Business Commons^™

Smiles As Signals Of Lower Status In Football Players And Fashion Models: Evidence That Smiles Are Associated With Lower Dominance And Lower Prestige, Timothy Ketelaar, Bryan L. Koenig, Daniel Gambacorta, Igor Dolgov, Daniel Hor, Jennifer Zarzoza, Cuauhtémoc Luna-Nevarez, Micki Klungle, Lee Wells

WCBT Faculty Publications

Across four studies, the current paper demonstrates that smiles are associated with lower social status. Moreover, the association between smiles and lower status appears in the psychology of observers and generalizes across two forms of status: prestige and dominance. In the first study, faces of fashion models representing less prestigious apparel brands were found to be more similar to a canonical smile display than the faces of models representing more prestigious apparel brands. In a second study, after being experimentally primed with either high or low prestige fashion narratives, participants in the low prestige condition were more likely to perceive …