Fake It ‘Till You Make It – Cheaters Fake Smile Make Lies More Difficult to Detect
Jenny Galvao
According to research by Matia Okubo of Senshu University and associates, when cheaters put on a fake smile it successfully hides their negative facial expression and helps them elude lie detection.
In fact, the study found that cheaters are better at faking a smile than cooperators thereby actually making them look more trustworthy. According to the research, the fake smile expressions completely eliminate any appearance of untrustworthiness. They say this is because angrier expression are much more easily detected in faces that are interested in cooperating.
“The higher emotional intensity that cheaters expressed could be attributed to higher levels of arousal that cheaters experienced during the trust game — It is possible that cheaters, who cheated a lot in the trust game, might have [been more] emotionally aroused than cooperators.”
Cheating causing grater emotional arousability is not a surprising explanation, as those who cheat often are likely to get something physiological out of it, otherwise they likely wouldn’t bother.
In this experiment, half of the study’s participants including men and women, rated the happy faces, and the other half rated the angry faces. The face photographs were chosen from male models based on how they performed on a computer version of a trust game. In the game, they were told to earn as much money as possible through trades.
Those with the highest deception scores would tended to “cancel” trades when their partners set them up, thus giving them an advantage over their trading partners. So rather than scoring a mutually beneficial outcome the deception lead to a lopsided outcome for the untrustworthy. The deception scores, of course, were much higher with cheaters. In fact, the mean score for cheaters almost reaching the ceiling.
The final rating used 108 photographs, of both the happy as well as the angry faces, of cheaters and cooperators. Of the 108, 12 neutral expressions were also added as filler stimuli. Raters used a 7-point scale (where 0=not at all, and 6= extremely) to rate the trustworthiness, and the intensity of the facial expression.
The results showed that the cheaters had an advantage in emotional intensity, compared to the cooperators. However, all happy expressions were rated as more trustworthy than the angry expressions.
“For the angry expression … faces of cheaters were judged to be more aggressive (threatening and intimidating) and attracted the attention of observers,” say the researchers.
“These results suggest that cheater detection based on the processing of negative facial expressions can be thwarted by a posed or fake smile, which cheaters put on with higher intensity than cooperators.”
So, there you have it. Cheaters may be able to display higher levels of emotional intensity, and their smiling faces may, in some cases, appear to be more trustworthy, but their angry faces indicate deception, intimidation, and extreme untrustworthiness. One could say that the natural facial expression of a cheater highlights their true intentions to a greater degree; the happy expression is simply just a well executed ploy.
About the Author: Jenny Galvao is an undergraduate student at the University of Guelph studying psychology.
Resources
Okubo, Matia; Akihiro, Kobayashi and Kenta Ishikawa. A Fake Smile Thwarts Cheater Detection. Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour. 2019. 36:217–225. DOI 10.1007/s10919-012-0134-9