CHAPTER SIX

Poker

Cool Hand Luke

In the classic 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke, there’s a prison poker scene where Luke, played by Paul Newman, gets everyone at the table to fold. When his losing opponents break protocol, flip his cards over, and realize he had a poor hand, Luke says, “Yeah, well . . . sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.”

Getting a bunch of rowdy prisoners to agree to anything isn’t easy. Getting them to admit inferiority is even more difficult. Yet Luke gets them all to agree that his hand is stronger than theirs. Their folds are just poker’s way of agreeing to Luke’s claim of card superiority. (Whether they believe Luke is another matter. I might believe Luke is probably 90 percent lying but be unwilling to expose myself to even a 10 percent chance of losing that much prison money.)

Not only does Luke manage to get a cage of cagey, violence-prone prisoners to agree to his claim, he does so without seemingly doing anything! He doesn’t argue, plead, or threaten. He simply sits there, completely expressionless; language not even required. That’s quite a feat!

As far removed as poker might seem from the emotionally expressive lives of social animals, there are surprising and deep connections, as we’ll see in this chapter. When we emotionally express ourselves, we’re actually betting! And, once we wrap our heads around how this can be the case, we’ll be able to see how our emotional expression system for negotiating compromises can deal with a glaring difficulty that we have thus far been quiet about.

Lying

At the end of chapter three we realized that social animals sometimes say the darnedest things. That means they need the ability to correct one another during a negotiation. Chapter four set out to deal with the issue. Because you might be incorrect about your claimed level of confidence (e.g., your pride expression might be incorrect), I need to be able to correct you.

As we thought that through, we came to the conclusion that I have to express not just my claim about my confidence, but also my claim about what your confidence about your belief is (using emotional expressions in the respect-disdain continuum). Then you do the same. Then I do it again. Each back-and-forth turn also amounts to an offer of a compromise, namely the compromise at the horizontal position where the two signaled curves cross.

Each is claiming that this is a fair compromise with some level of seriousness (an implicit threat about how close things are to a fight). No, this is a fair compromise. And so on. We called each of these two-pronged responses a “response.”

Except . . . there’s still a huge hole in our idea. We mentioned that Mark might have to correct Tim because Tim might be mistaken. But we failed to mention (or only briefly hinted at) one really obvious problem: Tim might be mistaken on purpose. Tim might be telling, uhm, falsehoods.

Tim might be . . . lying! Mark, too.

What’s missing thus far is honesty. Being able to correct one another may seem like a good idea, but it’s no help if the parties have no intent on being honest. Each party’s corrections could just be lies upon lies! What in anything we’ve developed so far prevents the two parties from simply lying and saying their reasons are much stronger than they actually are?

Back in chapter three we dispensed with reasons because they’re so complicated and require language. At least reasons have the advantage that, in principle, they are logically connected to their strengths. In a reason-filled discussion, the parties might be able to exaggerate the strength of a reason, but they can’t simply say whatever level of strength they wish. Reasons wear their strengths on their sleeves, at least in principle.

Having abandoned reasons in favor of levels of confidence, we seem to have no way to prevent the parties from lying without restraint.

Honestly! How could we have missed that?

Of course, we didn’t fail to notice the huge hole of honesty. Initially we were just being polite, avoiding accusing these two nice authors—and all social animals generally—of being the sort of creatures who might intentionally say something other than the full and total truth. We also avoided mentioning liars because we just weren’t ready to talk about them yet. But we are now.

In light of liars, the million-dollar question for social animals is now, “How can languageless lying social animals come to a compromise?”

One kind of answer to this question is that animals sometimes have something called “honest signals,” signals that, by virtue of the way the signal is displayed, provide evidence of the meaning of the signal.

For example, our human (and many other primates’) skin changes its color, undergirding blushes, blanches, flushes, and so on. In order to signal red skin, my blood needs to be oxygenated, and thus I need to be strong. If I’m so winded I’m about to collapse, I cannot show skin that is as red and will instead look pale.¹ Red skin, then, is an example of an honest signal for “I’m strong.” Similarly, some animals show their strength by revealing or showcasing their size, or the deepness of their voice, which correlates with size.

There are lots of varieties of honest signals, but there is one big difficulty with them for our purposes. The emotional expressions we’re setting out to explain do not seem to be honest signals in this technical sense. Emotional expressions are often under a considerable degree of voluntary control. That is, they can be faked. You can choose to look as proud as you want, regardless of your actual confidence. That’s acting! Honest signals can’t help us with the “liar” issue because our emotional expressions are mostly not honest in this specific, technical, “the stimulus itself provides evidence of honesty” sense.

General Purpose

One reason why honest signals don’t make up the lion’s share of our ancient emotional expressive system is that honest signals aren’t domain general—i.e., useful in a large variety of contexts. Red skin may provide evidence that I’m honest about my claim that I can continue to fight and kick your behind, but it’s specific to disagreements where my cardiovascular conditioning level, relative to yours, decides the matter. Each honest signal is honest for one specific variety of thing—deep voices for larger size, and so on.

Cardiovascular conditioning and size are big deals evolutionarily, no doubt, and worth having specific honest signals for. But social animals have wide ranges of disagreements, with wide varieties of fights to settle them. That may be why social animals have emotional expressions that aren’t honest in that technical sense: because social animals need a general language for negotiating compromises for all sorts of disagreements.

So, how do social creatures deal with the issue of dishonesty?

The solution, or partial solution, as we will see, is one of the most exciting and deep things about emotional expressions. It fundamentally alters how we think about our daily expressive selves.

Communicating with Chips

We started this chapter with Cool Hand Luke’s poker acumen, and by hinting that poker is key to helping us understand emotional expressions. It’s especially crucial for solving the issue of liars.

But how can this peculiar, human-invented betting game be at all informative for one of life’s deepest mysteries? While it may initially seem far removed from real life, social life is teeming with poker metaphors: he doubled down; she’s keeping her cards close; Jane has the better hand; John folded like a wet noodle; I kept a straight face but she called me on it.

In its defense, then, poker does seem to have something to do with social interaction, which is also the realm of emotional expressions. Without getting into the details of poker, is there something about the game that might give us at least a vague idea about why it might have such an intuitive connection with social life?

In the broadest sense, one can view poker as a game about coming to an agreement about whose cards are stronger and doing so without necessarily having to “fight about it,” which would be to reveal the cards and thereby the truth. Poker players and social creatures both often wish to settle their disagreement without a fight. In fact, as we’ll see, poker isn’t merely vaguely related in some way to social life; our system of emotional expressions is actually a variety of poker.

But if poker somehow explains emotional expressions, there’s a difficulty we encounter right out of the gate. Where are the emotional expressions in poker? Poker players can be notoriously straight-faced, and players are usually advised to hide their emotions. And a lot of poker in the modern era occurs online, where expressions aren’t even possible. How can poker somehow help us in understanding emotional expressions if it’s the game without any?!

If there are somehow emotional expressions being expressed in poker (even online), they must somehow be found in the game play of poker itself. Could there be poker moves that serve as emotional expressions?

There’s Nothing to Poker but Bets

One of the elegant features of poker is that there aren’t many kinds of moves. Whereas chess has a wide variety of qualitatively different moves one can choose from, poker has just one kind of move: a bet. Cool Hand Luke may have been expressionless and not lifted a finger in threat, but he did indeed lift a finger to bet. He bet a dollar (a lot in prison in those days) on three different occasions, placing it in the pot, accompanied by him redundantly and unemotionally saying, “Kick a buck,” meaning “I raise a dollar.” That’s all Luke did: bet, bet, and bet.

Therefore, if there are emotional expressions in poker, then they’d have to be expressed by the bets themselves. There’s nowhere else they could be!

Could each of Luke’s bets have somehow amounted to an emotional expression?

Initially that sounds mighty strange. Bets are pushing chips out onto the poker table, whereas emotional expressions are . . . well . . . nothing like that!

Yet, consider what a bet actually means. Bets convey confidence. That’s in fact all a bet conveys! The bigger my bet, the more my expressed confidence (that my cards are stronger than yours).

And what kind of thing is confidence? It’s an emotion. In fact, it’s the basic emotionally expressive building block of all the emotional expressions we saw in the previous chapters. Pride and humility are emotional expressions of my confidence, and respect and disdain are emotional expressions about your confidence. And the acknowledgment expressions like happy and unhappy confirm that I got your confidence-related response expression.

Bets are emotional expressions because bets convey confidence. Furthermore, bets not only convey confidence but do so in a manner that helps solve the difficulty of liars.

Somewhat Honest

If you’re playing poker with potato chips rather than money, folks at the table are much looser with their bets (unless they’re the really tasty salt-and-vinegar variety, or the players are exceedingly hungry). They might be willing to bet a lot on a very bad hand. It’s barely even possible to convey high confidence with a bet in this case, not without bringing a shipping container filled with a million bags of potato chips.

But if you’re playing with real money, it’s possible to fairly honestly convey a lot of confidence. If your buddy bets fifty dollars at a friendly poker gathering that he’s confident his hand is better than yours, you need to take seriously the idea that he may be telling the truth as you might suddenly be out at least fifty bucks. Bets not only convey confidence, but, as long as what is being bet is dear, convey it with some propensity for honesty because there’s the potential for a penalty for lying. That’s a possible answer to the liar riddle—how social animals can negotiate without everyone saying whatever they like!

But Betting What?

Can it be that, when we emotionally express confidence—whether my confidence (pride-humility) or your confidence (respect-disdain)—we’re engaging in bets? And bets of some sort of currency deemed valuable by social animals?

If that somehow were the case, we’d not only have the emotional expressions of confidence we need to negotiate, but they’d come with just the right “trick”—bets of a valuable currency—to make the discussion honest.

Could it be that social animals were playing poker millions of years before humans even existed and fooled themselves into thinking they invented the game? Could our suite of emotional expressions be the palette of possible poker moves one can play in a poker game of life, each of them a kind of bet conveying a type of confidence that allows somewhat honest languageless negotiation?

If social animals somewhat honestly convey confidence by engaging in a bet of something dear, what are these bets?

It seems almost preposterous that we’re all betting when we emotionally express ourselves . . . and that it’s a variant of poker. After all, many of us barely even know how to play poker, and a lot of our readers just aren’t that into it.

But whether or not you like poker, you’re actually very good at it. You’ve evolved to be good at it. It’s not enough to simply have emotional expressions as something you can do. To truly use those emotional expressions requires grasping—in your bones—how to play your cards, when to bet, when to back down, when to hold them, when to fold them, and when to call. You may not be a poker aficionado, but you’ve got poker guru software running in your head. You were blessed with a poker instinct, and only with that evolution-granted capability can you effectively negotiate your social habitat. It’s your skill in the poker game of life that determines how socially smart you are.

Putting the “Social” in “Social Animal”

The bets emanate from an important property of social animals we haven’t yet leveraged: that social animals in need of compromise are . . . social! It’s time to put the “social” in “social disagreement.”

In social networks, folks are watching and remembering. People acquire reputations over time for how correct they have been. Because people in your social community are tracking your rightness, there are incentives for honesty. If I disagree with you, and it turns out I was wrong, that will be held against me. My overall level of rightness will lower in the eyes of the community. And the more vehemently I disagree with you, the lower I’ll be.

This “level of rightness” is a kind of currency. It’s the “dollar” of the social animal world, something you rely on. It won’t lose its value, and it will be accepted within your community. This social currency is often called social capital or reputation. And it’s what we’re betting in any negotiation because it’s inherently dear or important.

Because folks in your social community are tracking your reputation, and because being incorrect in the eyes of the community is costly in reputation, disagreeing amounts to betting. If I am found to be wrong in my claim disagreeing with you, I will lose reputation and thus lower my standing. And my disagreeableness (and subsequent wrongness) not only lowers my standing upon being incorrect, but because you were correct, it raises yours.

To disagree is to put some social capital on the line. If you disagree with my claim, you, too, have placed an implicit bet of social capital. Back and forth we go, as the community watches. One must dare—bet—to be disagreeable. And the more disagreeable I am, the more social capital I have implicitly bet. That’s what keeps one (somewhat) honest.

If being disagreeable amounts to a bet, being agreeable is the opposite. I am being agreeable if I say that I’m less certain than you claimed I am, or if I say that you’re more certain than you claimed. In both cases I am consequently suggesting a better compromise for you than what you suggested.

Folks in the community remember that I’m the type to admit when I’m wrong or admit that the other has a good point. That I’m open to criticism. That I’m open to complimenting others. Being agreeable doesn’t put social capital at stake (a bet) but, rather, it pulls social capital off the table (an unbet, something not possible in the rules of standard poker).

If your social community consists of folks lacking memory, you can disagree all you want, with no worry about whether what you claim is correct. No one will ever remember all the times you were humiliatingly wrong. Humiliation—or loss of social capital due to being wrong—just can’t happen. Being agreeable doesn’t amount to unbets among such memoryless folk either, because you can’t build a nice reputation when for all practical purposes you don’t have a reputation.

But social communities do have memories, and reputations have to be built, one social currency chip at a time. In fact, this feature is the key to the very idea of a social animal in the first place. Being a “social animal” isn’t merely being one among a bunch of animals living together. To be a social animal, the creatures—and the community—must be able to keep track of everyone’s reputation.

Emotional Expressions Are Bets

For social animals, the disagreements occur through negotiation and are done via response emotional expressions that shift the offered compromise. Therefore, if emotional expressions are disagreements (or agreements), and disagreements in a social community amount to bets of social capital, then emotional expressions amount to bets!

Confidence is the one thing a bet can convey. So, in fact, it’s not merely that emotional expressions of confidence occur and are trustworthy because they come along with a bet.

Rather, the bet itself is what gives an emotional expression the meaning of confidence in the first place.

Disagreeable Bet

Fine. We can all see how one can lose social capital by being found to be incorrect in a claim—that’s embarrassment or humiliation. And we can also all see how that means that making a disagreeable claim amounts to a bet of social capital.

But how big is a bet in any given claim? If you emotionally express moderate pride and high disdain, does this total response emotional expression amount to a fairly determinate bet amount? It all seems so imprecise!

However, we can quantify exactly how disagreeable any given “move” in a negotiation is. We’re not saying social animals have a down-to-the-third-decimal-place appreciation of how much social capital they’re betting when they disagree. We are saying that our theory, however, provides an answer, the moral of which is that social animals can get an approximate idea about how much social capital has been bet. This bet amount can be seen and tracked by the social community witnessing it as well.

The size of the bet is directly dependent on how disagreeable an emotional expression is. So, really, our question is: How do we determine how disagreeable any given emotional expression is? Or, equivalently, how disagreeable is any given response in a negotiation?

If, for example, Mark gives a response emotional expression amounting to saying he’s more confident than Tim suggested, the disagreeableness of that expression depends on two things.

First, and most obviously, the more Mark horizontally shifts the offered compromise, the more disagreeable, or agreeable, the response emotional expression is. “I’d like sixty percent of the zucchini bread” is more disagreeable than “I’d like fifty-one percent.” If you do a longer volley in the negotiation’s volley of offers, then you’ll become more disagreeable or agreeable, depending on which direction, aggressive or conciliatory, you’re hitting the ball. “You have no idea how Judy wanted it split” is more disagreeable than “You may be somewhat overestimating what you know about Judy’s intent.”

Second, and less obviously, it depends on where the previous offer was vertically in the negotiation space. If Tim’s previous response left the negotiation at low tension, then any horizontal shift Mark does will be low in disagreeableness (or agreeableness). If Tim’s previous response instead put the negotiation at a high tension, then that same horizontally shifted offer Mark might now make will be much greater in disagreeableness (or agreeableness). If the buyer tells you (the seller), “This is my final offer,” even a small push-back by you will be deemed very disagreeable.

It’s fairly intuitive that things get more disagreeable—and thus more poker-like—as the tension rises, but fully grasping why, and by how much, is more technical. One simple way to begin to grasp why things are more disagreeable at higher tension is that horizontal shifts are disagreeable (or agreeable) to the extent that the tension changes. If you recall from chapter four, when tension is low, the curves in the diagrams are very shallow hills (i.e., almost flat), and so the crossover (fair compromise) point does not much change in height for small horizontal shifts (when one confidence curve rises or lowers). If the tension doesn’t much change when you make a new offer, then there’s not much of a change in our likelihood of a fight, and so there mustn’t be much of anything disagreeable (or agreeable) about your new offer. (See appendix section “Measured Disagreeableness” for more details.)

The key conclusion is this:

When things are more tense, all the disagreements are amplified.

And because how much social capital is bet by an emotional expression is proportional to how disagreeable the expression is:

When things are more tense, emotional expressions amount to larger bets.

Social Capital Is Energy

Not only will these disagreeablenesses—and the bets of reputation they correspond to—help us get a deeper understanding of what’s going on when we socially interact via emotional expressions, but they give us a more profound insight into the relationship between social capital and our power to emotionally express and get our way.

To see why, recall in chapter three that we talked about how each party in a disagreement can be thought of as pushing: their wills reach out and push against one another, a kind of psychosocial force that was directly analogous to springs. That allowed us to view a pair of opposing disbelief curves as a pair of opposing springlike force curves, which end up at an equilibrium. That equilibrium point is the fair compromise.

Well, it turns out that the disagreeableness of a response has a physics meaning in the context of springs. In order to understand this, though, now we have to imagine that the springs are able to have their stiffnesses changed. For example, perhaps there’s some kind of rotary mechanism, and I can wind the rotor and the spring stiffens or unwind it and the spring gets less stiff.

So, with such a mechanism, imagine that one of the springs gets stiffer. It thereby pushes more strongly and shifts the equilibrium position in its preferred direction. But making that spring stiffer, and moving the equilibrium position, requires energy. In this imagined case, the energy comes from me, who has to wind up the mechanism that stiffens the spring. In physics we say that I would have to do work, a precise term only vaguely related to the everyday notion of work. If instead I were to unwind the rotary mechanism and lower the spring’s stiffness, the spring would relax, pushing less forcefully, and the equilibrium would move in the other spring’s favored direction. Work would have been “done on me,” we say in physics. Stiffening versus unstiffening a spring is akin to the difference between lifting a weight up and lowering it down.

But the interesting thing here is that the energy I would have to use to stiffen the spring is actually measured in exactly the same manner disagreeableness is measured (as discussed in the appendix section “Measured Disagreeableness”). And that, in turn, means that, in the analogy of disagreements to a pair of springs pushing against one another, social capital is like energy! To move the spring system requires using energy, and to move the claimed fair compromise value in a negotiation (by changing the steepness of a disbelief curve) requires using (i.e., betting) social capital.

Social capital (or reputation) is the energy of the social world.

Price of Social Disagreement

We have seen that higher tension means that more social capital must be bet in order to disagree. In addition to the observation that social capital is like social energy, there’s another nice consequence coming from the physical springs analogy—an economic one.

One way to define force is the amount of energy required to move an object over a distance. When we say that a force is needed to move something, we’re equivalently saying that energy will be required to move that thing. In physics, force can be given units of energy per distance, like joules/cm.

In this light, our vertical axis—which, recall, is a psychosocial force—can instead be thought of as saying that a certain amount of social energy is needed in order to move the compromise horizontally. We could say it’s measured in jools/cm-of-zucchini-bread, where “jools” is our made-up name for a unit of social capital. The higher up along the vertical axis, the more energy is needed to move the compromise horizontally.

The useful “economic” interpretation we hinted at comes from the fact that both social capital (jools) and zucchini bread are valuable to us. We all want to have a high reputation. Having all that social capital allows us to more easily disagree in discussions and get the other party to agree to our terms. But zucchini bread is also valuable; if it were not valuable, then compromise wouldn’t have been an issue in the first place!

Because the y-axis has units of jools/cm-zucchini-bread (it measures social capital divided by zucchini bread) and both the numerator and denominator are valuable to the participants in the discussion, we can view it as a price, namely how much one would have to bet in social capital in order to get a centimeter of zucchini bread. We might call it the social price of disagreement.

If the discussion gets more tense, it means one party believes the price of zucchini bread is high in social capital, meaning it subsequently takes a larger bet of reputation for the other party to budge the compromise in their favored direction. That’s why if I say, “and this is my final offer,” and you ask for even a wee bit more of the loaf, you’ve chosen to spend (or put at stake) a lot of reputation for that wee bit more.

In addition to an attempt at finding a compromise, these discussions are therefore also about the price in wagered social capital of the thing being argued over. If a compromise is found, it will be one having a certain tension (or social price). In a sense, it’s a super-micro-market consisting of just Tim and Mark. If they come to agree that Tim should get 55 percent of the loaf, they’re also ending at some social price, say 11.3 jools/cm-of-zucchini-loaf. That informs the social community about the value (in social capital) of portions of zucchini loaves.

We can now think of the vertical axis as a “social price.” Prices, of course, change depending on supply and demand.

The social price of zucchini bread is itself something to be negotiated! It depends on the supply of and demand for zucchini bread, where in this case the supply and demand curves concern Mark and Tim’s confidence curves . . . or how hard their wills are pushing.

Such negotiations are ultimately the atoms of economies. It is by virtue of trillions of negotiations that the macroscopic supply and demand curves are determined. But at the bottom, there are always two parties finding their way to a deal. Each of these trillions of deals essentially gets there via emotional expressions.

The atoms of an economy are emotional expressions.

Aggressive Bet

Emotional expressions are, we have argued, shifts—or “moves”—within the negotiation. If I suggest a better deal for myself via an emotional expression of aggressive, I am being disagreeable. And that means I’m betting social capital.

But does an emotional expression of aggressive really amount to a bet?

Here’s the simple test. Just ask yourself whether it’s possible to be embarrassed by making that expression. For aggressive, imagine I convey “I should get a better deal” via an aggressive emotional expression, but later everyone learns that I was wrong. I was demanding 60 percent of the zucchini loaf, and eventually the owner had to be brought in from her veggie vacation and inform everyone that, “No, not at all,” I was only supposed to get 40 percent, even less than your most recent offer.

That’s the hallmark of humiliation: claiming something in my favor and then being roundly shown to be wrong in front of everyone.

Pride and disdain both have an aggressive component (recall the earlier Figure 20) and should therefore also amount to a bet. Showing pride amounts to saying, “I’m more confident than you suggested,” and ending up wrong (or backing down later in the negotiation) is indeed embarrassing. Disdain is the same, but it’s embarrassing not because I incorrectly said I am so great, but because I said you were not so great. “You’re less confident than you suggested.” Or “You don’t know jack.” Say things like this, and end up being found incorrect, and it’s humiliating . . . or so we’ve been told.

Pride, disdain, and aggressive are in the territory of trash-talk. Trash-talk is notoriously a double-edged sword. Trash-talk and win, and you might not only get your claimed share of the zucchini bread but also a healthy satchel full of your opponent’s social capital (if you managed to coax him to reciprocate with trash-talk). But if you’re found to be wrong—or back down later in the negotiation—your opponent leaves with a pile of your social capital, their reputation augmented at your expense.

Conciliatory Bet

Where the aggressive emotional expression (and pride and disdain, which each have an aggressive horizontal component) amounts to a bet, aggressive’s opposite, conciliatory—“You should get a better deal”—amounts to an unbet.

First note that you’re “safe” from humiliation if you’re conciliatory. You’re being nice and friendly, the opposite of trash-talk. But not only are you safe from embarrassment, imagine that you had, moments before, been aggressive, asking for more—a bet—before realizing you were wrong. To emotionally express conciliatory is to be agreeable. It unbets some or all of your earlier disagreeableness. It takes some social capital that you had bet off the table. In the eyes of the gossipy and judgy social community, you’re deemed less disagreeable thus far in the negotiation by virtue of having been conciliatory.

Respect and humility each have a horizontal component of conciliatory. They’re both friendly, agreeable, and amount to an unbet. They’re in fact the two distinct ways of being agreeable: complimentary to you (respect) and critical of myself (humility). These three friendly emotional expressions are all unbets for these reasons.

Niceties

Emotional expressions can be bets! At first it sounded a little crazy to suggest we were betting when we emotionally expressed. But indeed we must be. That’s why emotional expressions of aggressive put you at risk of being embarrassed, whereas expressions of conciliatory do not.

That’s one reason your parents told you to be nice! Pride, aggression, and disdain might get you what you want sometimes, but they can be a recipe for humiliation. That’s the path to being a jerk. Respect, conciliatory, and humility on the other hand may give away some of what you could have gotten but are a safe way to accumulate positive reputation in the long run (or at least not waste a lot of social capital on one ill-advised dispute).

That’s the left and right of things. Leftward was disagreeable (aggressive) for Mark, and rightward agreeable (conciliatory). Horizontal shifts concern bets and unbets and fit our emotional expressions very well.

Serious and Casual

But what about the up and down of things? Do the upward-directed response emotional expressions actually raise the level of poker-likeness (or raise the social price of disagreement, as we discussed earlier)?

Suppose you and I are in a negotiation and I suddenly get serious. As we discussed earlier, I’m saying that I’m getting closer to giving up on negotiating with you, and I might just fight about it instead. But along with this raised tension, in this chapter we further realized that there’s an additional consequence, one on the betting side. When the tension level increases in a negotiation, the disagreement becomes more disagreeable, more poker-like.

So if I emotionally express serious, have I actually made things more poker-like (or raised the social price of disagreement)? That does fit the emotional expression serious very well. “I am not messing around!”

If I emotionally express casual, on the other hand, I’m not only saying I’m less likely to fight, but also that you’re more able to disagree with me without it counting as disagreeable. I’m saying, “Let’s make this less like poker. Just relax and talk to me. Here’s a light refreshment.”

An expression of casual versus serious is the difference between chatting at a bar versus chatting in front of a judge. When things are casual, the parties can banter back and forth aggressively and it’s not disagreeable at all. Only a negligible amount of social capital is put at stake. When things are casual, even disdainful comments aren’t mean. Over a beer I can get away with telling you you’re full of crap. But in front of a judge, it’s a whole different ball game!

The vertical axis of negotiation gets at the formality of the negotiation. It shows what your realtor is conveying by telling the seller that “this is my client’s final offer”—an emotional expression of serious. Not only does it mean I’m close to walking away from the negotiation (a fight), but it means that if they, the seller, do counter again rather than accepting, then that would amount to one helluva ballsy and disagreeable response, something that could embarrass them later if the parties abandon negotiation, say, and I find a similar house less than or equal to the price the seller just offered. (Realtors are gossipy.)

In addition to the earlier meanings of the emotional expressions of serious versus casual, we’ve ended up with poker-bet implications. Neither corresponds to a bet or unbet, but, instead, to how poker-like the negotiation will be for the next respondent.

Serious isn’t the only serious emotional expression. Remember that, although pride and respect push in my and your favor, respectively, they both have an upward component of serious. They should therefore share the poker-like nature of serious.

Suppose I arrogantly say, “Do you even know who I am!?” This is a way of saying that I must be more justifiably confident (and worthy of respect) than what you have thus far claimed. If I do this, though, not only can you feel that I’m closer to fighting about it, but also that if you dare disagree now, that disagreement—and its corresponding bet of reputation—will be more amplified than before I raised the level of seriousness.

And a similar thing happens if, rather than me blowing my own horn, I blow yours. “You are the best! You’re always right. Respect, dude.” Now I’ve been so nice and complimented you so resoundingly that you barely dare ask for more, even if you originally felt you should get more. Asking for that extra slice will look really disagreeable now, given my strong emotional expression of respect. Sure, in showing you respect, I was conciliatory and gave up some zucchini loaf. But by raising the level of seriousness, I might have placated you enough so that you won’t even ask for more. (This is sometimes called, ahem, “butt kissing.”)

Humility and disdain, on the other hand, despite pushing horizontally in opposite directions, both have a downward component of casual. If I emotionally express humility, you feel more open to continued negotiation. You’re able to disagree without it making waves. And if I instead emotionally express disdain, despite it being not nice, it gives you an easier excuse, so to speak, to counter-respond without making large social capital bets because I’ve basically insulted you. “Excuuuuse me?! Oh no you didn’t!” you might reply. By showing you disdain, I’m almost asking for a comeback. And if you do make a comeback, folks in the community won’t hold it against you as much because I “brought it on myself.” When a negotiation becomes more casual, the back-and-forth becomes freer and easier. Less thought needs to be given to each response as there’s less being put at stake.

The Many Faces of “And This Is My Final Offer”

Recall that the y-axis of our negotiation diagrams originally was the “inverse of the good-deal probability.” Then it was “disbelief” that it was a good deal. Then we found that it was a psychosocial “force” (or tension) that a belief pushes due to its certainty level. That, we found in turn, corresponds to how likely the emotionally expressing party is to quitting the negotiation and instead fighting about it—the whole “and that’s my final offer” stuff we hinted at in chapter one. And earlier in this chapter we saw that it also can be interpreted as the price of social disagreement, or how much social energy must be put at stake to shift the compromise. This is basically how poker-like the negotiation has become.

That vertical axis sure does have a lot of interesting but equivalent meanings!

But there’s another!

The higher my response expression raises the tension (i.e., the more it has a component of serious, the vertical, up-shifting response emotional expression), the more you’re under pressure to be honest in whatever you express next.

Why? Because I’ve raised the poker-likeness of the negotiation—it now requires more social capital being put on the line for you to be able to disagree. If I emotionally express serious, I’m not merely saying, “I’m closer to fighting about this,” I’m also saying, “If you disagree now, I will deem that to be more disagreeable (than what we would have considered it at the tension level you had previously set).” I’m saying, “If I were you, I would choose your next words very carefully.” That’s just to say, “Be honest!”

It’s not so much that emotional expressions are bets of social capital and that those bets keep us somewhat honest. More carefully, the y-axis determines the extent to which there’s a pressure for honesty at all. If you keep the negotiation very casual, you’re “deciding” to not have a very honest discussion.

This enigmatic vertical axis is the axis that keeps on giving. We have at least eleven ways of thinking about it thus far, and we’ve summarized them in Figure 35.

Figure 35. The horizontal axis in negotiation is just the thing the two parties are trying to compromise over, like a zucchini loaf. Making sense of the vertical “and that’s my final offer” axis is what’s crucial for getting beyond that simple volley-of-offers understanding of a negotiation. As we have fleshed things out over the recent chapters, we have realized that that one axis has a number of different, but equivalent, meanings.

Bigger Than Poker

The compromise signaling system we’ve built really is just a variant of poker, a generalization of sorts. But how different is it?

Where poker is a half of one dimension, our system for accommodating general negotiation is two-dimensional (setting aside the acknowledgments). Let’s walk through this.

In poker, you can only bet; you’re not allowed to unbet. Because of that, traditional poker doesn’t even quite have the full horizontal compromise dimension. It has only half. Negotiation, however, has the full horizontal dimension, which consists of bets and unbets.

But negotiation has one entire dimension beyond that. In poker terms, one can not only bet or unbet in regard to my confidence but also do so in regard to your confidence. It’s as if there are, then, two piles of my chips at the center of the table: one for how confident I say I am, and one for how totally not confident I say you are.

This version of poker isn’t actually played in Vegas, of course, but its credentials go back millions of years, having the needed extra freedom for negotiating compromises. (See the final appendix section, “Poker Generalized,” for a more thorough walk-through of the Poker Game of Life that is negotiation.)

Line up, social animals! We can now train you to use this fundamental, compromise-finding language, the one used by our alien band paraphernalia-trading partners way back in chapter one! And it doesn’t even feel like a language so much as a game—a betting game just like poker.

Except that social animals don’t need to learn how to play this game. Evolution already discovered it long ago, and we’ve been playing the Poker Game of Life for millions of years! We have the expressions, the bets, the springy machinery. All of it.

Emotional expressions have bets hidden inside them. In a sense, you already know this because you totally appreciate that you can get humiliated, and more so the more you trash-talk during a disagreement. Each of those “trash-talks”—a variety of emotionally expressing yourself—amounts to a bet of social capital. The zingier the trash-talk (including the use of curse words!), the bigger the bet. And if your opponent is the one who got humiliated, you know in your bones that you just got “awarded” social capital. You can almost feel yourself raking all the reputation chips over to your corner of the table.

It’s these bets that give emotional expressions their confidence interpretation in the first place, because that’s all a bet can mean. And it’s these bets that explain why social animals at least tend to be honest. Otherwise the entire emotional expressive system would crash down like a house of non-oomphy cards.

¹ The ability to see variations in the oxygenation of blood under the skin is why we have red-green vision in the first place, an earlier discovery by one of us discussed in an earlier book, The Vision Revolution.