Non-verbal communication across cultures
Some faces do seem to record information about the life they’ve lived. When shown a selection of neutral expressions taken from dating apps, participants in a 2017 study were able to tell rich people from poor more accurately than if they were just guessing. Indeed, they could still do it with pictures of only the person’s eyes or, in particular, their mouth. After further investigation, the researchers concluded that rich people just look a little more attractive or more positive (a mixture of happy and likeable) than poor people do. When shown photographs in which everybody was smiling and looking deliberately positive, participants lost their ability to tell rich and poor apart.
The presence of these subtle cues might help to explain the bias that can creep into our thinking about people from different backgrounds. As we’ve seen, non-verbal accents often have the effect of making outsiders more difficult to understand.
When people want to be understood, however, they do have ways to make their feelings clear and they smile more often, as a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests
At the very least, when people really want to understand each other, non-verbal accents show us that it’s good to talk.