You’re listening to a friend describe two movies. You nod along, making small expressions you don’t even notice. Later, when asked which movie you want to see, you pick one. Here’s what’s unsettling: researchers can predict your choice just by measuring how much you unconsciously mimicked your friend’s face while they talked.
New research from Tel Aviv University suggests that facial mimicry — the tiny, automatic way we copy other people’s expressions — doesn’t just help us connect socially. It might actually be influencing our decisions before we consciously make them. Your face could be telling your brain what to prefer.
Muscles You Can’t Control Did the Choosing
The researchers paired strangers in a lab and had them describe movies to each other. While one person talked, the other listened and later chose which movie they wanted to watch. Nothing unusual there. But the scientists were tracking something the participants couldn’t see or feel: microscopic muscle movements in their faces.
These facial muscles move without our awareness or control, twitching in response to the expressions we see on other people’s faces. The researchers found that when listeners mimicked positive expressions like cheek-raising, they were more likely to prefer whatever the speaker was describing at that moment.
What’s stranger: this worked even when participants couldn’t see the speaker’s face. They heard movie descriptions read by an actress over audio. Apparently, we can hear a smile in someone’s voice and unconsciously mimic it. Even without visual cues or social pressure, that mimicry predicted preference.
Your Face Gives Your Brain Marching Orders
The hypothesis is that when you mirror someone’s facial expression, your brain uses that physical feedback as a signal. Before you consciously think “I want to see that movie,” your face has already given your brain input about how you feel.
This isn’t entirely new thinking. Research has long suggested connections between facial mimicry and empathy — people who automatically mirror others’ expressions tend to score higher on empathy measures. But this study pushes further, suggesting mimicry doesn’t just help us understand others’ emotions. It shapes our own preferences.
The researchers call it being “swept” toward the speaker’s perspective. You think you’re making an independent choice, but your face has already been influencing that decision through tiny, unconscious movements.
When Psychology’s Greatest Hits Stop Working
Before you start worrying about facial manipulation, there’s an important caveat: this area of research has a credibility problem. The famous “facial feedback hypothesis” — the idea that making a facial expression can create the corresponding emotion — has failed to replicate reliably.
A 1988 study claimed that holding a pen between your teeth (forcing a smile) made cartoons funnier. It became a psychology classic, cited in textbooks and introductory courses. Then a massive replication attempt across 17 labs with nearly 1,900 participants found no evidence the effect actually exists.
The broader field of embodied cognition — the idea that body postures and facial expressions significantly influence our minds — has produced mixed results. Power poses don’t change your hormones. Forcing a smile might not make you happier. When studies in this area fail to replicate, they tend to fail spectacularly.
Small Sample, Modest Effects, Big Claims
The Tel Aviv study has some important advantages over past research. It wasn’t trying to prove that forcing an expression changes how you feel. It measured natural, unconscious mimicry during real social interactions and looked at how that correlated with subsequent choices.
The researchers also acknowledged the limitations upfront. All participants were women. The effects were modest. This was exploratory research, not a definitive claim. They’re proposing a hypothesis worth investigating further, not declaring a solved mystery.
But the study also shares some problems with previous research. It was correlational — showing mimicry and preference happen together, not that one causes the other. The sample was small. And it’s exactly the kind of counterintuitive, attention-grabbing finding that tends not to hold up under scrutiny.
Conversations Your Brain Doesn’t Know About
Even if the effect is real, what does it mean practically? Should you be worried that salespeople or manipulative friends could unconsciously influence your choices through facial expressions?
Probably not. If the effect exists, it’s small and operates alongside dozens of other factors that shape decisions. You’re not a puppet controlled by other people’s smiles. Your conscious preferences, past experiences, and rational evaluation still matter enormously.
But the research does suggest something worth thinking about: we’re influenced by factors we don’t notice. The expressions on other people’s faces, the tone of their voice, the unconscious way we mirror their movements — all of it feeds into how we feel and what we choose. We like to think we’re making purely rational decisions, but our bodies are constantly collecting data our conscious minds don’t register.
Whether this specific finding about facial mimicry predicting preference holds up remains to be seen. Science works through replication, and this study needs many more attempts before we know if it’s reliable. But the broader insight stands: your face is having conversations your brain doesn’t know about.