My social experiment on smiling

Manoneet Singh
Sep 2, 2018 · 2 min read

Last week I conducted a social experiment. I counted the number of people who were smiling at a given time in the New York City Subway Station. Out of every 100 people that I looked at, how many do you think had a smile on their face? Note that this was on a Friday night leading into the weekend.

I asked this same question to my facebook friends and most of them guessed more than fifteen. However, only 1.6 out of every 100 people had a smile on their face. 72 out of every 100 were staring at their phone screens.

My take on the results:

I know that my experiment is biased towards negative results, since commutes are not a time when people are outwardly happy and jovial. But the experiment does highlight a deeper problem of modern life: staring at our phones and staying confined in our private worlds is not helping our mental health. With drastic increase in suicide rates and significant drop in the happiness index of US cities, we need to urgently address this issue.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/07/617897261/cdc-u-s-suicide-rates-have-climbed-dramatically

In my next experiment, I will smile at others in the subway. Hopefully, some of them will look up from their screens, smile back and lift the experiment numbers up from a mere 1.6%. When we feel happy, we smile but psychologists claim that this works vice versa. Thus, when we smile, our body sends a signal to our brain that might, in turn, increase our happiness level.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/prefrontal-nudity/201208/smile-powerful-tool

Imagine if we all started smiling at each other more often, rather than staying glued to our phone screens. Who knows, we might elevate the happiness index of our cities with this simple habit. Justin Timberlake brought sexy back, maybe its time for us to bring smiling back. Join the movement? #BringSmilingBack

Manoneet Singh

Written by

Artist by heart, business guy by choice.

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