Study suggests smile impacts how much of a risk people will take

Study
suggests smile impacts how much of a risk people will take

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BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News Staff

Smiling appears
to promote trust among strangers in a one-time bargaining
interaction, according to a study in the current issue of
the Journal of Economic Psychology (vol. 22, issue 5).

“Facial
expressions can be good signals about your partner’s
intention,” said Rick Wilson, a Rice professor of political
science and co-author of the journal paper. “People
who have friendly expressions are rated better or are perceived
to be nicer. Our study shows that people not only make those
attributions, but they will even rely on them when there
are financial risks.”

For the study,
which was conducted at the University of Oxford in England,
120 people participated in a simple two-person “trust”
game with monetary payoffs. The game was played on a computer,
and participants never met their partner in person —
they saw only a photo of their partner. So their decisions
had to be based on the assumptions they made about their
partner’s trustworthiness just from seeing a photo
of the person.

The photos used
for the game were first evaluated by 120 graduate students
and staff at Oxford. They were shown two photos each of
60 people, one in which the subject was smiling and one
with a neutral facial reaction, and asked to rate the photos
on a scale involving 25 word pairs of opposite meaning,
such as friendly versus unfriendly, trusting versus suspicious
and cooperative versus competitive. This gave the researchers
a frame of reference for whether the person pictured in
a photo was considered cooperative, which usually was related
to the presence or absence of a smile. The photo rankings
also reflected factors unrelated to a smile, such as dimensions
of trustworthiness and toughness, which the researchers
considered when studying the participants’ expectations
of their partner.

The game involved
allowing the participant or the partner to choose an option
that would determine how much money each would receive.
First, the participants could choose to receive a small
amount of money that was greater than their partner would
receive and end the game at that point, or they could pass
up the first money offer and allow their partner to make
a similar choice in hope of a better payoff. But the latter
option was risky, because the partner could choose to receive
a larger sum for himself or herself than the original participant
and end the game there. The partner also could opt to let
the game continue, which would allow the original participant
to select another choice that would yield equal sums for
both players but less than the amount the partner could
have kept at the previous choice.

For the study,
the “partner” never really participated in the
game. The partner’s responses were programmed by a
computer, but the participants did not know this. They thought
they were interacting with another person who was playing
the game on another computer. The researchers just wanted
to observe whether participants whose partners were smiling
were more likely to trust them than those who were partnered
with photos of people who were not smiling.

Sixty-eight
percent of the participants who were matched with a smiling
photo trusted their partner, compared to 55 percent with
nonsmiling partners — a statistically significant difference,
Wilson said. “The participants were more likely to
trust photographs of smiling persons than nonsmiling photographs
of the same person,” he explained.

And photos that
were associated with “niceness” even though a
smile was not apparent appeared to invite cooperation as
well.

“The participants
were able to detect a difference in facial expression, and
that facial expression affected the participant’s beliefs
about the trustworthiness of the partner represented by
the facial image,” Wilson said.

The researchers
noticed that male participants were more trusting of female
faces, but female participants trusted female partners less
than they trusted male partners.

Wilson noted
that because one key to successful cooperation is the ability
to identify cooperative partners, the researchers wanted
to evaluate the value of smiling as a signal of the intention
to cooperate. “What is surprising is that people are
willing to use that signal, and it boosts levels of cooperation,”
he said. “People have a lot of experience reading faces,
and they use those judgments to guide their behavior with
others.”

The study, which
also involved the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University in Blacksburg, Va., was supported by the National
Science Foundation.