Spot the fake smile!

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I got 17 out of 20.

My inherent grasp of body language is just different; I instinctively think someone's using body language the same way I do, and use a consistent, readable, mildly nonstandard way of showing emotion unconsciously. When I'm with others who use the same style, I have abilities to rival an average NT's ability with other NTs. So I could make use of it; I do have the wiring to hear words and parse body language simultaneously.

On the other hand, NT body language is generally awful for me to process at all (I bet you could tell an NT that when you slapped them and spat at them it meant true love, but they wouldn't feel loved when you did it; it's like that). I'm nervous. I don't have the early training that they do. My whole life has been spent learning that going into a social situation means laying my life on the line. I don't think, at this point, being highly skilled at interacting with NTs is in the cards for me. But I think I have the inherent wiring necessary to be successful at it, if only circumstances were different. If maybe someone had started not by saying I suck at this, but that my body language exists and is valid, and they were teaching me how a lot of other people do it, instead of how it's properly done.

Too late for me. Not too late for the next generation of people like me.

I scored 13 - right in the middle, missing 2 genuine and 5 fake smile.

If you are wondering how well you scored, with respect to the 58 scores reported in this thread, the median is 13 (mean 12.86). The percentile scores (e.g. 44% of scores were 12 or lower) are:

Score Percentile
7 5
8 6
9 12
10 20
11 31
12 44
13 65
14 70
15 81
16 84
17 93
18 98
19 100

8/20

16/20

I looked at the eyes and the cheeks. The eyes usually squint a bit more in a genuine smile and the cheeks follow the bottom of the eyes upwards... this rarely happens in a fake smile, the rest of the face kind of moves less...

A fake smile use less muscles than a genuine one.

A few of them were quite hard for me, mostly the men, but some of the women were quite hard too, like the Asian woman and the last woman in the lineup.

I think it is not reliable because I identify fake in a lot more complicated way than just watching a face for a couple of seconds. It is so complicated, that I guess its impossible to describe. I calculate the whole situation, with every detail in it, every person present, every possibility of connection between the people and the situation for the person smiling; I could probably go on telling the most detailed details that I use for this calculation, but since it would take more than a page, I hope you just understand what I mean?

12/20

I looked at how long the smile lasted after it stopped and their body movement. Obviously I didn't do so well lol.

even though some of them DID look creepy, I'd read someplace that people who genuinely smily crinkle their eyes when they smile, and fake smilers don't show any change in their eyes. So I looked at the eyes ( and the couple of ones that laughed) and i scored a 17/20. I don't know how I'da scored if I had done this before reading that article.
Also, in another article it said that if a person is lying they are more likely to look to their left.

I got 16/20. But technically, aren't they all fake? These are actors (or at least, people posing in front of a camera) so how could they reliably trigger an authentic smile reflex that would come from their subconscious rather than a conscious decision to smile? It's like the "eye" test (although it's a lot better than the eye test because at least these are videos and not movie or modeling stills)- faked responses are supposed to stand in for authentic responses so you wind up actually judging how well an actor portrays an emotion rather than the emotion itself.


Or maybe they showed some of the people really cute pictures without telling them what they were posing for. In which case, never mind.

11/20

14/20

I didn't feel like I was guessing on a majority of them, but I also missed some so I guess that doesn't matter. If they had just been pictures of smiles it may have been harder to distinguish, but most of the fakes ended with their faces reverting to an un-enthused mess. Also if you watch the eyes they look different... which is weird because I'm not used to looking at eyes in real life so I probably wouldn't be so good at spotting a fake in day to day life. Also I almost quit the test after 2 to 3 faces cuz I was starting to get creeped out

8/20.

15/20

I missed 4 fakes an 1 genuine.