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Beauty is but skin deep Attractiveness and cooperation in social exchange. Chisato Takahashi. How physical attractiveness affects behavior in social exchange ?. Previous studies
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Beauty is but skin deepAttractiveness and cooperation in social exchange. Chisato Takahashi
How physical attractiveness affects behavior in social exchange ? Previous studies • Physical attractiveness collects premium in labor and marriage markets (e.g. Elder, 1976; Hamermesh & Biddle, 1994; Taylor & Glenn, 1976). • In the domain of social exchange, Mulford, Orbell, Shatto and Stockard (1998) found that participants who played the prisoner’s dilemma game (PD) were more likely to enter a game with and cooperate with others they found physically more attractive. Attractive people are advantageous in social exchange
How physical attractiveness affects behavior in social exchange ? In our study, we investigate how physical attractiveness affects subjects’ behavior inthree different experimental games(Dictator game, PD, SD).
Experiment 1 Please rate the “Physical attractiveness” of this person. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 not very attractive attractive Photographed people have already participated in the game.
Result 1 • Cooperators’ faces were rated more attractive than defectors’ faces. • This relationship was observed only among male players regardless of raters’ sex.
Experiment 2 • Why the less cooperative males are rated more attractive? • Do they have any traits that attract raters? We created an “averaged” face of cooperators and another averaged face of defectors in the SD game for each sex of the players .
Averaged faces Cooperators’ face Defectors’ face Please judge which person is more attractive.
Result 2 • Majority of the raters judged the male defectors’ averaged photograph more attractive than male cooperators’ average photograph. Our findings indicate attractive men were less cooperative whereas physical attractiveness was unrelated to cooperation among women.