Beauty is but skin deep Attractiveness and cooperation in social exchange.

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Beauty is but skin deep Attractiveness and
cooperation in social exchange.

• Chisato Takahashi

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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 prisoners 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
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How physical attractiveness affects behavior in
social exchange ?

• In our study,
• we investigate how physical attractiveness
  affects subjects behavior in three different
  experimental games (Dictator game, PD, SD).

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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.
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Result 1

• Cooperators faces were rated more attractive
  than defectors faces.
• This relationship was observed only among male
  players regardless of raters sex.

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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 .
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Averaged faces
Cooperators face
Defectors face
Please judge which person is more attractive.
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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.
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