Abstract
Over the past fifteen years, research has demonstrated the central role of interpersonal emotions in communicating intentions, goals and desires. These emotions can be conveyed through facial expressions during specific social interactions, such as in the context of coordination between economic agents, where information inferred from them can influence certain decision-making processes. We investigated whether four facial expressions (happiness, neutral, angry and disgusted) can affect decision-making in the Ultimatum Game (UG). In this economic game, one player (proposer) plays the first move and proposes how to allocate a given amount of money in an anonymous one-shot interaction. If the other player (responder) accepts the proposal, each player receives the allocated amount of money; if he/she rejects the offer, both players receive nothing. During the task, participants acted as the responder (Experiment 1) or the proposer (Experiment 2) while seeing the opponent’s facial expression. For the responders, the results show that the decision was mainly driven by the fairness of the offer, with a small main effect of emotion. No interaction effect was found between emotion and offer. For the proposers, the results show that participants modulated their offers on the basis of the responders’ expressed emotions. The most generous/fair offers were proposed to happy responders. Less generous/fair offers were proposed to neutral responders. Finally, the least generous/fair offers were proposed to angry and disgusted responders.
Highlights
Some specific research over the past years has demonstrated the central role of emotions in communicating intentions, goals and desires [1,2,3]
These emotions, and the associated information, can be conveyed through facial expressions [3,4,5] during specific social interactions, such as in the context of coordination between economic actors, where information inferred from emotional expressions can influence certain decision-making processes during transitions, negotiations and agreements [2,6]
Our results show that the responders are susceptible to fairness [8,9,64], and that the proposers can express irrational behaviors linked to fairness [56], giving a preventive punishment to those whom he/she assumes could behave in an unfair and uncooperative way, which is inferred from an emotional expression that is associated with negative behaviors
Summary
Some specific research over the past years has demonstrated the central role of emotions in communicating intentions, goals and desires [1,2,3] These emotions, and the associated information, can be conveyed through facial expressions [3,4,5] during specific social interactions, such as in the context of coordination between economic actors, where information inferred from emotional expressions can influence certain decision-making processes during transitions, negotiations and agreements [2,6]. Negotiation is pervasive both in everyday interactions and (above all) in the business and management field [2]. It was observed that participants tend to systematically reject unfair offers, namely those below the 30% of the total given amount of money [10,11], preferring to earn nothing rather than accepting an unequal distribution of resources
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