intelligence – Success Across Cultures

Frank Sinatra sang, “When you’re smilin’, the whole world smiles with you.”

But that may not be the case.

Some cultures are much more openly smiley than others.

And this is all due to norms, behaviors, and how smiling is viewed in society.

Smiling is often associated with positive traits such as happiness, attractiveness, competence, and friendliness.

This perception is widely accepted, especially in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, where most psychological research is conducted.

However, the influence of culture on the social perception of nonverbal behavior, including smiling, is not well-understood.

Recent research reveals that cultural context can significantly alter how smiling individuals are perceived.

Cultural Differences in Smiling Perception

In cultures with low scores on the GLOBE’s uncertainty avoidance dimension, a smiling person may be judged as less intelligent compared to a non-smiling person.

This finding challenges the assumption that smiling universally conveys positive attributes.

Additionally, societal corruption levels can undermine the prosocial perception of smiling.

In societies with high corruption indicators, trust toward smiling individuals diminishes.

This suggests that in some cultural contexts, smiling can have negative associations.

Gender Roles and Smile Perception

The study also highlights the role of gender in the social perception of smiles.

Female assessors are more likely than male assessors to attribute intelligence and honesty to smiling individuals.

Furthermore, the gender of the person being assessed influences the perception of honesty, but only for non-smiling targets.

These gender-based differences in smile perception do not affect the cultural variations in how smiles are interpreted, which is the primary focus of the study.

Practical Implications

This cross-cultural study sheds light on the complex and varied interpretations of smiling.

While smiling is generally perceived favorably, in some cultures, a smiling individual may be judged as less intelligent than when displaying a neutral expression.

In uncertain social conditions, expressing certainty through smiling may not effectively signal intelligence.

Similarly, in untrustworthy environments, displaying unconditional trust through smiling can be risky.

This has practical implications, particularly in the context of globalization and job applications.

For instance, in countries where photographs are commonly included in CVs, understanding whether a smile conveys competence and trustworthiness or negative traits can be crucial for international applicants.

As with our look at eye contact and culture in last week’s blog, this research advances the theory of nonverbal behavior by highlighting how cultural dimensions influence the perception of smiles.

It underscores the importance of considering cultural frameworks in understanding nonverbal communication and reveals that the generally positive perception of smiling can have unexpected negative implications in certain cultural contexts.

“Y’all come back now, ya hear?” – Ellie May, The Beverly Hillbillies

“No one ever lived after he’d decided ter kill ‘em, no one except you, an’ he’d killed some o’ the best witches an’ wizards of the age — an’ you was only a baby, an’ you lived.” – Hagrid, Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Whether you realize it or not, you may judge each of these phraseologies and their accents based on where you live.

If you’re from America, you might associate certain stereotypes with the South, and the obvious Southern drawl might trigger prejudice, whether consciously or subconsciously.

One example of this appears in The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World, wherein a detailed study was conducted by Bucholtz, Bermudez, Fung, Edwards, and Vargas on the perceptual dialectology of California in 2007.

The study found:

“that the most salient linguistic boundary is between the northern and southern regions, although, reminiscent of Clopper and Pisoni (2006), category labels ranging from ‘surfers’ to ‘hicks’ played a role in the social map.”

Essentially, the way you speak – often regionally-based or relative to your sub-culture – may result in a label of some kind.

If you’re from Britain, a coarser accent, like the one spoken by Hagrid above, might be associated with lower-class stereotypes, as opposed to those considered “posh.”

As mentioned last week, the wealthier classes have always attempted to distinguish themselves through their language’s social patterning. The lower class accents and phraseology, therefore, are often distinctly different from those of the aristocracy.

Either accent might trigger conscious or subconscious prejudices as well. As soon as a person’s mouth opens to speak, their class may be revealed, and the prejudices associated become sharp and glaring.

Sociolinguistics visits all of this and more.

What is sociolinguistics?

Sociolinguistics is “the study of language in relation to social factors, including differences of regional, class, and occupational dialect, gender differences, and bilingualism.” – Oxford

The sociolinguistics of a country are often nationally-based.

Funnily enough, Americans, who speak English, might not be able to differentiate between the stereotypically “posh” accents and the stereotypically lower- or middle-class ones in the UK.

They may not feel the same prejudices against the person speaking as their British counterparts, whose ear is attuned to these differences and mind is attuned to the prejudices associated with them in their country.

Likewise, those from other English-speaking countries likely don’t have the same associations with the American Southern accent and the South as Americans do.

Therefore, for foreigners, specific social patterning might not reinforce the regional prejudice related to these stereotypes, such as a person’s level of education or intelligence.

This is all deeply entrenched, rooted in the history of the country, regions, and the values, norms, traits, and behaviors associated with them across time.

Whether the regional values, norms, traits, and behaviors have evolved or not, the linguistic stereotypes remain.