Grin and Win? Politician’s Smile Can Influence Voter’s Support: Study 

New research led by Dr Carl Senior of Aston University and his team has found out that political leaders use certain types of smiles to influence voters to gain their support. The research was based on the information collected during the UK general election in 2019. The findings showed that politicians use two types of smiles, one is affiliative and the other one is reward.

The purpose of the research was to identify how politicians’ certain facial expressions like smiles along with other nonverbal cues can influence their supporters. Also how different types of smiles can affect voters’ emotions? We examine experimental evidence from the 2019 UK general election to investigate the influence of a politician’s reward or affiliative smile on voter emotions. Also, this one is the first research on how losers react towards the winners.

Professor Patrick Stewart, one of the important faces of the research, focused on two particular types of smiles -a ‘reward’ smile and an ‘affiliative’ smile. The reward smile: It has to be genuine and felt by everyone along with a sense of joy and enthusiasm. This type of smile shows higher levels of trust and affects the onlookers. The affiliative smile: It increases acknowledgement, approachability and appeasement and is important for developing cooperative relationships.

Volunteers were selected to observe supporters of each of the three main parties who were shown the same video footage of the three leaders – Johnson, Corbyn and Swinson before and after the 2019 election. The responsibility of the team was to assess the emotional response to the different smiles of the candidates.

The findings showed the winner, Boris Johnson flushed his affiliative smile, which helped him to fix up with his followers. Also, the Labour supporters showed high distress and anger when they saw Johnson’s reward smile after the election. In this context, Professor Lee said “The individual appeal of party leaders has become increasingly influential. A smile can’t win an election on its own. But Johnson’s appeal transcended party policies, connecting with people who hadn’t planned to vote for him.”

However, more research work is needed to understand how smiles and other verbal and nonverbal cues determine the leader’s dominance.