Faking Works

I hate fakes. I'm talking about the two-faced Janus's that plague the general population. While they appear to present a particular front (usually cheerful, even gregarious), they're really just hollow inside. The smiles are wide and fake, and it's often rather obvious that they are. Yet, it seems that the faking actually works.

I've come to realize that the average human is actually a horrible detector of fakes. Someone with the ready smile just seems to disarm them, making them think that they're dealing with a really nice person. There's something to the niceness that puts people off their guard and even makes them feel the same sort of rapport that the other person is spoofing.

My take is that the average person is prone to projecting their feelings. That means that they are quite likely to read a fake smile as real, because it looks like a smile. This recognition of a smile leads to extrapolations of the smiling person's intentions and personality, which leads to an incorrect reading of the person's intentions. It leads to a premature evaluation of a person's character, which is notoriously difficult to read as a first impression.

Case in point: This is a trap that my dad is especially susceptible to. He clings to the belief that a person's character can be read at a single glance: A most dangerous fallacy indeed. (Conversely, my assumption is that a person can only be truly evaluated from approximately 6 months of close observation. It's a view that he despises as insensitive.) In his evaluation, seeing a gloomy person leads to the conclusion that the person's cold, aloof or just generally unhappy. Seeing a smiling person means friend, liking and other similar such. Yet, it simply led to him having a sadly mistaken assumption of the person's reliability and general disposition.

The side effects of this easy evaluation are interesting as well. The general unreliability and shallowness of the person are subsequently attributed to personal problems and family issues, typical of the sort of strange extrapolation that people are prone to doing when they feel that they like the person. The tendency to conflate feelings of friendship with the goodness of the person seems quite prevalent.

Overall, it's just interesting to note that faking works in general. I've seen it happen time and again, where people are taken in by a friendly face and take a painfully long time to figure out that they've been duped. Happens in the office, with family, with other acquaintances on the road and such. Faking works, and will probably continue to fool people for centuries hence.However, it's always good to be educated so that one knows how to see the signs of a fake and protect oneself accordingly.