Spot The Fake Smile -- Quiz

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Female, 18/20.

Lakai, my two misses were the same as yours, for the same reason. I watched those two clips again, and I’m still not quite convinced.

22

You’ve obviously never seen Trilogy of Terror.

23

14/20, female. 13 will haunt me to the end of my days.

StG

24

M 17/20

25

F 11/20

26

Female, 19/20. I knew a lot about Paul Ekman’s work going into it, though. The one I missed was a genuine, but reserved, smile.

27

Blondie? 'Cause she got me, too.

28

M. 15/20.

29

Were anyone else’s results skewed by gender? I had a tendency to rate male smiles as fake.

30

M 17/20.

The three I missed were fakes that I labeled as genuine.

31

How do the researchers know if the smile is genuine? This seems like the kind of thing that relies heavily on self-reporting.

32

11/20 Female. Guess I’m not that good at telling the real from the fake.

33

They’ve put a lot of work into distinguishing “felt” and “false” smiles (http://www.paulekman.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/Felt-False-And-Miserable-Smiles.pdf). I’m sure I could come up with (and thus sure that they could) pretty workable experimental protocols that would reliably elicit false/felt smiles, respectively, among cooperative test subjects.

34

If so, me as well.

I started confident but was doubting myself in the middle, and all three I missed were within a frame of five smiles.

Male, 17/20

35

Female, 16 of 20

36

15/20 Male.

I missed 3 male smiles, 2 females.

4 of the smiles I thought were genuine were fake.

37

Male 13/20

I got 7 out of the first 10 wrong. 4 genuine smiles wrong and 3 fake smiles wrong.

38

15/20 female

39

Female, 17/20

I have been watching a lot of “Lie To Me” lately and have been that much more aware of people’s facial expressions. And the three I got wrong were all male.

40

M 19/20. My general rule of thumb is that if they move their head in correlation with the smile then it’s probably genuine. This is the one which got me, and he did the half-start, then full smile, along with a bit of a head nod. Most fake smiles are one smooth movement and then get held until people stop smiling. This guy has a very convincing fake smile. I nailed all the women though.

Enjoy,
Steven