Social Rejection Helps See Through a Person’s Pretense, Fake Smiles Included!

People who have experienced social rejection by family, friends, or peers acquire a sense to tell fake smiles from the real ones, says a new Miami University study.

An interesting new study conducted at the Miami University proclaims that social rejection by family, friends, or peers leaves a person better equipped to see through another’s pretentious behavior, especially to differentiate between a ‘real smile’ and its fake counterpart.

The study demonstrated that people who have faced rejection have an enhanced ability to determine whether the "happy" face before them is genuine or not.

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Led by Michael Bernstein, a Miami doctoral student in social psychology and one of the researchers, the study was conducted on 32 subjects, 17 women and 15 men.

The researchers found that the subjects who were manipulated to feel rejection could distinguish a fake smile from a real one nearly 80 percent of the time.

"This seems to be a skill we've acquired through evolution. Living in groups several hundreds of years ago was extremely important to survival. Being kicked out of the group was like death, so they became very good at reading facial expressions and social cues. People these days who are rejected are in a dangerous place because of evolutional pressure to find their way back into a group," said Bernstein

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At the start of the study, some of the researchers thought the outcome would be just the opposite.

"Some thought the subjects who had been rejected would latch on to any sign of positivity and accept the insincere smiles as genuine. But it's clear we're equipped with radar for identifying who is open to affiliation and who is not," said Bernstein.