The Value of a Smile: Game Theory with a Human Face

By Jörn P. W. Scharlemann, Catherine C. Eckel, Alex Kacelnik, Rick K. Wilson. 2001

486 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many economists and biologists view cooperation as anomalous: animals (including humans) that pursue their own self-interest have superior survival odds to their altruistic or cooperative neighbors. However, in many situations there are substantial gains to the group that can achieve cooperation among its members, and to individuals who are members of those groups. For an individual, the key to successful cooperation is the ability to identify cooperative partners. The ability to signal and detect the intention to cooperate would be a very valuable skill for humans to posses. Smiling is frequently observed in social interactions between humans, and may be used as a signal of the intention to cooperate. However, given that humans have the ability to smile falsely, the ability to detect intentions may go far beyond the ability to recognize a smile. In the present study, we examine the value of a smile in a simple bargaining context. 120 subjects participate in a laboratory experiment consisting of a simple two-person, one-shot “trust” game with monetary payoffs. Each subject is shown a photograph of his partner prior to the game; the photograph is taken from a collection that includes one smiling and one non-smiling image for each of 60 individuals. These photographs are also rated by a separate set of subjects who complete a semantic differential survey on affective and behavioral interpretations of the images. Results lend some support to the prediction that smiles can elicit cooperation among strangers in a one-shot interaction. Other characteristics of faces also appear to elicit cooperation. Factor analysis of the survey data reveals an important factor, termed “cooperation”, which is strongly related to trusting behavior in the game. This factor is correlated with smiling, but is somewhat more strongly predictive of behavior than a smile alone. In addition, males are found to be more cooperative, especially towards female images, whereas females are least cooperative towards female images.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4cd861f1986a19e98ad3b7c7380986837b5b3f10

Citations in the corpus

• Duchenne smiles and the perception of generosity and sociability in faces. (2007, unknown): “Recent research also suggests that smiling could act as a signal that facilitates the identification of cooperative partners (SCHARLEMANN et al. 2001; BROWN and MOORE 2002; BROWN, PALAMETA and MOORE 2003).”
• Facing Your Opponents (2014, unknown): “In addition to revealing identities, in related work Scharlemann et al. (2001) find that ‘‘smiles’’ can elicit cooperation among strangers in a one-shot bargaining interaction.”
• Nobody's watching? Subtle cues affect generosity in an anonymous economic game. (2005, unknown): “However, it has also been shown that behavior in economic games can be substantially affected by other types of information, such as perceptions of the physical attractiveness, gender, facial similarity, or emotional expressions of partners (DeBruine, 2002; Eckel & Wilson, 2003; Scharlemann, Eckel,”
• Fatal Attraction: Salience, Naivete, and Sophistication in Experimental Hide-and-Seek Games (2007, unknown): “Other studies of framing effects in different kinds of games include Jörn Scharlemann et al. (2001), who studied trust games in which otherwise anonymous players were “labeled” by photographs; and Judith Mehta, Chris Starmer, and Robert Sugden (1994) and Nicholas Bardsley et al. (2006), who studied…”
• Naturalistic observations of smiling and laughter in human group interactions (2008, unknown): “Moreover there is evidence that smiling could act as a signal facilitating the identification of cooperative partners (Scharlemann et al., 2001; Brown & Moore, 2002; Brown et al., 2003).”
• Honest signaling in trust interactions: smiles rated as genuine induce trust and signal higher earning opportunities (2015, unknown): “Scharlemann et al. (2001) use still pictures and observe that participants trust more when seeing a smiling image of their partner.”
• Public goods experiments without confidentiality: a glimpse into fund-raising (2004, unknown): “Visual identification of one’s partner increased cooperation in Dictator and Prisoner’s Dilemma games (Bohnet and Frey, 1999a,b; Fox and Guyer, 1978), and photographs of smiling partners induced more cooperation in trust games (Scharlemeann et al., 2001).”
• Is trust a risky decision (2004, unknown): “Previous results from variations on this game indicate that a large fraction of subjects trust by sending some positive amount, and trust is just reciprocated on average (Berg et al., 1995; Glaeser et al., 2000; Croson and Buchan, 1999; Scharleman et al., 2001).”
• Navigating a social world with robot partners: A quantitative cartography of the Uncanny Valley. (2016, unknown): “…and mechanical-resemblance behave as a unidimensional property, and (3) secondarily, the perceived valence and magnitude of emotion displayed by each face, which might strongly influence and confound social responses in subsequent experiments (Scharlemann, Eckel, Kacelnik, & Wilson, 2001).”
• Love & Loans: The Effect of Beauty and Personal Characteristics in Credit Markets (2012, unknown): “The experimental economics literature shows that subjects that see their partners tend to behave more cooperatively in various games (Eckel and Wilson (2003)), especially if their partner smiles or is more attractive (Scharlemann et al. (2001), and Mulford et al. (1998)).”
• Gender Differences in Trust and Reciprocity (2003, unknown): “See also the papers by Andreoni and Vesterlund (2001), Croson and Buchan (1999), Eckel and Grossman (1996, 1998, 2000b), Scharlemann et al (2001) and Solnick (2000) for evidence of gender differences in a variety of economic transactions.”
• Impact and the art of motivation maintenance: The effects of contact with beneficiaries on persistence behavior (2007, unknown): “Emotional labor and customer service research indicates that employees enjoy friendly, appreciative interactions with beneWciaries (Gutek, Bhappu, Liao-Troth, & Cherry, 1999), and game theory research indicates that even a mere smile from beneWciaries can lead individuals to trust and cooperate with”