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Transparency and the Friends Fallacy
- Bryan Carmichael
- Sep 13, 2020
- 9 min read
Updated: Sep 28, 2020
An analysis on the misleading concept of 'transparency'
Note: The concept and naming of the Friends Fallacy is the belonging of Malcolm Gladwell and the Friends producers.
Introduction
All emotions have expressions, but these expressions aren’t always used to show off the emotion. Often, people hide their emotions and say/act things they don’t mean. Other times, people may have expressions or looks that may seem to represent one thing but in actuality mean something completely different. This is the confusion of transparency. The concept where sometimes things aren’t what they seem on the first level.
Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Talking to Strangers, which I’ve also previously used in earlier articles, constructs a good case on what it is and why it is misleading. I will now attempt to redesign said case and re-explain it to make it arguably clearer than it already is.
What is the Friends Fallacy?
If any of you have seen Friends, you’d be indirectly aware of the Friends Fallacy. Have you noticed that a lot of the time when the characters are talking to each other, they’re facial expressions give away the way that they’re feeling? Like blatantly. If someone is unhappy, they display an exaggerated unhappy face, there is no possible way to mistaken that character’s emotions.
The example used in Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers is the scene where Ross finds out about Monica (his sister) and Chandler (his best friend)’s secret relationship. He storms into the apartment with an angry look on his face. He is end-of-the-spectrum angry.
“My best friend, and my sister! I cannot believe this.”
he rants.
Monica attempts to calm Ross down as Chandler cowers behind her. When he understands that the two really love each other, his emotions change completely and smiles as he exclaims,
“My best friend, and my sister! I’m so happy!”
So why is this a fallacy?
Well, suppose you’re walking down the street and you come across a woman who has been sulking behind the scenes because she just got dumped by her boyfriend. When in public, people often hide their negative emotions because of embarrassment, fear and just common etiquette. Nobody wants to be around a grump that they don’t know. Back to the woman, if she were to follow the Friends fallacy, she’d most probably be walking around weeping, or muttering to herself, or acting dejected. However, how many people have you seen in real life acting like that? Not many. It’s not that nobody on the street has been rejected, but simply that they’re hiding their true emotions in order to give themselves a better public image, which is perfectly understandable.
This, in turn, rejects what the Friends logic represents and contradicts everything that is portrayed in the TV show. Imagine if Ross had hidden his anger from Monica and Chandler, they might have kept on living not knowing that he secretly despised them together, which is a bad relationship to have with a sibling.
That’s one reason why people are open with those they’re close with so that there is no miscommunication or misunderstanding to them as to what you’re feeling. Some friendships are so close that they even start to think alike and make alike decisions resulting in a mental connection (read my previous article, Minor Telepathy, to find out more).
Another reason as to why Friends is a fallacy is the lack of universal signalling of a certain emotion. Studies have shown that in different cultures, their versions of happy, sad and other emotions are different from one another.
For example (as taken from Talking to Strangers), 113 Spanish school kids were surveyed and asked to answer what emotion they thought a certain face was showing. Among the kids, there was no difficulty among the group identifying the ‘Happy’ emotion, 100% voted for the smiling face. The majority for ‘Sadness’ and the pouting face was 98%, ‘Fear’ and the gasping face was 93%, ‘Anger’ with the scowling face was 91%, and ‘Disgust’ and the nose scrunching was 83%. By and large, they did well. When the same test was given to kids from the Trobriand Islands, their results were surprisingly different.
The Trobrianders, unlike the Spaniards and most of 1st world society, had trouble matching the correct face to the correct emotion, with the percentage of matching the smiling face and the happiness emotion being 58%. Pouting and 'Sadness' was 46%, 'Fear' and gasping was 31%, 'Anger' and the scowling face was a minuscule 7%, and the scrunched face with 'Disgust' was 25%. Can you believe that only 7% of the Trobrianders thought that the scowling face meant anger? The majority thought that the gasping face meant anger and another 20% thought that it was the smiling face. How ridiculous to us is that?
This is due to the fact that these two cultures were brought up differently and thus uses different facial expressions to determine different emotions. Therefore no facial expression can convey an emotion to all the different cultural groups.
How do we best describe transparency?
Putting the Friends Fallacy aside for a second, we now move on to the concept of transparency. Transparency is essentially when you have someone who looks a certain way but in reality, is a completely different person to what you thought.
Transparency occurs all around us and we hardly ever realise it. However, we often find when reflecting on an event that went wrong or something that didn’t go as planned, we find that we make mistakes at the moment due to transparency which we don’t see at the time.
This is common in sports games when we misjudge an opposing player in some way. For example, in the sport of rugby, wingers are usually the fastest players on the field, which as a result requires a thin and agile body structure. The bigger players (135 kg or so) usually play as front-rowers or loose forwards. However, there is a Fijian winger named Nemani Nadolo who weighs 137 kg (he’s huge!), and yet he’s still able to run like every other winger despite his size. Most people playing against him would attempt to run down his wing thinking he wouldn’t be able to catch them, but he not only is able to cover his wing, he is also able to hammer anybody who dares to run at him using his huge body size!
Bringing the topic back indoors, we can also apply transparency to scenarios where people are dishonest. Everybody is taught about the signs to detect a liar: twirling hair, stutter in the voice, blushing; the whole deal. However, these signs aren’t the most reliable ways to spot the lie either. My first article, Can we trust what we see and hear?, explains in detail the best ways to filter and process information and it’s largely based on content and the layout of said content. Facial expressions and vocal stutters are unreliable because of the simple but deadly trap of transparency.
Malcolm Gladwell, in Talking to Strangers, refers to a series of experiments to determine whether someone is truthing or lying based on facial expressions. In particular, the second subject he introduces is especially interesting.
Referred to as Nervous Nelly, when the interviewer asks her a series of questions, she twirls her hair, she randomly pauses when she speaks, she gets repetitive, she fidgets around. Everything about her according to her physical appearance screams, “She’s lying, just catch her already!” Even Gladwell was convinced she was lying… but she wasn’t. Everything that Nelly said to the interviewer was the unchanged truth. The entire audience of people watching her from the control room was baffled. She looked so afraid of every question and was acting as shady as you can get, yet she still told the truth.
Before anybody comes at me and says it might have been a one-off thing, it’s really not. This mistake is made all over society. In the workplace, in the courtroom, in the hospital, even in restaurants! The instant that somebody says, “I misjudged you”, they’ve realised that they’ve fallen for transparency and were mistaken about their thoughts of the person in question.
Why does transparency occur?
So why is transparency so important and why does it occur so often? This, unfortunately, isn’t something that is explained in Talking to Strangers, which is slightly sad because I believe that it is the most important part of the concept.
Our brains like to connect concepts. They will draw connections between anything and everything. If something may be related to another thing, our brains will try to relate the two things as well as they can. Much like Google Translate. We automatically assume that somebody is a certain way from the way that they act, which is completely normal I may add. It’s just misleading. However, this isn’t easy to fix, as it goes all the way back to the root psychology of our cognitive processing. In other words, transparency is cognitive.
Taking the example of twirling hair from earlier, kids originally twirled their hair as a method of calming anxiety, so naturally, as an adult, since people in interrogations often get anxious, they would twirl their hair as an instinct from their childhood. People who are liars are typically more anxious when being interrogated and thus tend to twirl their hair more often, leading to the conclusion in our brains that all people that twirl their hair are liars.
This of course isn’t true and is exactly why we can’t trust certain cognitive instincts such as body movements and fidgets. People who are guilty and innocent are both subject to fidgeting during interrogations which invalidates the method of detecting the liar.
This is the case for most other typical ‘lying’ gestures we see often. We naturally think that someone who is fidgeting is hiding something since we know it to be a sign of stress-relieving. However, as the sign has been connected and reconnected with other events and emotions, it has morphed into something far from its original meaning (much like Chinese Whispers), which confuses our brains and leads them to believe that the sign symbolises the morphed meaning rather than the true meaning.
What are the consequences of transparency?
Unfortunately, in extreme cases, transparency can cause negative life-altering decisions to certain people caught up in the wrong mess. This is the story of the Amanda Knox case.
Meredith Kercher was murdered in her home on 1 November, 2007. Her killer’s name was Rudy Guede and from an evidentiary standpoint, he’s most certainly the killer. He was in her house on the night of her murder, his DNA was found everywhere and he had a criminal record. You’d think he’d be the prime suspect considering he admitted to all of that and gave suspicious reasons as to why he was there in the first place. If you thought that, you were one step ahead of the police. Instead of focusing on investigating him and proving his guilt (which really isn’t hard seeing as he confessed to all of it already), they decided to interrogate Kercher’s roommate, Amanda Knox.
Amanda Knox was a beautiful young woman with high cheekbones and striking blue eyes by Gladwell’s description. She had a list of all her previous sexual partners and was nicknamed ‘Foxy Knoxy’. Gladwell described her as the femme fatale. She was even spotted the day after the murder at a lingerie shop purchasing new red underwear.
As it turned out, however, all those descriptions were not what they seemed. She wasn’t named ‘Foxy Knoxy’ due to her sexual appetite, it was given to her as a child from the way she played soccer, her sex partner list was only written because she was concerned that she was HIV positive and wrote down her sexual encounters to figure out who she may have gotten it from, and finally, she was purchasing new underwear because she wasn’t allowed into her home due to police restrictions meaning she had no clean clothes. She wasn’t the femme fatale, she was normal, doing normal people things in a normal sort of way.
“I was the quirky kid who hung out with the sulky manga-readers, the ostracized gay kids, and the theatre geeks,”
Gladwell quotes Knox from her 2011 memoir, Waiting to be Heard
Unfortunately for Knox, she served four years in an Italian prison before being acquitted. That’s the horrifying and sad truth about the consequences of being fooled by transparency.
How does transparency connect with the Friends Fallacy?
So how do these two concepts (one horrible and one entertaining) relate in detail? If we think of transparency as a spectrum, from least transparent to most transparent, Friends resides at the end of the spectrum at ‘most transparent’. As the name implies, there is no confusion in terms of emotion, everything is 100% clear (unless you’re living in the Trobriand Islands I guess). The fallacy part is on the other end of the spectrum (as it is the opposite of Friends) at ‘least transparent’. Nothing is as it seems and we’re always second-guessing.
Factually speaking, the Friends Fallacy is a form of transparency, the most extreme kind specifically. Every case of transparency lies somewhere on the spectrum of transparency, I’d personally classify Amanda Knox as a more extreme case and Nervous Nelly as a less extreme case, you get the picture. However subtly, wherever on the spectrum, transparency plays a crucial role and must be carefully accounted for when making decisions.
Conclusion
Congratulations on making it to the end of this article, I salute you. I hope that you have found the complex topic of transparency as interesting as I did writing this. Key points to take away: Looks aren’t what they seem, truth and meaning can be twisted so that is no longer truth nor meaning, and make sure to carefully account for all of transparency’s tricks when making decisions.
If you understand this topic, it is actually a very useful skill to have in mind when dealing with people you may be unsure about. Remembering what you have learned in this article will help you get around people you don’t know and also help you understand people you don’t know better.
A parting word from Malcolm Gladwell:
“Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.
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