Smiling is communication. The information content of a message is inversely proportional to its probability. If you smile at strangers in places or situations where that’s very unusual, you’re communicating pretty strongly, and not necessarily what you intend to communicate.
For example, I live in a part of the world (Northeast US) where the culture is to leave strangers alone. You don’t talk to them, smile at them, etc; everyone just does their own thing. If someone here smiled at me out of nowhere, my first reaction would be trying to figure out where I knew this person from, and I’d probably smile back to be polite. Then if they moved on and I really didn’t know them I might wonder why they had smiled at me; were they flirting? Visiting from out of town and didn’t know the customs? On drugs? Indicating support for something I’m signaling with my appearance or attire?
I can report that nearly half of the strangers will smile back, although often they’ll look away as they do.
I’m not sure that’s as positive as it sounds? The “look away” part seems to me like it’s indicating discomfort, or that they’re worried returning your smile will escalate the interaction.
Smiling is communication. The information content of a message is inversely proportional to its probability. If you smile at strangers in places or situations where that’s very unusual, you’re communicating pretty strongly, and not necessarily what you intend to communicate.
This is of course correct.
The initial post seems like a geek fallacy: that you can just logically analyze social skills and come up with the optimum way to do social things as a workaround to not understanding social skills the normal way. This pretty much always fails, because analyzing social skills to enough level of detail that you can actually do that is really difficult. Couple with the tendency of “rationalists” to take one idea and follow it as far as they can without sanity-checking it or applying Chesterton’s fence, and you get disaster.
Smiling is communication. The information content of a message is inversely proportional to its probability. If you smile at strangers in places or situations where that’s very unusual, you’re communicating pretty strongly, and not necessarily what you intend to communicate.
For example, I live in a part of the world (Northeast US) where the culture is to leave strangers alone. You don’t talk to them, smile at them, etc; everyone just does their own thing. If someone here smiled at me out of nowhere, my first reaction would be trying to figure out where I knew this person from, and I’d probably smile back to be polite. Then if they moved on and I really didn’t know them I might wonder why they had smiled at me; were they flirting? Visiting from out of town and didn’t know the customs? On drugs? Indicating support for something I’m signaling with my appearance or attire?
I’m not sure that’s as positive as it sounds? The “look away” part seems to me like it’s indicating discomfort, or that they’re worried returning your smile will escalate the interaction.
I have a similar feeling… receiving a full-face smile out of the blue from a total stranger is vaguely creepy
This is of course correct.
The initial post seems like a geek fallacy: that you can just logically analyze social skills and come up with the optimum way to do social things as a workaround to not understanding social skills the normal way. This pretty much always fails, because analyzing social skills to enough level of detail that you can actually do that is really difficult. Couple with the tendency of “rationalists” to take one idea and follow it as far as they can without sanity-checking it or applying Chesterton’s fence, and you get disaster.