Why Smiles Generate Leniency Analysis

In the article, Why Smiles Generate Leniency, researchers Marianne LaFrance and Marvin A. Hecht, explore the smile-leniency effect. Their first objective is to see if different types of smiles affect the degree of leniency that is shown. The researchers define the smile leniency effect as the phenomena when "smiling can attenuate judgments of possible wrongdoing." They present some background research by Forgas supporting this effect which found that teachers were more lenient with students who cheated on an exam if the student smiled opposed to having a neutral facial expression, and the researchers base their experimental procedure on the procedure from this study. LaFrance and Hecht also provide five possible explanations for the smile-leniency …show more content…
This finding is not new, however, the experimenters talk about a new finding which was the fact that trustworthiness is the best predictor of leniency. If one is found to be trustworthy, then it is easier for them to get away with things. The researchers point out that in future studies, different situations should be tested. Perhaps in a social context, likability would be a better predictor (as opposed to trustworthiness), or in a power-hierarchy situation, submissiveness would be a better predictor. The researchers also discuss the fact that in their experiment they found that the type of smile did not make any difference in judgment, however, there is some other research that found that people were aware of the differences between smiles which caused differences in judgment. The experimenters presented three possible reasons as to why their results did not show differences while others did. The first being that in this experiment they did a between-subjects design so all the participants were only exposed to that one picture/smile. If they had done a within-subjects design like in the other studies, participants may have picked up on differences when comparing the multiple photos. The second reason was that in this experiment the judges …show more content…
One of the research articles from the presentation was all about how smiling is perceived in different cultures. It would be interesting to do a follow-up of this experiment in other cultures as well to see if the smile-leniency effect still exists. Similar to the study in the presentation, it would be interesting to replicate this study in Japanese culture as it has quite a few different social norms than we