Residents of countries with migrants smile more often 16.05.2015

Everyone knows about the eternally smiling Americans (even if they have never seen the Americans themselves) and the eternally gloomy Russians; sometimes Chinese are added to the Russians, who are also not too generous with a smile. Neither is good or bad - every society has its own unwritten rules of conduct, including those relating to the expression of emotions, and you should not, as they say, meddle in someone else's monastery with your charter. But such rules of behavior can be studied: after all, it would really be interesting to find out why it is customary to smile in some countries, but not in others.

According to psychologists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, not the last role in people's smiles is played by how many immigrants their country has had to accept in its history. In their work, the researchers used a statistical value that makes it possible to assess the historical heterogeneity of the population in a particular territory. For example, in Canada it is 63 - that is, exactly so many countries have been migration "donors" for it over the past 500 years. It should be emphasized that it is the significant influence that is taken into account here - that is, the flow of migrants should have left a well-defined trace in the modern population. China and Japan have a heterogeneity index of 1 - they were visited, maybe by many, but there was no significant population and cultural influence.

A measure of historical heterogeneity was compared to how different people express their emotions. To do this, they used the data of an earlier work, in which about 5 people from 000 countries were asked to imagine some kind of emotional situation from life, but the emotions that they should have experienced should be shown more strongly or try to hide them. For example, a person was asked to imagine that he was upset because of a reprimand from his superiors, but should still smile - or that he met an old friend, and should demonstrate as much joy as possible from the meeting.

In general, people from countries with a lot of heterogeneity (in other words, with a large historical share of migrants) were more emotional, that is, they easily showed what they really felt. Then the psychologists continued the experiment: several hundred volunteers from different countries, including the United States, Japan, France, and others, were asked to evaluate someone else's smile - but not just a smile, but a reason for which another person could smile towards you. . For example, if he is just happy - can he smile at you? What if he wants to sell you something? And if he feels in relation to you at a lower social level? In each case, there were seven response options, from "yes, I fully agree that he can smile at me" to "no, this does not give him any right to smile at me."

Combining the results of both experiments, the authors of the work came to the conclusion that in countries that received a lot of migrants, a smile is regarded as a friendly sign, while in countries with a small number of migrants, a smile serves a socio-hierarchical purpose, that is, it does not express emotions so much, how much plays a role in the social ritual. The results of the work were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. No ethical conclusions should be drawn here, just if a lot of people from different cultures, different social traditions collide in a country, then in order to somehow level the social tension in communication, one has to rely on a smile. If there have always been few strangers in the country, then the social rules are the same for everyone, and nothing unpredictable can be expected, social tension, if it arises, is smoothed out by other mechanisms, without the help of a smile.

Such an explanation may indeed, to some extent, explain the difference in smileiness in different countries. However, the authors of the work themselves say that the discovered regularity needs to be clarified. In the future, they are going to analyze the communication style of people from different states in the same way: after all, in the USA there are areas where there have always been fewer migrants than in other territories, and it’s not a fact that in such areas you can always count on an American smile.