Lab Report #14: Facial Guesslighting
Findings from playing with our bodies' deceptions
Dear Ludic Liberators,
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Sorry this report is a few days late! I love to send it out on Friday, the day after the lab, but this time I had to do some follow-up investigations to fully integrate.
I feel these reports are getting darker. Every time we hold a Ludic Liberation Lab, no matter how neutral the topic and how innocent the play, I realize how manipulative all human games are. Why should that be a surprise? Games are by definition manipulative. They are designed to influence our behavior. We voluntarily submit to their constraints, because they also liberate us to act in ways we never would IRL. We’ll mime jumping on a pogo stick or make our climax face for a bunch of strangers because it’s a game!!! It’s fun!!!
On Thursday, we played with “body language.” Zoë invited us to subtly order each other’s movements and to obey those orders, to individuate and synchronize different expressions, to let our faces and bodies take on different shapes. On unfamiliar faces these familiar shapes triggered our old programmed responses. They asked us to reply to them with comfort, with empathy, with imploring, with laughter, with mimicry.
Asked to pay so much careful attention to other people’s facial expressions, I grew aware of how much I already always was. In between the games I watched for what the “resting” faces might be hiding: boredom, judgment, nervousness, loneliness, disgust. How versatile other people’s “neutral” expressions are, capable of containing literally all of my social fears! I also started becoming aware of how much more I preferred to see other people’s faces take on the prompted shapes of excitement, affection, desire, or even a performed, exaggerated sadness or rage. It was comforting knowing what a face was intending to do. I became uncomfortably aware how much not knowing what someone else is thinking and feeling distresses and terrifies me.
By the end of the lab, I realized I’ll never be able to really know what someone’s face or body is “saying.” I can only guess. And that means I can only project. And that means there’s a lot of room for ambiguity and interpretation, for gaslighting and manipulation. Bodies having a “language” means they also have a way to deceive, and many ways for the message to get lost in translation.
I used to like saying this to new people I was dating: "I don’t know what you’re thinking unless you tell me.” It was kind of a manipulation to get them to share an intimate feeling I wanted to hear out loud, but it was also a reminder to myself not to assume. Because I really don’t know what you’re thinking, unless you tell me.
Here are some of my observations from playing with body language:
Across the board, sadness and excitement were easier to perform on cue, perhaps because we are already used to performing them for others, they’re part of the repertoire of appropriate feelings, more comfortable to witness, triggering a readymade repertoire of practiced, performable replies.
Anger and desire felt harder to express and in turn to believe in our co-players, maybe we are less used to exaggerating them on purpose and allowing them in public. The shapes these emotions take (or overtake?) transform us unwillingly, and we’re probably more practiced in hiding them than openly showing them off.
It felt really good (powerful, pleasurable) to have my face be observed with intense curiosity, to feel the attention of others who tried really hard to guess what I might be trying to express. It felt less good (evaluative, humiliating) to be spotlighted and perform an unknown action or gesture on cue. It felt better when everyone had to do their own version of the gesture, the spotlight more distributed. This might not have been true for those who feel more practiced and comfortable with acting – more fluent in the body’s language and its deceptive arts, or those who simply feel more at ease with their own bodies on display.
An acute shape of sadness felt very difficult to not raise concern, even when we knew it was being play-acted. It made me realize how manipulative sadness is because it can powerfully influence our own emotional state – it demands a response, response-ability.
Excitement was inviting but in its way manipulative too. It forced you to join it or else resist it, to bring its intensity down to a more comfortable, medium level.
Overall, it felt both liberating and trapping to move, emote, and enact together. I thought of that psychology study conducted in waiting rooms, where undercover laboratory assistants pretend to be strangers and boredly start to throw a ball around to one another but intentionally don’t include the experimental subject. Even though it was just strangers throwing a stupid ball to each other in a waiting room, the study found that the excluded participants suffered a sustained emotional pain from the rejection, even after finding out the experiment was staged! We really would jump off a bridge if everyone else was doing it, as long as we felt invited to.
In my follow-up research, I found that only a minority of people’s faces accurately express their actual feelings! Most people’s faces are doing something else, including (intentionally or not) gaslighting other faces – using misdirection and contradiction to manipulate, confuse and make us doubt our own models of reality. Which, let’s be honest, are probably already distorted.
Something crazy that happened when I went to re-watch the recording of our lab to write this lab report: the faces on the screen appeared 80% more friendly and relaxed than I remembered them to be. Not that I really thought anyone appeared hostile or unhappy during the lab. But clearly, I wasn’t reading the room with an overwhelming bias for positivity. . .
I have social anxiety (surprise!). One way that manifests is through a cognitive bias – I misinterpret or overinterpret other people’s faces to communicate things I’m afraid of: judgement, disinterest, hurt that I might be responsible for. This doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it sends me into torturous mental loops, often accompanied with a garnish of self-judgement for being so boringly anxious in the first place.
In researching this phenomenon, I learned that entrepreneurial psychologists are creating all kinds of gamified trainings for this condition, called cognitive bias modification apps. The typical design involves having to filter through a sea of faces with different expressions and as quickly as possible pick out the friendly/happy one(s). The games can actually get pretty stressful, especially as at the higher levels the number of angry, unhappy, or uncertain faces increase and the time to make the selection shortens. The goal, I guess, is to train you to focus on the positive even when the overwhelming evidence is to the contrary. Which sounds kinda insane and a bootcamp for toxic positivity. No, thanks.
Another “game” you could play if you missed the lab or want to probe more into the phenomenon of facial guesslighting is this emotional intelligence quiz from Berkeley that asks you to guess what different facial expressions mean. I answered barely more than half of the questions “correctly,” and that was on faces that were trying to accurately represent the emotions, which we already know most faces don’t do! My mistakes had a pattern. I misinterpreted anger for pain (maybe it is?), happiness for politeness, fear for embarrassment. In other words, I repeatedly projected a layer of self-judgment, correction, and concealment onto other people’s faces, likely because that’s my own facial/social MO. I’m leaving this month’s lab feeling like I can’t ever trust my own perception or anyone else’s face ever again. Sorry, everyone.
There’s one exception, however. Apparently the most reliable facial expression is laughter, which is a pretty dependable as a sign of amusement. Perhaps that explains why even with my social anxiety, the social event I committed to organizing every month is a play lab. I expect the absurdity and surprise of our experiments will at least sometimes lead to this comfortable and pleasant and non-ambiguous shape that is so pleasurable to both observe and express.
Fifty-Five Forever,
Natalia
Game Maker/Destroyer
🗓 Don't miss any more labs! The Ludic Liberation Lab meets every 2nd Thursday of the month, 6-8:30pm Eastern Time, so add it to your calendar. WE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH ON APRIL 8th!
Do you have feedback and findings from your personal Lab experience that you want to contribute? Please send them to ludicliberation@gmail.com. The email is also where you should send proposals for future playful liberation experiments you’d love to conduct at the Lab! 🎲🔬
P.S. If you’re playing PLAYFUL YEAR GENERATOR and want to get together to reflect on your winter gameplay and make the next season’s deck, I’m going to hold space for that on Wednesday, April 31, 7pm EST. Just reply and let me know if you’re interested in joining! If you haven’t been playing but want to start, you can still join!
I’ve always had an inability to hide my emotions from my face, so I don’t even try. When I’m not trying to make a face and my brain’s going “don’t make a face don’t make a face don’t make a face” I am 100% making a face. For good or for ill I really wear my heart on my sleeve that way, and I’ve learned to live with having my feelings be extremely transparent.
Since COVID I’ve used face masks to my advantage - strategically donning them at work not to protect myself from illness, but to hide feelings of anger, disgust, frustration, or contempt from my superiors or employees.
Side note: I played that emotional intelligence quiz and scored 14/20. I’d argue a lot of my misses we less lack of emotional intelligence and more the people in the pictures being bad actors, so don’t feel to down on your ability to read people. If it were Meryl Streep doing the emotions we’d all been 20/20.