A recent LiveScience article highlighted research that suggests that giving strangers a slight smile can make people feel more connected to one another.

At the annual meeting of Society for the Study of Motivation, researchers from Purdue University in Indiana suggested that people who have been acknowledged by a stranger feel more connected to others immediately after the experience than people who have been deliberately ignored.

Eric Wesselmann and his colleagues conducted a study where 239 pedestrians on a busy campus area didn’t even know they were part of a study. They simply passed by someone who acknowledged them politely, acknowledged them with a smile or stared straight through them as if they weren’t even there.

Immediately after this encounter, the unknowing participants were approached by another person who asked them to fill out a survey on social connectedness. The participants had no idea that the stranger who had just passed them was part of this study. A fourth group of participants filled out the survey without ever encountering the stranger at all.

The survey results showed that being pointedly ignored by a stranger had an immediate effect.

Participants who’d gotten the cold shoulder reported feeling more socially disconnected than people who’d gotten acknowledged, whether that acknowledgement came with a smile or not.

People who hadn’t encountered the stranger fell somewhere in the middle.

Researchers suspect that this response is evolutionary. Humans are social animals, adapted for group living, Wesselmann said.

He and his colleagues detailed their results in February in the journal Psychological Science. The abstract to their study entitled To be Looked at as though Air can be found here

Do you smile at strangers on the street? Maybe you should!

Have you been watching the NBA Finals? The series is now 2-1 in favor of the Cleveland Cavaliers over the Golden State Warriors.

You may notice while watching basketball and many other sporting events that every time an athlete triumphs over another, his or her first instinct is to do a victory dance.

In a study conducted by researchers at San Francisco State University, it turns out that athletes’ first reaction after victory is to strut. Or at least the modern version of it, which includes throwing their hands up in the air, puffing out their chest and pulling their head back, all while wearing an enormous grin of satisfaction on their faces.

Those are contemporary signs of dominance, says the study’s author, David Matsumoto, a professor of psychology at the university who began studying the phenomenon after noticing it during his years as the U.S. Olympic coach for judo. While some have labeled the behavior as signs of pride, Matsumoto believes otherwise.

“What I saw everyday in training and in competition had nothing to do with pride,” he says. “It’s all about just having clobbered somebody. It’s a sign or signal given to other members of the community who are watching.”

 Read more on this fascinating topic in our past blog post!