Summary Of An American Woman Quits Smiling

In Lisa Ko's article, “An American Woman Quits Smiling,” Ko discusses her frustration at being told to smile, even when she didn’t feel like it, which leads her into deciding to stop smiling at people for a day and evaluating people’s reactions. She would only smile if it’s by her own will. The demands to follow a certain practice from the majority connects with the topic of conformity that’s within the field of social psychology. Conformity is the idea that an individual will change in order to fit the norms of a group. It’s consistent with that being obligated to smile sheds light on how cultural expectations will pressure people to follow just a simple act because it’s a good thing and that everyone else is doing it. Ko explains that women are generally often expected to smile to make others feel more comfortable. Moreover, she believed that this expectation seems like it was a way to represent being American and to show Americans as being the most dominant figures. Based on Ko’s experience, she finds that people in America, immigrants and citizens both, smile more often than people do in other countries, even if those countries are their own native homes. This proves the cultural differences shown that

It shows a little in Ko’s article, proven by how her experiment when she decided to stop smiling for a day and gauging people’s reactions. Ko found it harder to not smile than to smile because smiling was widely performed by a majority of people in America. She began to struggle with her experiment as she began to worry if she’ll come off as rude in other people’s eyes, especially to those who smiled at her first. While Ko didn’t succumb to smile for others, the thought that she worried about how her actions may affect people’s judgment of her certainly follows the normative influence of wanting to be liked, accordingly conformity may happen in order to avoid looking