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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Smiley Face Effect Is Gender-Specific

Richard Morin Universal Press Syndicate

For those of you who majored in the wrong thing in college and find yourself waiting tables at a local munchatorium, don’t despair: Penning a Smiley Face or scrawling a thank you on a customer’s bill can boost your earnings.

It’s true - at least for women, claim Temple University psychologists Bruce Rind and Prashant Bordia, in the latest Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

They tested the Happy Face effect at an upscale Philadelphia restaurant. For three days at lunch, a waitress and a waiter drew happy faces on the checks of half their customers before presenting the bills. Nothing was drawn on the bills given to the other half. Customers were selected at random for the Happy Face treatment; a total of 89 dining parties were served.

These researchers found that drawn Happy Faces produced a 19 percent increase in tips for the waitress. That result echoes earlier studies that found a big bump-up in tips when waitresses wrote “thank you” on a bill.

But a Happy Face proved a flop for the waiter: He received no extra tips for his artistic efforts. In fact, the poor guy actually received slightly less in tips when he drew a Happy Face on the bill than when he left it undecorated.

Rind and Bordia said that’s exactly what they expected to find. “Expressive behaviors of this type, although perceived by members of our society as appropriate for females, are perceived as less appropriate for males,” they argued. “Rather than inducing customers to see a male server as friendly, this procedure may be more likely in general to induce the customers to form the impression that the server is strange.”

Dumbing down democracy reconsidered

No, great minds don’t always think alike.

Consider James Guyot, an unconventionally wise professor of political science at Baruch College in New York City.

Guyot read recently in “Unconventional Wisdom” that the percentage of high school graduates who knew which party controlled the House of Representatives had dropped from 77 percent in 1947 to 54 percent in 1995. That and other declines in knowledge of specific political facts are evidence to some researchers that democracy is being dumbed down.

Not so, argues Guyot. About the same proportion of Americans then and now know basic facts about politics and government. “All that has changed is the amount of time we spend in school and the labels that we give the degrees,” Guyot said.

In fact, today’s Joe and Jane College are the social equivalents of yesterday’s high school grads. “High school graduates of yesteryear made up 20.3 percent of the adult population, just as today’s college graduates are 21.4 percent of today’s adult population,” he said.

Not only do they make up the same proportion of the population, this top slice knows just as much about politics as they ever did: 80 percent of college graduates in 1995 knew which party had control of the House, compared to 77 percent of high school graduates in 1949. “In other words, the top one-quarter to one-fifth of the country is as informed about the government as it ever was.”

Guyot’s argument has other deliciously unexpected implications. For example, police departments that set a high school diploma as a requirement four decades ago and never changed it are drawing from a significantly dimmer and less desirable slice of the population.

Another “wilder speculation” is that as the human life span increases, our childhood stretches out too. “Such a prolonging of maturation could explain why 21-year-olds now know what 17-year-olds used to know. This may or may not be a rationale for raising the drinking age. More provocative is whether this means we should raise the voting age.”

Or the thinking age, for that matter.