Why Does Ron DeSantis Smile Like That? The People Who Know Have Ominous Answers.

Over the past few months, many have attempted to translate the uncanniness of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ smile into words. After the Republican debates, it’s been called “painfully weird” and said to look “like it’s on his face upside down.” It resembles “a Disney World animatronic” or “an A.I. trying to learn human emotions.” It even inspired The Daily Show to put out a public service announcement about “Frownington’s Disease,” a made-up condition that causes a person’s smile to resemble a wince one would make upon “sitting on his own testicles.”

As nice as it is that one expression has inspired such rich verbiage and creativity—Ron DeSantis, unlikely muse!—you might find yourself longing for a more technical explanation. Why does his smile strike so many people as inhuman-seeming? Why does it upset us so? What’s really going on behind the struggle grins? These aren’t superficial questions for a politician who has struggled to warm himself to Republican primary voters.

Marianne LaFrance, a professor emerita of psychology at Yale and the author of Why Smile?: The Science Behind Facial Expressions, has noticed the chatter about DeSantis’ smirk. “I’ve been intrigued with it,” she told me, a little ominously.

On the most basic level, LaFrance said DeSantis has failed to achieve a Duchenne smile, which is a smile that incorporates one’s whole face, particularly the eyes. “The so-called genuine smile involves not just what the lips and mouth do, but what the cheeks, specifically the upper cheeks, are doing,” LaFrance said. It also shows up “in the eye-crinkling in the upper cheekbone area.” It’s true that DeSantis rarely seems to be smizing—while his mouth may reconfigure itself into something smilelike, his eyes often stay locked in their previous expression.

But his eyes not matching his lips is really just the beginning. Many people have suggested that DeSantis doesn’t know how to smile, but LaFrance made the case that the bigger problem may be that he doesn’t know when to. “Genuine smiling is really about timing,” she said. Observing DeSantis’ behavior in the debates, LaFrance said that “when you would expect a smile, he didn’t or wouldn’t, and when he did, it appeared to be late.”

Besides being tardy, his smiles also have a way of lingering longer than they should. “Genuine smiles tend to be relatively brief,” she said. “They can be backed up by another smile if people are really enjoying something, but smiles tend to occur quickly. If they stay on the face too long, there starts to be some suspicion that they’re fake.”

Nathaniel Helwig, a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota, collaborated on a research paper that posited there are three important variables when it comes to a smile being well-received: its width, the size of the angle formed by the corners of the mouth, and the amount of teeth it shows. “All of these have to be in the right balance for the smile to be interpreted effectively,” Helwig told me.

How does DeSantis’ smile rate? “It is definitely not within the sweet spot in which we found smiles to be most effective in our paper,” he explained tactfully. “It seems quite asymmetric. We generally found that a little bit of asymmetry is good. But once you start having extreme asymmetry, that’s when those smiles start being interpreted more negatively.”

He also noticed something wonky in DeSantis’ ratio of width to smile angle to teeth. “Pictures tend to show quite a large amount of open mouth compared to the extent of the smile and the angles of the smile,” Helwig said. “How wide you open your mouth or how much teeth you show, that really needs to be in proportion to how far you have extended or how high you have extended your smile. If you have a really low angle and low extent, showing a lot of teeth is going to give you this sort of gawking look.”

As time has gone on and his fortunes have fallen, DeSantis’ smile keeps revealing new dimensions of strangeness. After November’s GOP debate, some social media users homed in on why his tongue had suddenly become a part of the equation, too. It briefly poked out from his teeth in one clip, which I would have interpreted as jocular, a real-life manifestation of any emoticon that uses a P for a mouth—as in :-P—if it weren’t for the context: It was immediately preceded by the hard sell of “As your president, I will not let you down. God bless you.” Who sticks their tongue out after that?

LaFrance noticed his tongue’s emergence too, but interpreted it very differently: “It’s really interesting that he does that because it’s not only that it’s an odd thing to do, but there’s some literature, specifically in the evolutionary animal field, that suggests when an animal shows its tongue, it is a signal of disgust,” she said. “The theory is that it derives from what you do when you’re vomiting: You open your mouth and your tongue shows and you may regurgitate.”

If this all seems like an unnecessarily detailed analysis of someone’s face, it’s worth noting that there’s no such thing as “unnecessarily detailed” when you’re running for president: All kinds of nonverbal factors can affect how candidates are perceived, how well they’re liked, and how trustworthy voters find them. (DeSantis’ height, and how he may manipulate it, has also been the subject of more debate than some of his policy positions.) This is particularly true for the micro-expressions candidates make, which often have an emotional impact on viewers—especially when they’re inappropriate for the context. Who can forget Michele Bachmann’s “crazy eyes,” John Kerry’s dour expression, or the infamous JFK/Nixon debate where the latter’s shifty gaze and pale, sweaty appearance were so bad that it completely rerouted public opinion of him? In that sense, DeSantis’ protracted grin could actually matter for some voters when they cast their ballots, whether they’re aware of it or not.

Given that these things do tend to matter, there’s also been some speculation about what kind of coaching he may—or may not—be receiving to soften his persona. And indeed, Helwig assured me that changing the way they smile is something the majority of people would be capable of doing with a little work. “Most people, with enough practice and training, should be able to correct with some form of feedback,” he said. “It’s really just kind of learning new muscle memory patterns.” In other words, if DeSantis really wanted to smile in a vaguely human way, he could—or he could at least do better than what he’s been doing. Perhaps there will be signs of this at Wednesday’s Republican debate in Iowa.

But the researchers also sounded a note of caution here. Where other people can fake it to some degree, DeSantis’ attempts to do so might betray a kind of contempt for the whole process. “He thinks he’s being judged, which he is,” LaFrance said. “Maybe he’s gotten rewarded for being aggressive and combative. Maybe he’s gotten reinforcement for showing the kind of facial expression that goes with being contentious and argumentative and not taking any guff from anybody.”

If DeSantis has always gotten a good return on being the tough guy, it makes sense that he would resist appearing too much like a softie, or like someone who actually cares what people think of him. It strikes me that his trouble smiling might actually be the most honest thing about him and his campaign—it’s a smile that says even he’s not buying it.