Facial Likability and Smiling Enhance Cooperation, but Have No Direct Effect on Moralistic Punishment.
The present study serves to test how positive and negative appearance-based expectations affect cooperation and punishment. Participants played a prisoner's dilemma game with partners who either cooperated or defected. Then they were given a costly punishment option: They could spend money to decrease the payoffs of their partners. Aggregated over trials, participants spent more money for punishing the defection of likable-looking and smiling partners compared to punishing the defection of unlikable-looking and nonsmiling partners, but only because participants were more likely to cooperate with likable-looking and smiling partners, which provided the participants with more opportunities for moralistic punishment. When expressed as a conditional probability, moralistic punishment did not differ as a function of the partners' facial likability. Smiling had no effect on the probability of moralistic punishment, but punishment was milder for smiling in comparison to nonsmiling partners.
1 Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany.
Laura
L
Mieth
1 Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany.
Raoul
R
Bell
1 Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany.
Axel
A
Buchner
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005145:Face; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009014:Morals; D000068956:Prisoner Dilemma; D011678:Punishment / Q000523:psychology*; D012904:Smiling / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult
cooperation; facial expression; facial trustworthiness; moralistic punishment; trust