Abstract
Detecting subtle indicators of trustworthiness is highly adaptive for moving effectively amongst social partners. One powerful signal is gaze direction, which individuals can use to inform (or deceive) by looking toward (or away from) important objects or events in the environment. Here, across 5 experiments, we investigate whether implicit learning about gaze cues can influence subsequent economic transactions; we also examine some of the underlying mechanisms. In the 1st experiment, we demonstrate that people invest more money with individuals whose gaze information has previously been helpful, possibly reflecting enhanced trust appraisals. However, in 2 further experiments, we show that other mechanisms driving this behavior include obligations to fairness or (painful) altruism, since people also make more generous offers and allocations of money to individuals with reliable gaze cues in adapted 1-shot ultimatum games and 1-shot dictator games. In 2 final experiments, we show that the introduction of perceptual noise while following gaze can disrupt these effects, but only when the social partners are unfamiliar. Nonconscious detection of reliable gaze cues can prompt altruism toward others, probably reflecting the interplay of systems that encode identity and control gaze-evoked attention, integrating the reinforcement value of gaze cues.
Highlights
Detecting subtle indicators of trustworthiness is highly adaptive for moving effectively amongst social partners
Debriefing confirmed that none of the participants in Experiment 1 were aware that some faces of the gaze-cuing task always looked toward the subsequent targets whilst others always looked away from the targets, suggesting that investments made with valid and invalid faces reflected implicit processes
The enhanced investments made to valid compared to invalid faces were not associated with gaze-cuing effects (r ϭ –.01); neither were they associated with participants’ Autism Questionnaire (AQ) scores (r ϭ .10)
Summary
Twenty healthy adult volunteers completed a standard gazecuing RT task (see below), followed by a series of amended one-shot investment/trust games and explicit ratings of approachability and trustworthiness. When making investments with the eight valid and the eight invalid faces of the gaze-cuing procedure, the final stage of the game in which the investments increased before trustees provided returns to participants, was omitted This ensured that participants’ investments were not influenced by variability in different trustees’ payoffs. Mean investments in the one-shot investment/ trust games were tested by analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the two between-subjects factors of participant-gender and Face Group, and the single within-subject factor of cue (valid vs invalid faces). Following completion of the gaze-cuing procedure and the one-shot investment/trust games, participants were again shown the eight valid and eight invalid faces presented in the gaze-cuing task, this time with their gaze straight ahead. All participants were questioned in order to identify and exclude participants who perceived correctly that particular (i.e., valid) faces in the gaze-cuing task shifted their gaze consistently toward the same side of the display as the to-becategorized objects while other (i.e., invalid) faces shifted their gaze to the opposite side of the display
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