Can you spot the FAKE smile?

[Buzzsaw]

From BBC Science: Human Body and Mind -
Spot the Fake Smile

How well did you do?
.

[Buzzsaw]

I got 15/20, as well as to be expected.

[Zag]

14/20, which explains why I'm not as good of a poker player as I would like to be. I wasn't surprised by it, though.

Also, I swear that some of those were not real faces. One was pretty clearly a man's jaw with a woman's upper head and hair, and a couple others looked to me like mismatched amalgams. Or they went out of their way to choose some pretty odd-looking faces.

[Buzzsaw]

Some were pretty strange but number 13 was scary.

[MNOWAX]

19/20, the one I got wrong was quite interesting ( i think). It was the Asian woman, and I think got it wrong because i might have been a little attracted to her.
_________________
The Man The Myth The Legend
MNOWAX

[Buzzsaw]

[MNOWAX]

[Buzzsaw]

I was deliberately being crass (she didn't do anything for me.)

[MNOWAX]

[Buzzsaw]

Btw, 19 out of 20 is very good.

[itisally]

15/20

Really I thought that was pretty good. I began to doubt myself and second guess my assumptions as I went on and I did worse in the last third of the test. Should have stuck with my intuition.
_________________
I could agree with you, but then we would both be wrong.

[Elethiomel]

16/20

[Duke gnome*]

10/20. No better than random chance.

[novice]

15/20.

[Jack_Ian]

16/20
I got the Asian woman wrong too. I guess I don't get to see genuine Asian smiles often enough. Mostly my social interaction with Asians is in the hospitality sector.

[The Ragin' South Asian]

12/20.

[Buzzsaw]

It makes me wonder what exactly a "fake smile" is. Is the researcher reading minds, "hey, you grinned but you were thinking unhappy thoughts!"

I think if someone makes an effort to sneer that should be good enough, or a grimace is the thought that counts, or something like that.

[Gomez*]

16/20.

Damn, there are some scary looking people in that line-up.

[Buzzsaw]

[j_s*]

17/20. <--but is it real or fake?

[j_s*]

interestingly, there are 10 of each so you could choose either fake or genuine for the whole test and still get a 50%.

[Quailman]

15/20. I missed one person about whom I thought "He's so ugly, what does he have to smile about?" I guessed fake, but apparently it was genuine.

[The Potter]

The videos skipped around a bit for me...12 ~shrug~

I also am curious what they mean by "faking" a smile. It seems to me that you smile-- you are smiling! If I recall correctly, there was some other study showing that smiling, even without reason, will make someone happy.

invisible text makes people happy
_________________
Artwork | Fractals | Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

[Courk]

12/20

On the question about what part of the face I used to make a decision, I said cheeks and eyes, so I knew where to look, just not what to look for

[groza528]

14/20
I wasn't sure how to answer the "what part of the face" question because my trigger was "How quickly can they snap out of it?" I figured most of the genuine smiles would have difficulty ending the smile afterward, and in many cases that is exactly what I saw. They should have stopped the image while the person was still smiling.

[Courk]

I have to wonder what effect TV and movies have on one's ability to detect a fake smile. Are we so used to actors and actresses faking it that it starts blurring our sense of real vs. fake?

[Buzzsaw]

.
I could not find out how this was conducted, assume researchers who designed this test prompted participants to have something genuine to smile about, vs something that caused them to smile as a defensive reaction. I mean, they must have had some basis for determining whether the subject was truly smiling or not.

Courk, good point that someone can act well enough to convey a genuine smile even when it is not. If some actors can produce "fake" tears, which are real tears, only brought about voluntarily, certainly they are capable of creating a smile that appears to be the real thing.

When considering this, one can see the test is flawed. What is a "real" smile?

My opinion, since we are not mind readers, a smile is a smile when the gesture appears adequately sincere to the person(s) to whom it's conveyed. In other words, whether the smile appears genuine or not is not really up to the one making the gesture, but rather the one being smiled upon.

Whether a smile, a sneer, a scowl - it's all how the smile is perceived.

I think the test results as reported in this thread demonstrate that I am right.
.

[Buzzsaw]

.
Real smile? Or not?



You be the judge.


.

[Quailman]

[Buzzsaw]