Large smiles and competency levels

Smile for the camera,” they said. “It will make you seem more approachable.” And so you try to coax a toothy grin from resistant facial muscles, while your tortured and uncomfortable eyes stare back at the camera.

This is usually the mantra of the work photographer (or school photographer — it is an indignity that did not end with matriculation), but this is not necessarily good advice, particularly if you are trying to sell someone something. A new study out of the University of Kansas in the US has found that while smiling does make you appear friendlier, it makes people think you are less useful at what you do.

“We found that broad smiles lead people to be perceived as warmer but less competent,” said Jessica Li, an assistant professor of marketing at the university’s business school.

“We ask how that can influence consumer behaviour and in what situations might marketers want to smile more broadly,” she said.

Published in the Journal of Consumer Research, the study had a two-pronged approach. First, the researchers showed more than 300 people marketing material in which the marketer had a big or a small smile.

Ultimately, they found that broad smiles won people’s affections, but failed to engender confidence in their abilities. This meant that grinning marketers were better able to convince consumers to buy their product or service in areas that carried less risk.

“If I see an ad with a heart surgeon who smiles really broadly at me, I might think she is really warm, but not choose her to be my doctor because she seems less competent than a surgeon with a slight smile,” Li said.

“If the risk is really low, such as going to the store to get a new shirt, then the competence of the salesperson isn’t as important and I respond more positively to the broad smile,” she said.

This makes sense, but I’m uncertain about this “positive” feeling the researchers talk about.

The toothy marketers looked as if they were trying to hypnotise you with their eyes, so that they could eat you with their inordinately large teeth.

That said, perhaps they have a point: I definitely don’t want a surgeon looking at me like that. But back to the study: this perception of risk is important if you are trying to get backing for your start-up company, for example.

In the second part of the research, the academics turned to kickstarter.com, the world’s largest crowdsourcing platform through which people fund creative projects.

How you smile makes a difference there too. By selecting projects that had profile pictures of the creator, which ended up being about 340 projects in total, the researchers looked at how willing funders were to reach into their pockets and whether there was a correlation with the creator’s exhibition of pearly whites. And there was — quite a substantial one, in fact. Broadly smiling creators’ projects got less than half of what small smilers got, and the average contribution per backer was up to a third less.

THE TOOTHY MARKETERS LOOKED AS IF THEY WERE TRYING TO HYPNOTISE YOU WITH THEIR EYES, SO THAT THEY COULD EAT YOU

“Project creators with a slight smile are perceived as more competent,” Li said. “More people wanted to donate to their project because they believe this competent person is able to deliver the product.”

But, interestingly, the big smilers got more social media love. These projects got double the number of Facebook shares than their slight-smile counterparts. “It’s intuitive that if you seem to be friendly but not competent, people will want to help you in low-cost ways but not necessarily be willing to give you a lot of money,” Li said.