Gender-based expectancies and observer judgments of smiling

Beliefs about gender differences in smiling were measured by asking college students to rate how much they believed hypothetical women and men smile. Women were believed to smile more than men. Individual differences in this belief did not affect subsequent scoring of smiles, whether scored by counting the number of smiles exhibited by videotaped male and female targets or by rating the amount of smiling exhibited. An expectation about gender differences in smiling was experimentally induced, either that women smile more than men or that there is no gender difference in smiling. This expectation did not affect subsequent scoring of smiles, regardless of scoring method and regardless of whether the expectation was induced as a casual aside or in more formal instructions. In all conditions female targets were observed to smile more than male targets. Rating produced larger target gender effects than counting, but this could have been due to the nature of the rating process rather than observer bias.The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Thomas Leahy and Joe Pieri in data collection, and of Cliff Brown and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. Miles Patterson served as Action Editor for this article.