Psychological study suggests Republicans see a smile as a power play

A new study reveals that supporters of President Donald Trump, and of conservative politics more generally, tend to interpret the act of smiling differently than people who are not right-leaning.

A recent study in the journal Animal Behavioral Scientist surveyed 1,385 American adults shortly before the 2024 presidential election. The study covered a diverse range of individuals based on different ethnicities, income levels and age brackets, asking them to assess 15 different reasons why a person might smile according to a seven-point scale.

“When the researchers analyzed the survey responses, they grouped the data to find underlying patterns,” wrote PsyPost’s Eric W. Dolan on Wednesday. “They found that participant answers generally fell into two broad categories. One category favored social bonding as the main reason for smiling, while the other category favored managing social hierarchies as the primary motivation.”

Dolan added, “The authors found that identifying with the Republican Party was the strongest and most consistent predictor of how a person viewed smiles. Participants who identified as Republicans had substantially higher odds of endorsing hierarchy management as a reason for smiling compared to non-Republicans. This relationship remained consistent even after the researchers accounted for different demographic factors like age, gender, and income.”

The lead author of the study, University of Arkansas political scientist Patrick Stewart, argued that these results shed light on how people interpret the political process.

“In the real world of politics you want to know who your leaders really are, and the best way of accomplishing that is by closely watching what they do and not just what they say,” Stewart said. “But perhaps most important is understanding followers and just what they want out of their leaders. After all, there are no leaders without followers.”

He added, “If you grew up and live in a small community where everyone knows everybody else and everyone has a ‘place’ in the power structure, you don’t need to smile to signal that you are friendly and cooperative, you just have to show that you know who has power and who doesn’t. And this perspective of the world affects how an individual approaches the public good, in other words, politics.”

Dr. David Reiss — a psychiatrist who contributed to the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” which argued Trump is mentally unfit to be president and challenged the Goldwater Rule barring mental health professionals from commenting on figures they have not personally diagnosed — told AlterNet he was intrigued by the study’s findings.

“I think in general it makes sense,” Reiss told AlterNet. “ ... Anyone who's following a person blindly is going to interpret things to fit what they want it to say, rather than being objective.”

By contrast psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham, formerly of Tufts University, offered a mixed assessment of the study. Abraham was one of the signatories of a letter to Congress earlier this year that urged lawmakers to invoke the 25th Amendment or take other measures to rein in Trump based on his perceived cognitive decline.

“It sounds like an interesting study,” Abraham said. “It has a number of features that are particularly attractive,” including “the fact that they looked to explain their findings through multiple variables and not just one. The study really requires a careful assessment in terms of its validity and reliability. There are certain positive features I can identify right off the top of my head — it's an admirable sample size, and they took pains to try to rule out confounding variables. That's really important.”

Yet he added that these positive characteristics don’t “necessarily mean that you should take this one to the bank, for a couple of reasons. One is that the results are so partisan that you have to explore the methodology to see if the researchers took adequate pains to protect the process from their own bias — to what extent the researchers were biased, either consciously or unconsciously. A very simple question is: who paid for the study? That makes sense.”

He added, “Secondly, how did they assemble a sample of more than a thousand?”

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