The BBC has a quiz asking if you can spot a fake smile.  According to the seemingly scientific quiz, I am an absolute bad-ass at routing out a fake smile. The key was looking to see whether the eyes matched the smile. This has helped me enormously in my life when making friends, but wasn't always a skill I've had. I can't imagine how much better my life would have been in my younger years if could spot a fake that easily.

Think of the possibilities of having this skill. You are in a bar and a hot guy smiles from the pool table across the way. You look to his eyes and realize the smile is fake. What you can't hear him saying is how nice your "tits" are, which would normally piss you off. Instead, you use your new-found knowledge and wisdom to find a guy who is smiling at your with his eyes and not only zoning in on your breasts. Of course, the problem is that the skill is reduced in direct correlation to the amount of alcohol consumed, making it particularly difficult to spot the fake smilers as the night goes on. This means you have to find your "prey" early in the night if you want a trust-worthy man or practice by drinking heavily on a more frequent basis. If you are young and your body and stand it, I recommend the latter.

Fake friends would also be avoided very, very easily. At your first book club meeting, for example, you could see if your fellow Jane Austen book-club member was really telling the truth about her love and fascination for "Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies" (which is better than it sounds) or if she herself had already taken a turn towards the dead. If you knew her smile was fake, you would avoid after taking her out to coffee the next day for a more thorough discussion and avoid spending $5 at the nearest Starbucks and the possibility of having to take care of a Zombie for the rest of your life. And all because you took a simple quiz on the BBC site.

Of course, it would not help on the phone if you felt that you were being led into a disastrous Craig's List scam. For a better test of phone listening skills, you may have to take a Facebook quiz, though I am not sure which particular quiz to recommend. Perhaps "What kind of pizza are you?" would be helpful, although I'm not sure why.