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My strategy for the last 10 or so was to only watch the instant they started to smile, and immediately look away and decide purely on instinct. With the first few, I watched the whole video and ended up debating with myself whether it was fake or genuine, and as a result did less well.
3 years ago I would have had the opposite problem. The last couple years have turned me into a cynical, mistrusting human being. Ugh. Note to self: work on that
Do you guys feel that the advice at the end is helpful? I can't see the outside tip of the eyebrow moving at all in a lot of them. Let alone analyse the movement of the eye cover fold...
20 out of 20! My fake-spotting skills are unstoppable!
And yeah, the whole key is the eyes. Not only do the real smiles involve crinkling around the eyes, the real smilers seemed invariably to blink at least once (and those who blinked more than once did it in an irregular pattern). Most of the fake smilers didn't blink, or they blinked in a regularized way, even if they put a little eye crinkling into the mix.
I saw my friend's baby when she was ten days old...it's said that smiles that young are "just gas" but it was in her eyes too when she finally opened them and looked at me.
This is actually a bit disturbing to me, because so many smiles do strike me as fake. I usually just tell myself I must be bad at telling the difference -- all these people around couldn't be fake-similing so often!
18/20, and one of those, I hesitated, thought it was real, but put fake. Only one really fooled me - it was fake and I said real. Both misses were dudes, if that has anything to do with it.