The Naked Face

Malcolm Gladwell, in his essay “The Naked Face,” talks about how emotions can be read on human face. He follows Paul Ekman, a psychologist who has been studying the art of face-reading. Ekman first got the idea of face-reading from Silvan Tomkins, who was also a psychologist and an expert in face-reading. Ekman and his collaborator Wallace Friesen studied facial expressions across many cultures of the world and concluded that human facial expressions are universal phenomena. They also identified many involuntary microexpressions which could signal actual emotions however hard a person may try to lie or voluntarily control his facial expression. They later created a taxonomy of these facial expressions and the rules for reading and interpreting them, named Facing Action Coding System (FACS). Gladwell narrates his conversation with Ekman, where Ekman explains the FACS. Ekman points out that FACS can be learned by anyone with proper training.

Gladwell starts his essay with a case of a police officer, John Yarbrough, who did not shoot a criminal because he did not sense immediate sign of threat on his face. He ends the essay with a similar case of another policeman, Bob Harms, where Harms shot a criminal-looking guy for he perceived a serious threat on his face and behaviour. Gladwell shows that the skill of face-reading can benefit people like policemen and psychiatrists who are in the business of crime and lie detection. But he also makes a point that face-reading can be a problem in cases where one needs to make a fake smile in order to conceal some private pains.