Smiles Predict Marriage Success | Hacker News Reader

Smiles Predict Marriage Success

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33 pointsmshafrir31 comments

Hypothesis: people who smile in yearbook photos are not really happy, just concerned with appearances, and thus likely to stay in a joyless marriage for appearance's sake.

I'm only half joking :)

Though they did measure wrinkles around the eyes as well, which is generally a sign of a genuine smile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile#Duchenne_smile

(Yes, you can fake that as well, but I doubt enough people know about that part to do it.)

Smiling in yearbook photos is probably an indication of conformity.

My wife didn't smile in hers because she had just recently chipped a tooth and had to have her braces put back in. Not sure what that proves.

It proves that they didn't discover a rule, but merely a trend.

I'm surprised the general response here is so negative. Besides the fact that it's obvious, research does in fact confirm that happier people smile more. And the average high school student is probably not focused on being cynical and grumpy whilst having his/her picture taken (though perhaps cultural norms around pictures have changed over the past decades).

Anyways, couple the happiness-smiling connection with a few other facts about human psychology, and this makes a lot of sense. (1) Emotional states in humans are contagious. We naturally tend to empathize with one and other, laugh together, and cry together. (2) We also naturally tend to mimic physical gestures made by people we are interacting with, often subconsciously. (3) Facial expressions actually influence our emotional state. Being happy makes us smile, but also smiling actually makes us happier.

It doesn't seem much of a leap from there that happiness would correlate inversely with divorce. In my take, this article is just reaffirming that naturally happy people are less likely to divorce.

Here's another interesting article about the contagiousness of happiness: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9784878...

If you're happy enough to have a genuine smile while attending an American highschool, then putting up with someone's shit for 50 year's is NOTHING :)

Here is pg's take on how to deal with high school:

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

I just read that--it's one of the best I've read by pg.

They define marriage success as not divorcing. That works only if you define marriage as a formal pact devoid of any emotional substance.

This seems really susceptible to noise. It makes perfect sense that people who smile a lot tend to have a happier disposition, which makes them easier to get along with, which makes them more likely to stay married. However, plenty of people are unhappy in school for reasons that have nothing to do with having a genetically cheery personality. It could be, oh, the getting beat up, and being forced to do mindless work, and listening to teachers who are dumber than you, and waking up at godawful hours.

People often change a lot when they go off to college and start working. I was just having dinner with a coworker who's one of the most talkative people I know. Apparently, she never talked for the first 18 years of her life, and only rarely for the next 4. Happiness may have a strong genetic component, but that's not saying that the environment doesn't matter at all.

So... the top 10 percent had 0% divorce rate, the bottom 10 percent had 25% divorce rate.

Isn't overall the divorce rate is 50%? Something fishy is happening here.

Isn't overall the divorce rate is 50%?

No, that is a statistical fallacy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html?pagewan...

"About half is still a very sensible statement" </quote> from the article you cited

Divorces per marriage may be approximately 50% (not sure).

This does not imply that (people who got divorced) / (people who got married) is 50%, and this is what the study measured.

Simple example: 3 guys have a happy first marriage. 1 guy has 3 failed marriages. Divorces/marriages = 3/6 = 50%. People who got divorced/people who got married =1/4= 25%.

Who paid for this?

"We need some money to fund a research project to look at people's amount of 'smiley-ness' in their old yearbook photos and see if it corresponds to whether they get divorced later in life."

You don't think there is huge social significance in preventing divorce? Some very smart young people I know can't attend great colleges that have admitted them, because their parents are divorced and not in agreement about paying their college expenses. Loss of human talent hurts all of us.

I think there's incredible value in preventing divorce. I also think this study is bullshit.

I know this is a bit of a strawman, but what have we really learned here? That if you tell your kids to smile in their yearbook photo, they'll have a happy marriage? Sorry, I just don't see any value in this correlation at all...seems like it's almost as likely to be random as meaningful.

Edit: Instead of just downvoting me, could someone explain what I'm missing?

I'll upvote you as much as I can, and explain why I think the study is worth doing. Just like Alexander Fleming when he first saw a zone in a culture dish where bacteria wouldn't grow,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming#Accidental_di...

a scientist who notices an interesting correlation has some new issue to investigate. The next issue to investigate is why some young people smile for their yearbook photos and some do not. Yet another issue to investigate is whether that characteristic is malleable in each individual. And of course all the causation issues need to be sorted out--do people stay with spouses who smile a lot, even if the spouses are louts, while good spouses who are glum get dumped? There is a lot to investigate here, but the investigation could reduce an important problem. At the very least, a marriage counselor prioritizing which client to devote the most vigorous interventions to might start asking clients to bring in their high school yearbooks and talk about how they felt about having their pictures taken, to get them talking about other issues.

But, yes, I agree that one of the first things to be done here is to attempt to replicate the finding.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Maybe it is just coincidence in this one study, and the correlation is spurious. But it would be a reasonable idea to check.

Other research has shown that happy people smile more.

In various photos outside of the yearbook, the tendency to smile might indicate the positive attitude of that person.

Though a bit weak, this study might suggest that happiness predicts marriage success.

Smiles Correlate With Marriage Success

The article even points that out - it's just the headline that's misleading.

I thought the GP was a correction to the headline.

You can talk about an independent variable "predicting" a dependent variable even if the mode of causation is unknown. That's what statistics is often used for.

Yes, it's entirely possible that the divorce flowed backward through time and wiped the smiles off the future divorcees faces while they were posing for yearbook photos.

Thank you for the knee-jerk causation/correlation comment.

I think the person who complained about the correlation/causation comment was right, whether it was knee-jerk or not. You don't need time travel to see what the problem could be.

Say a typical person may or may not be the smiley type, and say that means nothing at all about their chance of marital bliss. But say oh, I don't know, all migraine sufferers frown, because they are in pain. And say that being a migraine sufferer puts a terrible strain on your marriage (look, it's just an example) and so you are more likely to divorce. Now if you look for the divorce rate of people who frown, it will be much higher than that of people who smile. But that has no predictive value for an individual who frowns, because (in this hypothetical example) it's not the frown that is the issue - it is whether they get migrains. If there is no predictive value, there is no real science.

The other fundamental problem with presenting research in this way is that it is very easy to pick two percentile ranges and find a difference even in random data. The question that one should ask is - was there a dose response. In other words, if you plotted divorce rate along this so called "smile strength" axis, would there be a linear correlation (the weaker the smile the higher the divorce rate)? Or is your conclusion based on the outliers?

I can't tell from the OP.

I absolutely hate smiling for photos. It feels fake. I don't really like having my picture taken, to be completely honest, even though I'm not bad looking.

I really hope this study is as meaningless as I suspect it to be.

I feel the same way you do about photos, but I fear that the study isn't quite as meaningless as you suspect. It's seems quite plausible that unwillingness to conform to social norms by faking a smile correlates to (lack of) success in marriage.

I'm with you, but I don't mind laughing. I try to make people laugh for photos. It feels less phony.

In general I agree with what has been said. But, there are also cultural issues involved here. Some cultures smile more some less. Canadians for example smile a bit less than Americans, but I believe have less divorces. Also some horribly stupid smiles have to be filtered out. Some other thoughts: Recall some crazy sadistic couples, who mutilated people, killed for no reason etc. - it looks like the have pretty strong marriages,but I doubt they smile a lot.

sounds like a load of bull.

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