Hi Lab,
Rob Henderson has been tweeting excerpts from A Theory of Everyone. Ab excerpt about the origins and evolution of the broad American smile seemed to get a lot of attention.
Full excerpt
America’s melting pot is helped by a long-running history of migration from so many different places. This has shaped many aspects of American culture. For example, this long history of migration has made America a deeply expressive culture which puts a lot of emphasis on explicit emotional expression – thinking about how you feel and the feelings of others. Many Americans may take this focus on expressing emotions for granted, but it is not universal.
Americans are known for their broad smiles, obvious displays of anger, and other clear emotional expressions. These features are common in countries with long histories of migration. When your neighbor doesn’t speak your language or share your culture, emotions serve as a common ground for communication. Clear expression is critical to being clearly understood.
In 1990, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the iconic American burger chain McDonald’s opened its first restaurants in Russia. One of the first challenges was teaching Russian workers to smile as part of that authentic McDonald’s experience. Both workers and customers initially found this difficult. In Russia people who smile when something isn’t funny are considered crazy. But with sufficient training, workers – and customers – accepted the new smiling norm. They came to understand that people smiling without a joke might be crazy or they might just be American. They came to accept a local norm at McDonald’s. Of course, this didn’t change the overall culture. Prior to hosting the 2018 FIFA World Cup, Russia once again ran smile training sessions for service workers lest tourists from countries with long histories of migration leave with the impression that Russians are unfriendly.
Within cross-cultural psychological research, the emotiveness of Americans is often contrasted with other, more monocultural countries like Japan, known for its more muted emotional expression. Japan’s homogeneous culture allows for any Japanese person to know what any other Japanese person feels from the context alone. A Japanese person would immediately recognize a shameful situation or one that would provoke anger without anyone displaying emotions. Outsiders, on the other hand, may be oblivious to contextual cues, not realizing when they’ve offended their hosts.
This emotional control has further downstream effects – for example, eyes are often used as a focus of emotional expression more than the mouth in many similarly homogeneous East Asian cultures. By corollary, Asian immigrants to America are often surprised by explicit ‘I love yous’ and the ‘Thank you; you’re welcome’ routine, even for family members. In places like India or China, being so explicit with family members would be considered odd or even insulting. Implicit communication can be more efficient when everyone shares the same norms and understanding, but it makes it difficult for newcomers who have to discover hidden norms and rules through faux pas – ideally someone else’s. A broad policy of explicit communication may be uncomfortable and unfamiliar initially, but is part of what helps newcomers assimilate more easily.
For those who want to read more, this is one of the seminal papers: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1413661112
Long story short, America and other countries of the New World tend to be more emotionally expressive and as a result care a lot about feelings. Children are trained to think a lot about their own feelings, how to express those feelings, and how their actions affect other people’s feelings. This emphasis is not universal. A European student of mine had a moment of revelation upon reading the chapter,
Is that why Americans label emotions like “thats funny!” instead of just laughing like the rest of the world?
Generative AI Models
The American smile and emphasis on emotion spreads through American movies, books, and TV shows, but hints can also be found in AI. This Twitter thread and Medium post documents the prevalence of the American smile in generative AI models:
Best wishes,
Michael