Why people from some countries don’t smile
UNCERTAIN ABOUT SITUATIONS Some countries thought you were less intelligent if you smiled, such as Russia, Japan and Iran...
Russians, Iranian and French people don’t smile much. Okay, that sounds prejudiced but bear with us. Kuba Krys, a psychologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, recently published a paper about “uncertainty avoidance”. A bad explanation for this term is the assumption that people from some societies feel anxiety around situations that are uncertain.
This is a characteristic found more frequently in societies, which are politically repressed, where schooling is respected and structured especially around sciences and where strong social norms are preferred. In addition corruption tends to be a little more prevalent and civil services tend to be a bit more unstable. Therefore, the paper argued that smiling in countries such as these, would be less welcome — a smiling face could be duplicitous. To test this, the study asked thousands in 44 countries to judge eight smiling and non- smiling faces.
The results were that some countries thought you were less intelligent if you smiled, such as Russia, Japan and Iran... while some thought you were less honest, like Argentina, Zimbabwe, Iran and Russia. The researcher concluded that this “indicates that corruption at the societal level may weaken the meaning of an evolutionary signal such as smiling.”
It’s an interesting theory, but the study also notes gender and culture play a role and that “the samples may not be fully representative of the cultures they come from”. The conclusion also read: “The role of smile intensity is also another ripe area for future research.”