Comment by pmoriarty
5 years ago
To appear friendly and welcoming, and to show that you're having a good time.
People often assume something's wrong if you never smile, or, worse, frown.
5 years ago
To appear friendly and welcoming, and to show that you're having a good time.
People often assume something's wrong if you never smile, or, worse, frown.
I'll try to give you European POV :).
People sometimes have good time (better than avg), sometimes bad time, and sometime neutral time (say.. thinking about some problem to solve, or repeating Swedish vocabulary to learn a new language, or trying to recall the name of a person you just met and you're supposed to remember).
If you're compelled to smile with every interaction, in order to show that you have good time, then it'd mean that you'd be mostly lying according to the aforementioned definition :).
Unless we re-define the 'good time', so it means 'not significantly bad', which seems to be the case here. It's just, that it requires a bit of effort to remember and to switch to when visiting US.
The real reason is that American smile is relatively new phenomenon that appeared about 100 years ago with the emergence of Hollywood, everyone wanted to act like famous actors and it became a part of the culture. Also the smile in US is a sign of hope, dream, prosperity and individualism. In socialist countries the collective well-being is above the needs of individual so there is no reason to smile all the time.