Anyone who wants to make themselves amiable and get what they want should smile more, writes LUCY KELLAWAY.
IN JAPAN, workers are being subjected to a new sort of control: computer scanning to see if their smiles are wide enough.
Every day, staff at 15 railway stations in Tokyo have to bare their teeth at a computer that rates the curvaceousness of their smile on a scale of one to 100.
For those who can’t muster a broad enough grin, the computer issues directions on how to improve performance. Lift up the corners of your mouth more, it orders. Staff are then given a print-out of their best smile to refer to as needed.
Oddly, the very same day that I read about the smile police in the east I received an e-mail from the west about a less coercive but no less enthusiastic attempt to get us to beam at each other. Smile and Move is a movement based in Richmond, Virginia, that is peddling its message on Facebook, Twitter, mugs, books, posters and videos.
On YouTube, there is a three-minute video trying to brainwash us into smiling. "Love it! Keep it up!" say the comments posted on the site. Later that same day, I cycled to the dentist and in the waiting room picked up a copy of the Times. The main feature showed a life coach photographed with a pencil clamped between his jaws demonstrating how to improve our smiles.
What is going on? I wondered. Should we all be smiling more?
Certainly not, is the view of the British public. Last week, the BBC website asked people whether they would like more customer service to come with a smile. They mainly replied that no, they would not. They weren’t anti-smiling per se, they were anti-smiling-to-order. One man said that if someone was smiling at him for no reason he’d want to knock his block off. Almost everyone agreed that smiling inanely was creepy and made people look like the Stepford Wives – a fake smile was worse than none at all.
While I’m profoundly British in temperament, I’m with the Japanese and Americans on smiling. People serving others should smile more. In fact, anyone who wants to make themselves amiable and get what they want should smile more. I disagree that faking is bad – it is part of what it is to be a good employee.
A smile isn’t a gesture of spontaneous joy, it’s a social thing. A fascinating experiment was done in a bowling alley that showed that, when people get a strike, they do not smile as they watch the pins come clattering down. It is only when they turn to face others that their faces crack.
We smile to communicate a message. If you put two macaque monkeys in a cage, they start off pretty tense, as even the slightest movement will have them tearing each other to pieces. After staring at the floor, one of them will bare its teeth at the other to indicate non-aggression. If the other bares its teeth back, the next minute they are stroking each other’s fur.
With humans, smiles work in the same way. A smile from someone in a shop, say, is a reassuring gesture and a prelude, if not to grooming, then at least to conducting business.
As I sat in the cage of the dentist’s waiting room, I watched two other patients arrive. One looked at me and smiled and the other marched straight in and sat down, avoiding eye contact. If I had to start a fight with one of them, I know which one it would be.
Smiling comes more naturally to some people than to others and the problem is how best to get unsmiley people to smile more. The Japanese way is flawed not because it’s like Big Brother but because it wrongly assumes that a bigger smile is a better one. Last week, I had lunch in a fashionable new Italian canteen in Soho, and the Marlon Brando lookalike who made my tea was unsmiling until, at the last minute, he curled the corners of his lips a fraction. It was more rewarding than if he had given me the full monty.
Holding a pencil in your mouth is still worse as a smile enhancer. My husband constantly wanders around the house pen clamped between his teeth, not to help the curvature of his smile but because it’s where he stows the pen when not in use. I find the sight of him like this so annoying that I quite often try to wrest it out from his tightly locked jaws – a tussle that ends with no one smiling.
The answer on smiling came to me as I finished my spell in the dentist’s chair. It is to have better looking teeth. I have recently spent a not inconsiderable sum on having my teeth bleached, and even though it hasn’t worked as well as I’d like, I’m smiling a lot more to try to get value from my investment.
There is a significant statistical correlation between what the scientists call “smile-related quality of life” and the state of one’s teeth.
One of the saddest messages on the BBC website was from a former maths teacher who could not afford to have the two crowns at the front of his mouth replaced. “My smile, my teeth are all part of what makes me a good teacher. So now I am a virtual recluse – on the scrap heap of life.”
Unlike the maths teacher, British prime minister Gordon Brown could afford to get his teeth fixed and smiles all the time. So much so that he is now ready for the smiling advanced class: learning how to identify the occasions when smiling is not appropriate. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)
