people who were lying,” his son Mark recalls. “He actually
wrote the producer at one point to say it was too easy, and the
man invited him to come to New York, go backstage, and show
his stuff.” Virginia Demos, who teaches psychology at Harvard,
recalls having long conversations with Tomkins during the 1988
Democratic National Convention. “We would sit and talk on the
phone, and he would turn the sound down while, say, Jesse
Jackson was talking to Michael Dukakis. And he would read the
faces and give his predictions on what would happen. It was
profound.”
Paul Ekman first encountered Tomkins in the early 1960s.
Ekman was then a young psychologist just out of graduate
school, and he was interested in studying faces. Was there a
common set of rules, he wondered, that governed the facial
expressions that human beings made? Silvan Tomkins said that
there was. But most psychologists said that there wasn’t. The
conventional wisdom at the time held that expressions were
culturally determined — that is, we simply used our faces
according to a set of learned social conventions. Ekman didn’t
know which view was right, so, to help him decide, he traveled
to Japan, Brazil, and Argentina — and even to remote tribes in
the jungles of the Far East — carrying photographs of men and