It is identifiable in children as young as two years old, who turn their gazes toward the same items in a room that other people around them are looking at.
The capacity for ToM improves considerably at age three or four; a child at that age can often distinguish between what he or she knows versus what others know. If you wish, you can try the following experiment on a four year old. Take two boxes colored in different colors—for example, one red and one yellow—along with a small candy bar. In the presence of the child and another adult, place the candy bar in the red box and ask the adult to step out of the room. After the adult has stepped out, but in the presence of the child, move the candy bar from the red box to the yellow box. Now invite the adult back in and ask the child in which box the adult thinks the candy bar is located. If the child gives the right answer and points to the red box, then he or she is exhibiting healthy ToM. Children with autism spectrum disorder, who have inhibited ToM, may not pass this test even at a much older age.
I intend soon to begin conducting a research project along with several psychiatric researchers in an effort to improve our understanding of ToM with the help of game theory. Games such as the ultimatum game and the trust game (which will be discussed in later chapters), as well as other games, may enable us to identify children who have slight deficiencies in attaining ToM or who have mild autism spectrum disorder but otherwise successfully pass standard tests. The capacities for empathy and ToM are related because both of them are based on the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes.
If you shut your eyes for a moment and try to imagine yourself with the same cognitive capacities that you now have but with no ToM, you will discover that this is a very frightening image—indeed, lacking empathy and ToM are common symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, which account for many of the daily difficulties faced by people with this disorder. In such a state, although you would be fully conscious and aware of your surroundings, you would in a sense be living on another planet populated by alien life-forms whose behaviors and reactions would be completely unpredictable. You would have no way of knowing whether or not scratching your left ear would deeply insult them and elicit an aggressive response. You would not know how to gain their trust or persuade them to help you find food. Even if they approach you with benign intentions, you would not know whether they come in peace or with the objective of attacking you, and you would certainly be unable to form an intimate bond with any of them or have offspring with them.
Just as you can’t identify which muscles are involved in a person’s fake smile, it is all but impossible to use logic to discern another person’s emotional state, and thus their intentions, whether in a game of poker, at the negotiating table, or on a date. The ability to read people and send back the signals they want is irreducibly emotional, and at the same time is an essential piece of data in making a good decision: whether to fold or raise, offer a compromise or hold firm, expect a kiss or a smack in the face. Our emotions contain arguments and facts we simply can’t relate to in any other way.