The test is based on Paul Ekman’s work. I couldn’t find the relevant publications on his site, but in similar efforts genuine smiles have been elicited by watching humorous video clips, or asking the subject to visualize a happy occasion. A ‘fake’ smile is elicited by telling the subject to smile.
10/20 Male - no better than chance (although six or seven of the clips didn’t play for me).
16/20 - Female
Well that was easy, they were all fake. The script only gave me 12/20 for some reason, but there’s definitely no chance any of those were geniune smiles.
10/20. I guess I’m just a gullible person compared to the rest of you. (female, by the way)
Hah! I had the same reaction. None of them looked truly real. Then again, that probably says more about me than about the smiling people.
17/20. Female.
It seemed the real smiles had twinkling eyes. The twinkle may be from slight eye or facial movement. Or it may have been my imagination.
I found myself smiling during the test and liking the people.
Female, 18/20. I missed #1, but only because I couldn’t get the movie to play and I had to guess, and #3.
I knew to watch the eyes.
15/20, male
17 out of 20. I’m male, 29. Two of my misses were calling a genuine smile fake. All of my misses were on men.
For me, the upper face muscles were the biggest indicator. Especially the muscles around the eyes. “Fake” smiles are usually just lower face. It’s harder to fake a full facial smile.
14/20 female
16/20. Female. All four of my misses were male. 3 of 4 I thought were fake when they were genuine.
Would someone define a “real” smile and how it differs from a “fake” smile? Since I don’t know what constitutes one (is it what the smilers claim it is?), it makes no sense for anyone to take this test.
17/20 male
I wondered why they didn’t define it. A real smile is one that is caused by genuine happiness, while a fake smile is one you can create on command. The only place on the test where this can be determined by the uninformed is after the results are given, and then only by contextual clues.
The bigger question, as already stated, is how the testers got the genuine smiles, and separated them from the fake ones.
The even bigger question to me, though, is why so many of us knew to look at the eyes, but still get nowhere near the same results.
16/20 Female
All the ones I got wrong were guys that were genuine that I thought were fake.
Female. Did it twice under differing circumstances:
10/20 the first time - my husband and my mother both have a distinctive nervous habit of grimacing in a fake-smily way when they are reacting to to unpleasant news, so I looked for that. Obviously a poor strategy.
18/20 - I didn’t even look to see which ones I got right or wrong, but I re-did the test after having read the trick about the eyes. Obviously that’s the way to go.
They all look fake in a way, though - it’s the quick return-to-a-non-smile state that looks unnatural to me. Do people really stop smiling that quickly, or did they doctor the tape to make people stop so fast?
And 13 really is a nightmare, whatever it is.
Male 16/19 (one of them wouldn’t play for me so I guessed and got it wrong). It’s all in the eyes I think, a fake smile doesn’t change the eyes and returns to normal much too quickly, a real smile fades away rather than being switched off.
Female 18/20. Judging quickly, just looking at the eyes. I seriously stopped even looking at their mouths.
I’m kind of shocked. I don’t think I’m great at reading people.
14/20 male