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 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
2
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.
123456789
not
attractive
very
attractive
Photographed people have
already participated in the
game.
4
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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