Getting ready for a Group photo with newly married couple.

Sam had suggested take it when we are fresh. Here’s something that is always puzzling.

Whenever you are having your photos taken, you are told to say “cheese” and smile.

But if your parents also happened to be in the photo, they would be stone-faced. It’s not just photos: women do not have to worry about being instructed by random men to “smile.”

Somewhere, it is Bitchy Resting Face Nation, seemingly forever responding “um, I guess?” to any question the universe might pose.

This does not mean you are unhappy! Quite the opposite: The virile ruler, the vodka, the endless mounds of sour cream—they are pleasing to some. It’s just that grinning without cause is not a skill many possess or feel compelled to cultivate.

There’s a Russian proverb that translates, roughly, to “laughing for  no reason is a sign of stupidity.”

Russians’ fondness for the gentle scowl seems even more unusual to expats than its actual, climatic cold. And the cultural difference cuts both ways: Newcomers to America often  remark on the novelty of being smiled at by strangers.

So why is this? Why do some societies not encourage casual smiling? If you come across a new paper by Kuba Krys, a psychologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, in some countries, smiling might not be a sign of warmth or even respect. It’s evidence that you’re a fool—a tricky fool.

Krys focused on a cultural phenomenon called “uncertainty avoidance.” Cultures that are low on this scale tend to have social systems—courts, health-care systems, safety nets, and so forth—that are unstable. Therefore, people there view the future as unpredictable and uncontrollable.

Smiling is a sign of certainty and confidence, so when people in those countries smile, they might seem odd. Why would you smile when fate is an invisible wolf waiting to shred you? You might, in those “low-UA” countries, even be considered stupid for smiling.

Krys also hypothesized that smiling in corrupt countries would be, um, frowned upon. When everyone’s trying to pull one over on each other, you don’t know if someone’s smiling with good intentions, or because they’re trying to trick you.

To test this theory, Krys had thousands of people in 44 different countries judge a series of eight smiling and non-smiling faces on a scale of honesty and intelligence. He compared their answers to the country’s rankings of uncertainty avoidance from a 2004 study of 62 societies and ratings of corruption.

He found that in countries like Germany, Switzerland, China, and Malaysia, smiling faces were rated as significantly more intelligent than non-smiling people. But in Japan, India, Iran, South Korea, and—you guessed it—Russia, the smiling faces were considered significantly less intelligent. Even after controlling for other factors, like the economy, there was a strong correlation between how unpredictable a society was and the likelihood they would consider smiling unintelligent.

That’s certainly a satisfying explanation. But it’s worth noting that other studies have found there might be other factors, like how hierarchical or masculine a culture is, that play a greater role in emotional expression—which smiling is certainly a part of. And there’s evidence that some cultures don’t value happiness very highly, which would affect how often people there force themselves to break into a grin.

Finally, ranking countries in order of their uncertainty avoidance can be kind of fraught. (Not to mention time-dependent: Consider how “certain” pre-2010 Syria or pre-2008 Greece might be.) Confusingly, there’s an entire other ranking system of uncertainty avoidance, designed by a different researcher named Geert Hofstede in the the 1980s, and the two rankings have completely different results.

You know what they say about trying to understand Russia with the mind alone, and apparently questionnaires aren’t a whole lot better.

Krys’ work could use expansion and replication, to be sure. But it might at least be comforting for any chipper Americans who find themselves scratching their heads in that sanctuary of seriousness, the St. Petersburg metro.

Above thoughts are inspired by an article published in Business Insider

Suresh Shah, Pathfinders Enterprise