How to Show Your Superiority by Smiling
“I never smile if I can help it,” Dunder Mifflin assistant (area manager) Dwight Schrute tells the camera in an episode of The Office . “Teeth display is a signal of submission in primates. When someone smiles at me, all I see is a chimpanzee begging for his life.”
But there is a large amount of research that suggests otherwise, or at least that there are several messages that can be conveyed with a smile. In fact, a 2017 study grouped human smiles into three broad categories, and submission is not one of them. Dominance, however, is. But how exactly to smile dominantly? Here’s what you need to know.
Why do people smile?
Understanding why people smile has long been a subject of behavioral research, and for good reason: while we most associate smiling with happiness or pleasure, this is only the beginning. Facial expression conveys a wide range of other functions, including embarrassment, discomfort, and politeness.
In fact, the human smile is so versatile that researchers have grouped its uses into three categories: reward smiles, belonging smiles, and dominance smiles. Reward smiles are exactly what they sound like: a clear message to someone (or something) that we are happy, enjoying, or pleased with what they just did. Affiliation smiles are similar, but the smiling person is not responding to anything in particular. And finally, dominance smiles are used to signal to someone else that we are in control and have power (or at least want to project that image).
But Dwight was right — at least according to Frank McAndrew, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Knox College who has done extensive research on facial expressions. “In primates, the display of teeth, especially teeth set together, is almost always a sign of submission, ” he told Scientific American in 1999. “The human smile probably developed from that.”
How to smile powerfully
If you don’t know what a dominant smile should look like, Adrienne Wood, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Virginia who published a study on smiling , told us about it in a recent New York Times interview. York Times .
First of all, the dominant smile is asymmetrical (i.e. crooked). “You need a little mockery, ” she told the Times . To do this, move one side of your mouth back to the nearest ear, lifting your upper lip.
But there is more. “To be convincing, you have to engage every part of your body,” Wood said. This includes wrinkling your nose a little, leaning back and raising your chin so that you are literally looking down on the other person. Showing teeth is optional.