Smile variation leaks personality and increases the accuracy of interpersonal judgments.

Abstract

People ubiquitously smile during brief interactions and first encounters, and when posing for photos used for virtual dating, social networking, and professional profiles. Yet not all smiles are the same: subtle individual differences emerge in how people display this nonverbal facial expression. We hypothesized that idiosyncrasies in people's smiles can reveal aspects of their personality and guide the personality judgments made by observers, thus enabling a smiling face to serve as a valuable tool in making more precise inferences about an individual's personality. Study 1 (N = 303) supported the hypothesis that smile variation reveals personality, and identified the facial-muscle activations responsible for this leakage. Study 2 (N = 987) found that observers use the subtle distinctions in smiles to guide their personality judgments, consequently forming slightly more accurate judgments of smiling faces than neutral ones. Smiles thus encode traces of personality traits, which perceivers utilize as valid cues of those traits.