Issue 152

Ever heard the saying ‘nice guys finish last’? Well, a new study suggests it could be true – inside the Octagon at least. A joint study conducted by the lab coats at the University of Illinois, and Berkley in California, found that fighters are far more likely to lose inside the cage if they smile at the weigh- ins.

Researchers Michael Kraus and Teh-Way David Chen and their teams studied the effect of smiles and the intensity of the smile in photographs of 152 fighters from 76 UFC weigh-in face-offs. They then watched the subsequent fights to see how each fight fared during the bout (nice work if you can get it).

Results suggest that fighters who gave their opponents a toothy grin at the weigh-ins were more likely to lose, be struck more times, wrestled to the ground by their opponent and knocked down more frequently than a fighter with a neutral expression on their face, who was morelikely to win via finish.

The researchers also had 178 online, non-expert participants rate head shots of the same fighters either smiling or using a neutral expression during a face-off, with the majority of them rating the smiling fighters as less physically dominating compared to those with no expression

So unless a Wanderlei Silva is grinning at you from across the cage, the win could be yours before the first punch is thrown.