The Power of a Smile

Most of us like to think that we're pretty independent and rational beings: the decisions we make are not dependent on the people who surround us, nor are they influenced by the things that we're confronted with in our day-to-day lives. But if you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll probably agree with me that nothing could be further from the truth. It seems as if everything has an influence on us...

I've recently started reading a fascinating book by Daniel Kahneman entitled Thinking, Fast and Slow (which you can get here). Generally speaking, it's about the two ways of thinking every human engages in: The more intuitive thinking which happens very fast (what Kahneman calls System 1) and the slower, more in-depth thinking (System 2) with which we try to keep System 1 in check (at least sometimes). The interesting thing is how System 1 can be manipulated, a process called priming. Here's Kahneman's explanation:

"In the 1980s, psychologists discovered that exposure to a word causes immediate and measurable changes in the ease with which many related words can be evoked. If you have recently seen or heard the word EAT, you are temporarily more likely to complete the word fragment SO_P as SOUP than as SOAP. The opposite would happen, of course, if you had just seen WASH. We call this a priming effect and say that the idea of EAT primes the idea of SOUP, and that WASH primes SOAP." (p. 52)

When confronted with a word fragment like SO_P, we generally tend to rely on our System 1 instead of sitting down to think about it for a few minutes (that would be System 2). In this case the priming effect determines if we go with SOUP or SOAP. But it doesn't just work with words:

"Another major advance in our understanding of memory was the discovery that priming is not restricted to concepts and words. You cannot know this from conscious experience, of course, but you must accept the alien idea that your actions and your emotions can be primed by events of which you are not even aware." (p. 53)

How does Kahneman try to prove this? He cites an experiment by the psychologist John Bargh who asked students to assemble sentences from a set of five words. One group of these students received scrambled sentences that contained words associated with the elderly (Florida, forgetful, bald, fray, or wrinkle). After completing the task, they were then asked to take a short walk over to another room down the hall for a different experiment. This short walk was the actual experiment. Just as Bargh and his team had assumed, the young people who had used the "elderly" words walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others. And this even though the words old or slow were never mentioned!

By now you're probably wondering what all this has to do with smiling. I thought you'd never ask. As it turns out priming works the other way around as well. You might remember the term reciprocal from math class:

"Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you were primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age. Reciprocal links are common in the associative network. For example, being amused tends to make you smile, and smiling tends to make you feel amused." (p. 54)

In other words, you don't have to feel happy to be able to smile. Just try smiling (even a fake smile will do) and chances are you'll probably notice at least a slight improvement of your mood. And you thought only other people (and your circumstances) had the power to manipulate you...