Ron Gutman: The Hidden Power of the Smile (Full Transcript)

I wanted to make everyone happy. But I knew that I need superpowers in order to accomplish my dream. In order to find this superpower, I used to look for intergalactic objects from planet Krypton which was a lot of fun but really didn’t yield much result.

When I grew up, I decided, instead, of looking into science-fiction, going to look into a little bit more serious science. And also, another thing that was important for me is go and learn from people. So I said, ‘How can I find the power that I need in order to change the world? How do I find the power that I need in order to transform things in the way that will be meaningful?’ I thought that one of the best ways to doing this was to actually travel, was to actually meet people where they are, and see how they transform things and learn something from them, live with them, get inspired by them and do the things that I wanted to do.

I actually started my journey with a very fascinating study, a UC Berkeley 30-year longitudinal study that looked in the pictures of students in their yearbook. And then these researchers actually followed these students for 30 years throughout their lives. The amazing thing about this study was that by measuring the students’ smiles in the yearbook, the researchers were able to predict how long lasting and fulfilling a subject’s marriage will be, how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being and how inspiring she would be to others. And these are real studies, this is a very serious study. You can find it at UC Berkeley study. I’m happy to share it with you.

So you want to be a leader, you want to change the world, you want to be inspiring to others, smiling can help. In another year book, I found this picture. When I first saw Barry Obama’s picture, I was convinced that his superpowers came from his super collar. But now I know it was all in his smile.

Another very interesting study, a Wayne State University 2010 study that looked into pictures of baseball cards of Major League players. This was the 1950s cards. By looking at the span of the player’s smile researchers were able to predict the span of their life. Players that didn’t smile in their cards lived an average of about 72.9 years whereas players with beaming smile lived an average of almost 80 years. This is a serious study.

Smiling is very universal. It’s something that is not only thing that is common here in the US and studies here in this country. Actually traveling around the world and researching smiling I realized that one of the most renowned researchers on facial expression Paul Ekman conducted a very fascinating study about smiling in Papua New Guinea.

And the reason the Papua New Guinea is very interesting in the smile is not only because Paul Ekman was an adventurous guy and loved adventurous travel and he traveled around the world to meet people, understand them really well, but because the people that he researched in Papua New Guinea, the Fore people, the members of the Fore tribe were completely disconnected from what we know as Western cultures as our culture or even Eastern cultures. So they’re completely disconnected.

In fact, the Fore tribe is pretty well known for the unusual cannibalism rituals. What Paul Ekman discovered is that the Fore people attribute smiles to situation the same way you and I would. So there’s something in smiling that goes beyond something cultural. It goes beyond something that we get used to and learn throughout our life. It has to do with us as human beings.

So from Hollywood — right from Papua New Guinea to Hollywood all the way to Beijing, we smile often and we attribute smile to situation that makes us happy. But with a little bit different — how many of you know the emoticon on the upper left side of the screen? Do you know it? Have you seen it before? Where have you seen it? No one! All right, go ahead.

[Audience: Inaudible]

Right. Korean website, Japanese website — these are the emoticons of smiling, right? They did not exactly the same thing but as you can see, one of them which is the one that was the Korean one or Japanese one is actually focused on the eyes, because when you talk with Japanese people, you see how they smile, the focus is on the eyes. Whereas in Western cultures you will see more focus on the mouth in smiling. So it’s a little bit different but in essence it’s very similar. How many people here use emoticons just in emails and IAMs and stuff like that, it’s pretty useful.

So there’s a guy at Carnegie Mellon that claimed that he invented emoticons in — I think it was 1982 or something like that. But doing research I actually found a magazine — a humor magazine called Puck from 1881 that actually used emoticons like as you see here to denote joy and that was a character. So using smile, using the notions of smile to express joy and satisfaction was there way before computers and way before iPhones.

How many people in this room smile more than 20 times per day? Raise your hand if you do. Cool! How many people in this room smile fewer than five times per day? Raise your hand if you do. You don’t — you can’t admit it, right? Outside of this room more than a third of us smile more than 20 times per day whereas less than 14% of us smile less than five. In fact, those with the most amazing superpowers are — anyone knows? Children, who smile as often as 400 times per day. And this is pretty amazing. What happens to us since we were children all the way to the time that we grow up that we go from smiling 400 times per day to smiling maybe 20 or 25 times per day is an interesting thing to think about.

But the children — it brings me back to the origin. So using 3D ultrasound technology we can actually see that babies appear to smile even before they’re born in the womb. When they’re born, babies continue to smile initially most in their sleep. And researchers found that even blind baby smiles to the sound of the human voice. So there’s something smiling that is innate in us. It’s not only cultural, it’s not only human, it actually starts way before we were born and goes with us throughout our life. It’s very very powerful.

How many of you guys recognize this? Right, so children are very effective in using smile, they learn very early on that if they smile at us we get very happy and we get very excited about, right? So they try an experiment with it all the time. And then they use it very very powerfully. So what is she about to do, right? But you’re not angry at her, right? Because she is like she’s going to do something you know but she doesn’t really mean it. Or she wants just a little bit of attention, right? So we forgive her because she smiles and that’s very powerful.

So I like running, I run every day. And a little bit more than a year ago, I trained for a marathon and in one of these long runs that they had in the weekend, I realized that after about an hour and a half of running when things started to become a little bit more difficult and then I had this like thought about something that made me happy. So I smiled, and all of a sudden I felt better physically, which is kind of interesting, I thought it was really interesting.

And then I kept running and then I had another thought. And although I was quite tired, I also got a boost of energy out of nowhere. And I thought that’s really interesting, let me see if I can just try to do it without the reason, without having a great thought, just smile like this, would it make me feel better? And strangely enough it did. And I thought to myself, wow that’s interesting. Why does this happen? And I went and did research.

And lo and behold, I found something really really interesting. You guys probably know this guy Charles Darwin, but you know Darwin from a different context, right? The Theory of Evolution, The Origin of Species but beyond writing about the Origin of Species, Darwin also wrote the facial feedback response theory. His theory states that the act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good. And that’s quite astonishing.

Think about it in your own life. If you can induce a smile and actually feel better, but just inducing a smile, wouldn’t it be revolutionary? Wouldn’t you be able to use it in moments that you actually need a boost of energy by just focusing on the moment and smiling? So that was a theory in Darwin’s world but interestingly enough, it was approved by a lot of great science more recently.

So there’s some great research that was done in Germany in Echnische University where basically the researchers injected botox to suppress smiling muscles. So once you inject botox into these muscles, you can actually not smile anymore, right? So what they did is they showed this subject a picture that made them smile before they injected botox and so they used fMRI imaging in order to test the brain activity in the frontal lobe, in the reward area of the brain.

And they realized that before they injected botox, actually these areas in the frontal lobe lighted up. And after they injected botox and showed people the same images and they couldn’t smile anymore. All of a sudden these areas were not active, which is very fascinating. Once again what causes our brain to have more activity in the frontal lobe and make the reward mechanism light up is the act of smiling itself, which is super interesting.

One smile is as stimulating to our brain as eating how many bars of chocolate? 2000 bars of chocolate! And this is pretty amazing. This is actually a British study that found and actually again by just looking at the images of the brain when eating chocolate that it’s as stimulating to smile once as eating 2000 bars of chocolate. In fact, the same study actually showed that one smile is equal to receiving up to 16,000 pounds sterling in cash. That’s like 25 grand a smile, it’s not bad.

And think about it this way, 25,000 times 400 — but quite a few kids out there feel like Warren Buffett every day. And unlike chocolate, smiling can actually make us healthier. Smiling actually reduces the level of stress enhancing hormones that cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, increases the level of mood-enhancing hormones [endorphins] and also reduces blood pressure. So this is actually good for you rather than chocolate.

If that’s not enough, there’s another research that was done in Penn State University that shows that smiling doesn’t only make you look more likeable and courteous, it actually makes you look more competent. And that’s once again, if you’re looking for a superpower, a very simple one that you can employ in your own life on a daily basis, that will not only make you feel better, look better but also make you look more competent, which is very interesting, it’s not something that is intruding for us but was proven by science, smiling can help.

We know that we’re talking — we’re in a CEO summit and we need to talk about business a little bit. I was asked to actually tie it back to business. So I’ll share with you some more studies that — actually if you want to learn more about smiling and hear more about these things, there’s the TED Talk that I gave a few months ago at TED. But there is also — the folks from TED asked me to actually write a book and they’re going to publish it a few months from now about smiling. There’s a lot more research that’s coming out on that. So I will share with you some of the things that’s coming up in the book. And one of them is tied back to business. So I thought it’s appropriate in a CEO summit.

So they actually conducted research with waitresses in a restaurant and they controlled for whether the waitresses smiled or didn’t smile. And they realized that the tips went up about 40% when the waitresses only smiled. And that was the only thing that changed.

And more than that, there’s another study that showed that it was enough not even to smile, just to put a little smiley face at the end of the check, you saw some of these before, right? It actually caused you to give a bigger tip. And that’s interesting.

Another thing that is very interesting, again tying back to business to my own experiences, in the company that we founded, that’s called HealthTap where we are focusing on answering people’s questions, health questions by a network of 5,500 physicians. We actually decided to focus on smile as a differentiating factor. And why we’re doing that? I grew up among physicians, I got married to a doctor. And I realized over time that healthcare has two components. One of them is health and the other one is care. Something you forget about that, but the doctors that we like most, the doctor that we want to go back to are the ones that really care. The ones that reassure us, the ones who smile.

So when we decided what would be the symbol for the company, we decided that the smile is very central to this symbol. So we took a [town operator], gave him a good smile and we called him Dr. Happy because he has a role. But so this is Dr. Happy and he smiles. But how do we know his smile is real or fake? This is a very interesting question that was asked all the way back to Guillaume Duchenne who’s a French neurologist that Charles Darwin actually quoted in his studies. What Guillaume Duchenne did — and he created this notion that’s called Duchenne smile which is like the genuine big real smile.

So what Guillaume Duchenne did which again is very interesting, he actually used electric jolts to facial muscles to stimulate smiles. I really again recommend not to try this at home. I want two volunteers quickly, I have a little bit more time — two volunteers that want to come on the stage, very very quickly. Come on. 150 CEOs, one come from the back and one from here, awesome quickly.

All right. Nice to meet you; what’s your name? Angie, from France. That’s awesome. Oh nice to meet you, Paul. Angie and Paul. OK, so what I want you to do, Angie, I want you to be very serious — very very serious, okay. And what I want you to do, Paul, is stand next to Angie. You’re going to stay very very serious — not like that, serious, serious. And what you’re going to try to do is making smile, right? And you can do whatever you want but try to make him smile. Are you serious enough? No, but be very serious. Okay, go ahead, make him smile.

[Paul: Oo, aa, wuu aaa — that’s my daughter every time.]

So he smiled. So thank you.

So Paul actually exemplified what I wanted to show you, which is again — and that’s actually a Swedish study so that was not a French study but it actually shows that it’s very very difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles. I don’t know about that — uhh, woo, woo are hurting but I mean the smiling thing. And it’s been shown scientifically that’s difficult and what’s interesting about this thing is actually trying to make someone frown doesn’t work. If you frown at someone and try to make them frown really hard, it’s impossible. But trying to make someone smile by just smiling at them most of the time works. And why is that? The reason for that is that smiling is actually evolutionary contagious and this is not something that we are choosing to do, it’s actually part of who we are as human being.

And the way it was discovered basically is another very very interesting study and that was done in the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France. And it was a mimicking study that gave people actually pencils to hold in their mouths and they asked them to determine whether a smile that they look at is real or fake, right? So without the pencil in their mouth the subjects were really great judges. They knew if the smile was really fake, but with the pencil in their mouths when they couldn’t smile, try to hold the pencil in your mouth, it’s very very difficult to smile.

So when they had the pencil in their mouths and they couldn’t smile, their judgment was impaired. And that’s a very powerful notion again of something that you can take with you going forward, which is the best way to determine if someone that looks at you has a real and genuine smile is to actually mimic the smile yourself and experience it yourself. And this is the best judgment that you can have of whether a smile is real or fake. And that’s a really powerful notion, because this takes away the smiling from just being something that is about yourself and you can benefit a lot by being healthier, by feeling better, by looking better, by being more competent, but what about others?

So the emotion of mimicking takes smiles away from just being about yourself and enables you to transfer it to other people, right? So when you smile you look great and feel good, other people see you, they mimic you and smile themselves, they look great and feel good, other people see them smile and pay it forward. And this is a very powerful notion of how you can create this effect, right? It’s like a butterfly effect that takes the smile not only from yourselves to yourself but actually take it to the rest of the world, to your employees, to people that you’re working with, and to everyone else.

And I want to finish up by saying, if you take everything together what we spoke about today and whenever you want to feel good and look great, improve your marriage, or reduce your stress, or whenever you want to feel as if you had a whole stack of high quality chocolate without incurring the calorie cost, or whenever you want to feel as if you find that 25 grand in a old jacket that you hadn’t worn for ages, or whenever you want to help you and everyone around you, live a longer, healthier, happier life, smile.

Introducing speaker: Thank you, Ron. So we have again some mics for folks if you have questions, we’ve got time for two questions.

Audience: In my career in technology for 25 years, women are coached not to smile as much, not to laugh as much around the men executives and be seasoned because we will be thought of as less competent than I guess if we frowned. Is your data there anything like that or if I’d been led astray by these anti-smile people?

Ron Gutman: So it’s very distinct differences between women and men and again that will come up in the TED book that’s coming up very soon, was that actually women smile more than men. Whereas kids — in kids boys don’t smile less than girls, which is very interesting. So that’s cultural that has nothing to do with us, with their innate trait in us. So something is getting lost in us guys and there are lot more guys in different than women but I don’t know why it happens. That’s one thing.

So the short answer to your question is no, no, it’s great to smile, it makes you feel better, it makes you look great and even more competent. It’s very interesting to think about attraction. There was a bunch of studies again that will come in the book that are talking about researchers, maybe when they get bored, they like doing studies in bars. So there’s three studies actually, one in this country and two in other country that were done with many women and men in bars, trying to figure out if the smile has the power of attraction.

And it was a very interesting study. It found that when a woman just had eye contact with — just a woman in a bar when a man approaching, she had only eye contact, a certain percentage of men approached her. But when she actually smiled, it almost doubled, right? Interestingly enough, well, when men did it, nothing happened.

Okay. Are there questions?

Audience: So do you think that if people walked into pitches smiling more, then that would increase the likelihood of them getting funding?

Ron Gutman: I can tell my own story. I think one of the most powerful things that I do now is I can go into a partner’s meeting with like 30, 40 people, about 30, 35 people in the room sometimes and it’s always like not very serious and people are kind of looking kind of like — and then you start by talking about smiling or making anecdote about smiling or just asking how many people smile more than 20 times per day. And in just one second something changes and this is very profound, because, think about it this way, smiling is innate, smiling is very fundamental to who we are as human beings.

And once I start talking about smiling or when I smile myself, all of a sudden things change. And a beautiful thing that I discovered is that what it causes people more than anything else is just pause for a second and be in the here and now. So there’s a big race that happens all the time, the things that are happening. You’re asking about funding and going to these meetings and it’s serious and it’s like slides and numbers and ROI and all these things. But for a second pause, look around, see your beautiful life, smile and keep going with much better energy and with great success. Thank you.

Want a summary of this talk? Here it is.

SUMMARY:

Ron Gutman’s TED Talk, “The Hidden Power of the Smile,” delves into the remarkable impact of smiling on our lives and the people around us. Here’s a summary of the key points:

1. Introduction and Tribute to Steve Jobs: Gutman begins by referencing Steve Jobs’ iconic “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” message and his own graduation from Stanford in 2005. He hints at the importance of a hidden power he wants to reveal.

2. The Universal Nature of Smiles: Gutman highlights the universality of smiling, citing studies from UC Berkeley and Papua New Guinea, which show that smiles transcend cultural boundaries. Even people from a tribe known for cannibalistic rituals recognize and attribute smiles similarly.

3. Smiles Begin Before Birth: He explains that babies exhibit smiles before birth, and the act of smiling is innate to humans. It’s not merely a learned cultural behavior but a fundamental part of our human nature.

4. The Science of Smiles: Gutman delves into scientific studies that demonstrate the benefits of smiling. He mentions Charles Darwin’s theory that smiling itself makes us feel better, rather than being a result of feeling good. Research using Botox to inhibit smiles and brain imaging supports this theory.

5. Smiling Is a Natural Contagion: Gutman discusses a study from Sweden that reveals it’s difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles. This demonstrates that smiles are naturally contagious, and trying to make someone smile often succeeds.

6. Mimicking Smiles for Authenticity: He emphasizes that the best way to determine if someone’s smile is genuine is to mimic it yourself. This technique helps you understand and connect with others on a more profound level.

7. The Ripple Effect of Smiles: Gutman introduces the idea of the “butterfly effect” of smiles. When you smile, you not only feel better and look more attractive, but you also inspire others to smile, creating a positive chain reaction.

8. Benefits of Smiling: Gutman concludes by listing the many benefits of smiling, including feeling good, looking great, improving relationships, reducing stress, and potentially even gaining health benefits. He encourages the audience to smile not only for personal well-being but also to contribute to the happiness of those around them.

In his talk, Ron Gutman effectively conveys the hidden power of smiles, revealing that it’s a universal language that connects us all. Smiling isn’t just a reflection of happiness; it’s a powerful tool that can improve our lives and positively influence the people we interact with. Gutman’s message encourages us to embrace the simple act of smiling as a means to enhance our well-being and spread happiness to others.

Related Posts

• Transcript of An Ethicist’s Guide to Living a Good Life – Ira Bedzow
• Transcript of Resilience: How to Emerge From Your Tragedies Stronger – Sydney Cummings
• Transcript of Confessions of An Accidental Killer: Gregg Ward
• Transcript of How to Spot Liars at Work and How to Deal with Them: Carol Kinsey Goman
• Transcript of The Secret To Conflict Resolution: Shannon Pearson