Whenever my friends or I ask someone to take a photo, someone always asks us to say "eggplant", which makes us laugh.
But if my parents happen to take part in the photo shoot, they will be expressionless. So are my relatives' holiday photos in Russia.
Graduation photo from my parents' high school showed that they were playing with their classmates in bell bottoms, but they looked absolutely depressed.
Russians don't just take pictures without smiling: Russian women don't worry about not being told to "smile". It is a natural face, and it seems that it has been answering any questions in the world with "Well, let me think".
Not laughing doesn't mean that we are all unhappy! On the contrary: male rulers, vodka, endless sour cream-all these make some people happy. Russians are born without the ability to grin for no reason, and they don't feel the need to acquire this skill. There is even a Russian proverb, which is probably translated, "Laughing for no reason is stupid."
Russians are often kind and sad. For foreigners, this seems more unusual than the really cold climate in Russia. Cultural differences have two results: Russians who come to the United States often talk about new things that are laughed off by strangers.
Then why is this? Why don't some societies encourage casual smiles? When I happened to see Kuba, a psychologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences? An article written by Krys, I have my own answer, or at least a partial answer. In some countries, a smile may not be a sign of warmth or respect. This can only prove that you are a fool-a cunning fool.
Krys pays attention to a cultural phenomenon called "uncertainty avoidance". Cultures with low uncertainty avoidance usually have social systems-courts, health care systems, network security, etc. , are unstable. Therefore, people think that the future is unpredictable and uncontrollable.
Smiling is a sign of affirmation and confidence, so in countries with low uncertainty avoidance, if someone smiles, they will look a little strange. Will you still smile when fate is an invisible wolf waiting to tear you apart? In those countries where uncertainty avoidance is low, people regard smiling as stupid.
Chris also believes that in a corrupt country, smiling means unhappiness. When everyone is helping each other, you don't know if someone's smile is kind. Maybe they're playing a prank.
To test this theory, Chris asked thousands of people from 44 different countries to judge eight smiling faces and unsmiling faces, and to tell their honesty and intelligence level. He compared this result with the uncertainty avoidance ranking and corruption ranking of 62 countries in 2004.
He found that in German, Swiss, China and Malaysian countries, smiling is considered smarter. But in Japan, India, Iran, South Korea and, of course, Russia, smiling is considered not very clever. Even after controlling other factors such as economy, there is a strong correlation between the unpredictability of society and the possibility that a smile is considered unwise.
Chris wrote, "This study shows that corruption at the social level may weaken the meaning of smile, which is an important signal produced by human evolution."
This must be a satisfactory explanation. However, it is worth noting that other studies have found other factors, such as a cultural hierarchy or masculinity, which play a great role in emotional expression, and smiling is definitely a part of it. There is evidence that some cultures do not attach importance to happiness, which will affect the number of times people there force themselves to smile.
Finally, it is worrying to rank countries according to the degree of uncertainty avoidance. Confusingly, there is a completely different uncertainty avoidance ranking method called Geert? Hofstede researchers designed it in the 1980s. The results of these two ranking methods are completely different.