Abstract
AbstractWhile there is a plethora of experimental studies on the effects of preplay communication on economic behavior, little is known about the impact of simple cues, such as smiling, on pro‐sociality. This article presents a comprehensive analysis exploring how the presence of a smiling opportunity affects pro‐social behavior as measured by a one‐shot linear public goods game. Our design varies (i) whether smiling is costly or costless and (ii) whether one or both members in a group are given the opportunity to smile. To test for the robustness of our results, we consider two versions of smiling cues: (i) a smiling label and (ii) a smiling face (emoji). Our findings indicate that introducing a cost for smiling has detrimental behavioral consequences regardless of the cue. Specifically, when smiling is costly, only a small minority of subjects are willing to smile as opposed to when smiling is costless. As a result, subjects contribute significantly less. These results remain the same regardless of the type of smiling cue that subjects can send. Overall, our findings provide new evidence that simple cues such as smiles embody information that influences pro‐social behavior in social interactions.
Highlights
Communication is an integral part of our everyday lives
While there is a plethora of experimental studies on the effects of preplay communication on economic behavior, little is known about the impact of simple cues, such as smiling, on pro-sociality
Our study focuses on the effects of smiling on cooperation as measured by observing behavior in a one-shot linear public good game
Summary
Communication is an integral part of our everyday lives. It can take different forms (such as verbal, visual, or nonverbal exchange of information) affecting our economic interactions and cooperative relationships. We find that introducing a cost for the use of smiling labels has detrimental effects on cooperative behavior in the sense that individuals become significantly less pro-social compared to the case when sending a smiling cue is free This finding holds regardless of which smiling type we consider. Experimental evidence (for a review, see Wang and Houser, 2019) shows that the presence of natural language communication has a positive impact on efficiency in various economic games Relying on this evidence, it may be the case that, in our context, the limiting effects of smiling on pro-social behavior are due to the lack of a richer communication environment (e.g., allowing subjects to send free-form messages) which typically facilitates cooperation. Subjects were asked to indicate what their current state is by selecting one of the two buttons containing either the word “Smiling” or “Ready.” Note that subjects had to make an actual choice and no default option was provided
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