Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

In humans, the silent bared-teeth display is evident in our deferential smile, which signals thoughtful, at times fearful, attention to the concerns of others. This smile involves the activity of two muscles: the zygomatic major, which pulls the lip corners upward, and the risorius, which pulls the lower lip sideways. I first encountered the deferential smile empirically in an early study of teasing, in which I had two high-and two low-status fraternity brothers tease one another. As they ripped into each other in the profane gutter language of young men living together in tight quarters, the low-status guys were ten times more likely to show deferential smiles. A good time was had by all, but it was the low-status guys who signaled their subordinate positions with this smile.

The relaxed open-mouth display, in contrast, is observed, Preuschoft notes, in fewer primate species. It is accompanied by panting and staccato breathing, and on occasion bursts of grunt-or howl-like vocalizations and boisterous body movements. Quite clearly, the relaxed open-mouth display is the primate predecessor to the human laugh. Importantly, Preuschoft has found that the relaxed open-mouth display occurs in a radically different set of social contexts than those associated with the silent bared-teeth display: It precedes and accompanies the pyrotechnics of primate play—chasing, nuzzling, gnawing, rough-and-tumble somersaults and cavorting in the branches of trees.

Preuschoft’s analysis of these two primate displays makes it difficult, even for the ardently faithful, to continue entertaining Darwin’s hypothesis that the smile is the first stage of the laugh. No longer tenable as well is the pleasing inference that our capacity for play is the most rudimentary element of positive emotion. Instead, we must conclude that smiling and laughter have distinct evolutionary origins. The smile emerged to facilitate cooperative and affiliative proximity. The laugh emerged to promote play and levity. They are tokens of different swaths of positive emotion, and different facets of the meaningful life.

A VOCABULARY OF SMILES

 

During the summer following my freshman year in college, I decided to teach myself classical guitar while living at home in Penryn, California, a tiny rural backwater named after an island in Wales. Two weeks into thick-fingered attempts at “Classical Gas,” my mother had had enough. A week later I found myself donning the brown polyester and golden arches insignia of the McDonald’s uniform, serving burgers, fries, Chicken McNuggets, and gooey sundaes to sunburned revelers on their way to underaged drinking and debauchery at the rocky rivers in the foothills of the Sierras or the noisy waterskiing lakes. Each and every day at 11:10 AM a middle-aged man arrived, strode to the counter in shoes that made a strange clicking sound, and, with somber brown eyes and Lincolnesque sideburns, placed the same order: four plain hamburgers, with nothing on the gray patties and buns that dissolved upon touch, and a cup of black coffee, which I had to refill a dozen or so times in the span of the thirty-six minutes he reliably took to finish his lunch. He became a Sisyphus-like commentary on my fate: the minimum-wage undermining of my musical career and the missed opportunities for summertime revelry. My manager, a good-hearted, optimistic soul, recognized my deep despair and offered managerial guidance straight out of some McDonald’s handbook: just smile. I felt deeply oppressed, filling the regular customer’s Styrofoam cup with another round of coffee, smiling as I delivered his cup of joe.

I can assure you that I was not smiling the smile that evolution has produced, and which we will soon dissect, and which promotes goodwill between individuals. Much more likely, I was emitting the service industry smile, the one that signals that the customer is always right, that the sale should always come first. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild has argued that this smile is part of the emotional labor required of so many service-oriented jobs and the tip of the iceberg of alienation from the fruits of human labor. Research shows that when workers smile in the service industry, for example when greeting customers at a 7-11 counter, customers are more satisfied and actually more likely to consume. As the bottom line is enhanced, however, workers experience a problematic disconnect, Hochschild argues, between the emotions they display to the outer world and the feelings they experience within. This disconnect has parallels to recent studies by my colleague Ann Kring of schizophrenics. Contrary to longstanding assumptions about schizophrenia and flat affect, schizophrenics have been shown to feel the emotions that you and I feel but not to express them in the face. Service industry jobs produce a form of schizophrenia: We may experience feelings of emptiness and quiet frustration, or a deep ennui, but we display to the world the smile of satisfaction.