CHAPTER ONE
Dialogueless
In the riveting 2013 movie All Is Lost, Robert Redford plays a captain alone on his sailboat trying to stay afloat after it’s been struck by another vessel. It was a physically demanding role for the seventy-seven-year-old, and his compelling work earned him the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actor.
So far that sounds pretty unremarkable. A devastatingly handsome, Academy Award–nominated veteran actor wins yet another award for acting. Yawn.
But that movie wasn’t like your typical movie. And Redford’s acting requirements weren’t quite, uhm, normal. Usually we imagine how difficult it is for actors to memorize all those lines. Well, in this case, Redford basically didn’t have any lines. In fact, the entire movie contained only twenty words. Total. In the entire hour and forty-five minutes. Yet he still won an acting award!
That is weird.
A movie without words is indeed a rare novelty. When such modern movies are made, many are modeled after old-fashioned silent films (ones where we can see, but not hear, the characters talking), are about a deaf character (who is usually signing), or feature animals for their leads. All Is Lost doesn’t fall into any of these categories.
As weird as this movie is, it’s great for inspiring some thought experiments about how real life is even more weird. While a movie without dialogue is very rare—and usually carries an extremely limited market appeal—up until relatively recently humans lived without dialogue altogether.
We don’t know exactly when we gained language skills. Estimates are in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands of years ago. Prior to that, while humans were basically identical to today, biologically, they spoke nary a peep. We were ready for language, but in lingo limbo.
Sit back and let that sink in. Imagine going even one whole day among your family and friends with no one speaking. (It would be wonderful, yes?!) Of course, that would mean no texting or writing of any kind either. You still have to prepare a lasagna, though. So you need your spouse to run to the store to grab ground beef and tomato sauce. You need to get your son to chop the onions (because he’s the one with cry-proof contact lenses) and find the pasta you accidentally left in the wrong place in the scary part of the basement. And you need to talk on the phone to your mom about grandma’s recipe, which is what makes the lasagna worth doing. Going even one day without language feels almost unimaginable. So, visualize a week of that. Imagine one month. A whole year. An entire life!
And it’s not just us humans who, before the advent of language, dealt with the deafening silence. Our prehuman ancestors and our hominid cousins were basically like us—similarly toiling through their lives . . . wordlessly.
The more you think about this, the more difficult it might be to imagine. Nearly the entire history of our human lineage is one long movie without dialogue. Borrrrring!!
Languageless Hominid Problem
The silent movies our ancestors endured are exceedingly counterintuitive to our modern times, so perhaps this thought experiment should have some fancy title that generations of great thinkers have considered.
As far as we know, there’s no name for this stumper of a problem. So we’ll christen it ourselves as the Languageless Hominid Problem: Language is central to what we now take to be human, so how did we possibly get by for millions of years as smart hominids without it?
Language-Filled Hominid Problem
By pointing out the sheer galactic stretches of time without language, you’ll naturally find yourself wondering how language-capable humans kept quiet about their silent plight, missing out on all the riveting non-silent movies that make life worth living!
But let’s flip the entire thought experiment upside down by concentrating our attention on the silent epochs first. As one of us argued in an earlier book, Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man, language was never part of our nature. Rather, cultural evolution shaped language to fit us, and it did so by structuring language to look (writing) and sound (speech) like nature. Spoken language came to sound like the combinations of hits, slides, and rings that occur among the collisions of solid objects. And writing—covered in an earlier book, The Vision Revolution—came to look like the contour conglomerations occurring among opaque objects around us (e.g., T and Y junctions). Over time, cultural evolution imbued language with the shapes of nature, the exact shapes that our instinctual brains were already brilliant at recognizing. Humans got “harnessed” by what amounts to “cultural technology.” And so no language instinct was needed.
That means our silent movie experience is our true nature! What’s paradoxically weird isn’t that our ancestors lived silent lives, but that their offspring—us—jibber-jab constantly. How did creatures raised on an endless diet of silent movies suddenly transform so radically to the animal that wouldn’t shut up? This way of viewing things motivates a different problem. The Language-Filled Hominid Problem: Language has not long been part of us and is quite possibly not part of our biology at all. So how is it that we’re utterly transformed now, partaking all day in linguistic communication never carried out by our recent ancestors, who for unimaginably long periods of time were content with peace and quiet?
Silent Movie Problem
Either way one phrases it, the point is the same: there’s a galaxy-sized chasm between the dialogue-free lives of our relatively recent ancestors and the brimming-with-dialogue lives of recent times. It’s hard to reconcile this vast contrast between us language-filled humans and our earlier silent humans and hominids.
We’ll just refer to this problem, viewed from either perspective, as the “Silent Movie Problem.”
So far, we’ve framed the problem to be about humans or our recent ancestors because that’s what makes the thought experiment so stark—after all, they’re basically us, but sentenced to a life without sentences. But there’s no reason to stop at our recent ancestors. The other great apes are no slouches. They’re vastly intelligent creatures, and most humans underestimate their intelligence because we compare our cultural selves, with our capacity for writing, speech, the arts, tech, iPhones, and toasters, to them. But the right comparison is between apes and our pure biological selves, humans without all that cultural tech (especially language and writing) that actually “harnesses” us.
From a cosmic perspective, apes are brilliant. Yet they’ve never been in anything but a silent movie. That may not feel counterintuitive to you because, in our experience, linguistic silence is what an ape does. But it is weird if we really think about it! Our young children, who are closer to the level of intelligence of an ape, talk incessantly. We’d argue it’s even more difficult to imagine kids not speaking than to imagine adults not speaking. Additionally, apes have much more important business to carry out in a day—like their survival—than our kids, so you’d think they would be in greater need of language.
The Silent Movie Problem isn’t just a problem for the winner and runner-up of the solar system’s intelligence championship—humans (woot!) and other great apes, respectively. It’s a weird problem for lots of other animals as well. Especially the smart ones, and, correlated with smarts, the social ones. Parrots and crows are thought to be within the same qualitative intelligence class as apes. Then there are, of course, all the primates generally, and dogs, and cats, and hundreds of other well-known bright social animals and birds.
For smart social animals, life just is, has always been, and always will be a silent movie. For humans, the Silent Movie Problem more generally comes down to this: Silence?! How the heck is that living at all?! It makes you wonder when you really think about it. How did today’s humans get to such a warped perspective that they can’t even imagine living a day in the life of every other bright social creature, including our own recent ancestors?
Cacophony
Is this one of those mysteries that’s inherently unsolvable? Must we just learn to live with it? Or might there be some sort of resolution to the Silent Movie Problem?
In a sense, this book is an answer to that problem. We’ll argue that there was already a pre-linguistic “language” present among all those bright social animals living out their silent movies. By grasping what that ancient “first language” was and what it allowed our ancestors to do, the Silent Movie Problem fades away.
So how can we start diffusing the Silent Movie Problem? First, notice that while these intelligent social animals may have lived out their lives without language, the movie they were in was by no means silent. Quite the contrary, their lives were teeming with noisy vocal repertoires of barks, growls, purrs, and squawks, as well as chest beats and ground stomps. In addition to their noisy signals, they were often “loudly” baring teeth, puffing up, and flashing colors on their skin.
In this light, maybe we’ve been a little unfair to silent movies. Just as our languageless, Earthly predecessors could be “noisy” without sound, silent movies had their share of grimaces, winks, and longing looks. Plus, silent movies were often accompanied by noisy music. And not just any old music, but music specifically choreographed for the movie. The characters may have been silent, but the music was often doing the “talking” for them.
So if it’s almost inconceivable that smart social animals could have gotten by without language, then the solution might be, well, aha, they did have a language all along! (Hint, the language of emotional expressions. But be patient!)
But Are “Loud” Gesticulations Enough?
Fine. We may have overstated how “empty” a dialogue-free life really was, to the extent that our intuition relied on imagining smart social animals robotically going about their daily activities. Such creatures—our recent ancestors included—were not dead-eyed robots but highly expressive beings, sending and receiving countless “messages” all day every day, their entire lives, generation after generation.
Even so, it’s hard for most of us to imagine being able to get by in social communities only using non-verbal vocalizations, gestures, and anything else at our dialogueless communicative disposal. Language, with words and grammar and meaning and endless compositional power, seems utterly crucial to our daily interactions with other people.
Sure, our ancestors wouldn’t have been trying to do some of what we do with language—like calling mom for grandma’s lasagna recipe—but there’s still all the other stuff they’d have to “talk” about. Surviving in nature without technology is hard enough. Imagine keeping the camp running with only gestures and whatnot!
Even when we roll in all these “loud” gestures, the Silent Movie Problem doesn’t seem to go away. After all, don’t silent movies, even though they’re brimming with non-linguistic and visually expressive gestures, seem so deeply inferior to movies with dialogue?
Hog Plums
To truly resolve the Silent Movie Problem, we have to look at explaining what it was that we, and other bright social animals, did then (and have always done, really) in their cacophonic silent movie lives to deal with the issues that social animals have to contend with.
Maybe we’ve been modern, language-speaking cultural animals for so long we’ve lost all touch with our roots, blinding us to an answer. Although we humans are more familiar with movies with dialogue, there are portions of our lives that are dialogue free. Could these provide a hint?
What about when you have to interact with someone who doesn’t know your language? Suppose you’re at a bazaar haggling with a foreign merchant. Despite the lack of a shared tongue, you can nevertheless somehow come to a deal. They don’t need words to tell you that you’ve offered too few shillings for the bag of hog plums. Even when you do use language at the bazaar, you often exaggerate the intonation, other evocative overtones, and OF COURSE THE LOUDNESS! Whatever it is you’re doing in this circumstance—the yips and shrugs and flailing about—seems closer to the silent movie behavior of other social animals, no?
Let’s take it a bit further. Suppose after agreeing on a price for the bag of hog plums, the merchant brings you the bag, but putrid green juice is leaking out the bottom, and a plume of fruit flies is hovering around it. You may not speak the local tongue, but you know in your bones how to express that you’re not at all pleased with your purchase! Without missing a beat, your face, your gestures, and maybe even the growl that escapes your lips manages to communicate your severe displeasure. And it works! The merchant gives you a seven-pence discount despite the complete linguistic barrier between you.
Well done! You’ve managed to interact with another cunning social creature without using language—you found an agreeable price, complained about a dissatisfaction with a product, and got a partial refund! Maybe we humans do have some ability to communicate with one another without language.
And if we do have some non-language “language” that we instinctively know how to use, then perhaps our discourse-free movie of the past was filled with our bizarre bazaar vocalizations and gesticulations as well. If so, then the solution to the Silent Movie Problem is that we social animals did have a language before language. The other social animals still do—it’s just that that’s all they have.
Expressways
In fact, we don’t have to imagine ourselves at some faraway fruit-fly-infested marketplace to realize that we might already know how to use an ancient “language” mediating social behavior. Would you believe that most of us do it every day without even knowing?
Just consider driving. Unless you live in the remote sticks, you’re on the road with other cars. Lots of them. Roads are one massive example of human social behavior that “gets done” without anyone ever saying a word. Sure, you might yell a few words when the fella in the convertible cuts you off, but he didn’t hear a thing. Once cars become automated in the future, some central algorithm will be able to move millions of vehicles around with no need for any of us passengers to ever look up from our phones. But that’s not our road reality now, where motorists are constantly signaling to one another.
What kind of signals are we making when driving? To start, our cars are equipped with turn signals, emergency flashers, and horns that are specifically designed for non-linguistic signaling. But our street speech goes considerably beyond that.
If I’m behind you in the fast lane and you’re going painfully slowly, I might flash my high beams at you, cozy in tight behind you, maybe downshift so that my engine is ominously loud and threatening, begin weaving around, or even shake my fist out the window. In response, you might signal at me by lightly tapping your brake lights, suddenly braking to force me to back off, maybe doing one suuuuuper looooong sloooowww deceleration, conspicuously yelling into your rearview mirror, or showing me one of your favorite fingers.
While road rage tends to get into news stories more often, most of the signaling among drivers isn’t quite so ragey. We often signal someone else to go first at a four-way stop by flashing our lights, waving our hand, or nodding our head. And we might indicate another motorist can merge in front of us by conspicuously slowing down and leaving room. Notice, too, that we even manage to use our horn in more than one way—sometimes aggressively (heavy on the horn in a “don’t you dare merge in front of me!” sort of way) and sometimes in a friendly fashion (a couple light taps on the horn to say, “come on, I’m letting you in”).
The next time you go for a drive, pay attention to the interpersonal details. You’ll realize you’re involved in dozens of such social interactions with other motorists. Each one has an exchange of signals of some kind. And not one of these signals involves a single word of actual language! That’s why they’re “expressways” rather than “talkways.”
The Language of Emotional Expressions
The Silent Movie Problem is sounding less and less like a problem. After all, how big a problem can it really be if it turns out that every day, we’re all doing exactly the sorts of complex social behavior that we thought wasn’t really possible without language? And sometimes doing it at breakneck speed!
Could it be that all those gesticulations at the bazaar and the wide variety of signals we manage to squeeze out of our automobiles amount to a kind of “language,” one just like the one we evolved so as to be able to communicate with one another long before we spoke? Is there a term for these sorts of non-linguistic signals people make for hog plums and in horseless carriages?
Sure. They’re just “emotional expressions.” It’s emotional expressions that got you your partial refund on the hog plums. And it’s an emotional expression—specifically your pleading and pathetic face—that let you merge at the last moment onto the exit you almost missed.
Could it be, then, that it’s also emotional expressions that solve the Silent Movie Problem? That we had an ancient language after all—our emotional expressions? Could it be that our eyebrows and mouth and shoulders and face coloration and voice intonation are somehow powerful enough to handle the complex and thorny lives of our non-linguistic ancestors?
And, if emotional expressions somehow are at the bottom of this mystery, how do such drama-laden, imprecise, and grammarless things as that do the job? It’s a big task being the communication system undergirding life as every bright social animal knows it!
Charlie Chaplin
In every movie you’ve ever seen, the real story is being told by these ancient universal emotional expressions going on “underneath” the dialogue. The dialogue may be needed, but it’s this other, unspoken language that makes it a good or a bad movie. That is, the genius behind a non-silent movie is really all about the silent movie that accompanies it.
After all, that’s why they pay actors the big bucks. They’re not paid to read lines—anyone can do that—but to display all the modalities of emotional expressions the character would express in those circumstances. Robotically reading the lines would miss the point, leaving the true social story untold.
Robert Redford didn’t win the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actor in All Is Lost for the delivery of his lines—there basically weren’t any!—but for the delivery of his emotional expressions.
Displaying the full range of emotions is difficult, though, because we don’t usually express our emotions with conscious purpose; they just . . . happen. That’s why some actors employ the “method acting” technique, one way of helping them do this difficult job.
We’re starting to see that silent movies aren’t quite so boring after all. We mentioned earlier that the silent movies from the early twentieth century were teeming with emotional expressions. Remember that even the music itself was highly choreographed to further convey the emotions expressed in each scene. We may make fun of these old silent movies, but they were actually deeply exciting and fervently followed by a populace who was itching to see them. We all know the name “Charlie Chaplin” for a reason!
So silent movies aren’t the runt of the movie entertainment world after all. If there is a runt in that world, it’s the sort of movie that’s all language and no emotional expression. But that sort of movie is so runty that it never even gets made. There simply aren’t such movies.
An Emotional Lunch
Nigel will never forget where Butch lives. Months earlier, Nigel unknowingly cut through Butch’s territory, and big old Butch aggressively leaped out of nowhere and left Nigel with a nasty scar on his cheek. Nigel is still haunted by that interaction, and as he approaches Butch’s territory today, which he must do to get lunch, he keeps his guard up as he has done since the incident, staying alert for any signs of him: his muscular frame, his razor-sharp incisors, and his stink. Nigel shudders inside at the thought.
So, as Nigel nears Butch’s territory, he’s anxious. He’s afraid. Where’s Butch? Where’s Butch? Nigel nervously says to himself. Just as Nigel is about to leave the danger zone, he thinks, Oh, crap! Is that Butch? Run! Off Nigel runs, heart pumping, a million nerve cells sent into a fear state.
Now Nigel’s out, far from Butch’s yard. He’s not even sure whether Butch was there, but Nigel’s safe now—there’s nothing to stop him from getting the lunch he came for. And today turns out to be the best lunch day of the year. His all-time favorite! Lunch in hand, Nigel relaxes to eat.
But before he can even take a bite, something about the smell of his lunch puts him off. What’s wrong with my lunch? he wonders. And just as that thought becomes fully formed, someone or something snatches Nigel’s lunch right out of his mouth. My lunch! screams Nigel on the inside, surprised and unhappy.
And then Nigel figures it out. Butch! That foul-smelling thief—he did this! Nigel is livid. He sees Butch ambling slowly off, presumably internally sneering at Nigel. Without thinking, Nigel darts after Butch, catches the overconfident stinker by surprise, and lands a crushing—and lucky—blow to Butch’s temple. Butch is down.
Woo-hoo! cries Nigel to himself, grabbing his lunch and heading for home. Don’t mess with Nigel! he says to himself in triumph.
Dead-Eyed
The problem of why we have emotional expressions has captured thinkers for centuries, including Charles Darwin in his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals from 1872. It’s a problem quite distinct from why we have internal emotions. Fear, unhappiness, surprise, anger, and smugness are just some of the emotions Nigel felt that day. These inner feelings and emotions help guide Nigel, readying him to act appropriately depending on the circumstance. And they do the same for us as well. These rich, inner emotional experiences are one big part of being alive. But, as important as inner emotions are, they’re not the key to understanding the mysterious “first language” of emotional expressions that all of us bright social animals use to get by.
Maybe this will help to see the difference. One thing we didn’t tell you about our friend Nigel is that he’s not the emotionally expressive creature you might be imagining. Nigel is a shark. Yes, he’s a dead-eyed, expressionless killing machine.
Nigel, like most animals over the history of life, doesn’t have signaling mechanisms for aiding interactions with other creatures. He takes what he can, when he can, from whomever he can. His world is all action, no “talking.” And his inner emotions are a big part of how he manages to get his actions done right.1
But he’s still “dead-eyed Nigel” because when you look at him, all those inner emotions are forever sealed on the inside, masked over. Only Nigel’s blank stare remains. No vocalizations, no gestures, no emotional expressions. Nothing.2
Dead-eyed creatures make terrible protagonists in stories. So any dead-eyed animal that has a serious role is usually given artificial cartoon or computer-generated emotional expressions. The sharks in Finding Nemo, for example, are brimming with human facial expressions, gestures, and voice intonations because, as we mentioned earlier, no one’s interested in robotic stories.
Emotions ≠ Emotional Expressions
The big mystery isn’t about the emotions on the inside—the emotional but non-expressive. That’s ancient stuff. It’s important but found even among the animals that couldn’t “talk” their way out of a paper bag. Whatever emotional expressions are, they’re not something we can explain by understanding emotions. Emotions, the inner stuff, were part of our constitution for a half billion years without anyone ever “saying” one expressive, non-dead-eyed thing!
Not only do emotions not imply emotional expressions, but emotional expressions don’t imply emotions. Although we often feel emotions (i.e., we have internal emotions) when we’re emotionally expressive, the emotions we’re feeling don’t need to be the ones we’re expressing. Sometimes we might even express an emotion but feel pretty much nothing at all.
Emotional expressions, on the one hand, and emotions, on the other, seem to be utterly different creatures! One wonders why emotional expressions are called “emotional” at all.
Indeed, a different term may have been a better choice. We wish someone would have asked us for our input a couple centuries ago. The truth is the very phrase implicitly makes the claim that emotional expressions are expressions of emotions, and we know that’s not always the case. Nevertheless, researchers like American psychologist Paul Ekman and others have shown that certain emotional expressions have some tendency to associate with certain internal emotions, and so they are connected. But it’s not the case that emotional expressions are for “revealing” internal emotions.
What does it take, then, to understand emotional expressions, since internal emotions clearly aren’t enough? What happened after countless generations of dead-eyed but emotional creatures that evolution invented emotionally expressive chatterboxes? As we mentioned earlier, it’s widely believed to be something social. Emotional expressions are, after all, something social animals have (even cows!).
Haggle Babble
Emotions were perfectly content to remain masked for hundreds of millions of years. Trillions of clever beasts struggling to survive, tooth and claw, roiling inside, and a single tooth or claw was never used to express anything to anyone.
And then came the novel, evolved technology of emotional expressions. Somehow these served as an ancient language of sorts for social animals. But what is this ancient language really for?
The question brings us nearer to our central claim for this book: emotional expressions are for negotiating with other social animals.
We are using the term “negotiating” very broadly. Negotiations are just a way of communicating so that two parties can settle a dispute. They’re simply a way of finding a compromise or coming to an agreement.
Thus, our central claim is simply this: emotional expressions are nature’s first language, one allowing languageless social animals to settle disputes . . . to negotiate.
Run-of-the-mill haggling, or “asset negotiation,” is just one special variety of negotiation—it’s the kind where one party has shillings for purchasing and the other has hog plums for selling. It’s what we do when we buy a house or buy anything at a yard sale.
While we know asset negotiation very well, we know the more general forms of negotiation and compromise exceedingly well because we evolved for millions of years dealing with disagreements that had to be settled—disagreements we had to negotiate—and we all possess instincts for how to employ these emotional expressions. These sorts of negotiations don’t include an exchange of money and assets. Rather, they just involve figuring out a way to settle a disagreement.
The secret to uncovering why we have emotional expressions, and to what they mean and how they function, is the simple notion of negotiation writ large. Emotional expressions are the ancient signaling system allowing social animals to negotiate disputes. Emotional expressions really are haggle babble.
But what, you might ask, do animals need to be able to negotiate about? Most social animals don’t have anything to sell, and, at any rate, nothing to buy anything with.
The social world is teeming with disagreements about who gets what and how much, whether it’s about food; sex; territory; who goes first; whether my feather necklace is pretty; and, well, everything! Compromises are the lifeblood of social animals, because disagreements (about mangoes, water access, who’s the boss, aesthetic preferences, or the affections of Doug) are the daily curse among all those smart creatures living together and sharing limited resources.
Chipmunk Negotiations and the Rosetta Stone
While disagreements and negotiations sound inherently unfriendly, that’s not the case at all. I might insist on paying for your beer, and you might object half-heartedly until you eventually agree. This is a variety of compromise, but a friendly, non-greedy variety where each is asking for less rather than more. The Looney Tunes chipmunks, Chip and Dale, exemplify this when each insists the other go first: “You first, my dear.” “But, no, no, no. It must be you who goes first!”
Negotiations for houses or bicycles aren’t often like that (we wish they were!), but tremendous swaths of life are friendly, especially between colleagues, patrons, family, and friends. Coming to agreement is a vastly broad concept, after all, and not just something that applies between rivals or enemies. Even parents and children are ever engaged in compromises.
The idea that emotional expressions are somehow an aid for social animals to interact is in no way new. Not even a little. That’s pretty much the accepted position by anyone anywhere. And the idea that emotional expressions have to do with compromise, and settling disagreements, isn’t new either. Somehow that’s what they have to at least be partly for.
Our contribution here is to show that emotional expressions are exactly the “language” needed to carry out negotiations.
In that regard, our book amounts to a Rosetta Stone. It provides the principles allowing us to understand the meanings of emotional expressions. Or, said differently, this book is the key to translating back and forth between emotional expressions and “negotiation talk.”
Let’s try a thought experiment together. Imagine you need to invent a communication system so that you can carry out negotiations with strange alien creatures who occasionally beam here selling cool rock band paraphernalia. You hire a pricey consulting firm filled with mathematicians, engineers, and economists. After many months and an invoice for eighty grand, they come back with what they claim is the best negotiation-signaling system ever. They give you a little instruction manual. Now if you can just get your own people and the aliens to grasp it, you’ll be swimming in Guns N’ Roses acid-wash jeans for resale!
Well, that best-ever negotiation-signaling system is exactly what evolution gave us (although allowing negotiations vastly beyond the special case of acid-wash asset acquisitions). No fancy consulting firm was needed. And that “best-ever” negotiation-signaling system evolution gave us? You guessed it: it’s just our emotional expressions.
Our task in this book is easier than that of our fictional consulting firm. We don’t have to invent the perfect negotiation-signaling system from scratch. We only have to explain, after the fact, why the system we already have works as it does. How exactly does our repertoire of emotional expressions, and the underlying “grammar” shaping it, allow languageless social creatures to negotiate?
And This Is My Final Offer: Hints of Betting
You may be thinking, But isn’t negotiation kinda simple? It’s just a volley of compromise offers. What’s so interesting about that? And how can something so simple explain our enigmatic emotional expressions?
As we will see, there’s much more to negotiation than you may have realized. Even everyday negotiation at a yard sale is actually considerably more than just a “volley of compromise offers.”
Here’s a teaser of the complications we’re about to unpack in these pages. Imagine you’re trying to buy a house. You’ve gone back and forth a couple of times with the seller, hoping to get them to agree to your offer. The seller replied last, and you need to instruct your realtor on what to offer next.
What do you tell your realtor to do? Well, if you’ve been in such situations, you know that you often don’t merely tell them to convey the new offer. Instead, you ask them to convey, for example, that “any higher and the buyer is likely to walk.” Or, “and this is my buyer’s final offer.”
Alternatively, you might instead tell your realtor to convey that “the buyer is quite flexible and is looking forward to hearing back from the owner if she believes his offer is too low.”
So we see there’s more to negotiation than mere back-and-forth offers. Something else has snuck in. In fact, this other thing seems to express something almost . . . emotional. In both cases you’re making the same offer, but they feel emotionally quite different, with fundamentally different implications: “$207,000 is my final offer” and “$207,000 is my offer, but I’m totally open to suggestions” are the same offer—namely $207,000—but they differ . . . in something emotional.
Even seemingly simple negotiations aren’t so simple. They have at least two dimensions, not just one. There’s the offer, but also something like the level of seriousness of the offer. And notice that “serious” is an emotional expression.
The “this is my final offer!” sort of thing isn’t the only facet of negotiations that goes beyond a simple volley of compromises. There’s still quite a bit more to negotiation—stuff you know in your bones but don’t explicitly realize you know.
For example, as we move forward in the book, we’ll see that negotiation actually involves bets. That’s right. Negotiations amount to a variant of poker, where one bets a bit of one’s own reputation. This is crucial for understanding negotiation and especially for coming to a deep understanding of emotional expressions.
How could there be betting in negotiations? Think about the totality of what you’ve done when you instruct your realtor to tell the seller, “My client offers $207,000, and that’s their final offer.” By communicating that dramatic “final offer” part, you’ve stuck your neck out. You can feel it. Something is now at stake. If the seller accepts, all is good, and you’ll get back whatever you just bet. But if the seller doesn’t—oh my, that could be embarrassing! Especially if you can’t find another house that nice for such a low price, or if the seller finds another buyer willing to pay considerably more.
Yes. Buying a house is steeped with emotion. And, as we’ll see, the signals your realtor conveys—the price and level of seriousness—are emotional expressions. That’s exactly the sort of thing that emotional expressions do. And, just as you can end up putting some of your reputation at stake when you buy a house, reputation gets put on the line when we emotionally express.
The movies of social animals were never silent, but were, rather, filled with the looks and sounds of nature’s first language. Emotional expressions are haggle babble. This simple idea turns out to be incredibly powerful. It explains why we have the repertoire of emotional expressions that we do, what they mean, how they’re organized, why they can be so dramatic, and how those who can better employ emotional expressions are smarter in the ways that truly matter.
We will also be able to make sense of a variety of issues that don’t initially seem to have to do with emotional expressions at all. How exactly is it that some folks rise or fall in reputation? How are these social movements recorded and remembered within a social community? What determines what you really believe? What are social narratives? How do social communities stumble toward the truth? The story of our emotional expressions is the story of what it is to be a social animal, and the story of what a social community even is.
1Evidence is considerable that emotions are hundreds of millions of years old, existing among vertebrates and even some invertebrates. Lacking access to their introspective experience, researchers look for emotion-specific behavior and the expected physiological responses that accompany them.
2If you’re a shark expert and claim they actually do have some range of emotional expression, fine. We don’t want to pick on your favorite dead-eyed, horror-movie animal. Most of the animal world is non-social and non-expressive, so there are plenty of Nigels out there.