Can you recognize a person's willingness to cooperate from their face? (publication by Prof. Dr. Johannes Lohse)
2024-10-01
Prof. Dr. Johannes Lohse, together with Prof. Dr. Santiago Sanchez-Pages (King's College London) and Prof. Dr. Enrique Turiegano (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), has published a paper titled " The role of facial cues in signalling cooperativeness is limited and nuanced" in Nature Scientific Reports. This experimental study examines whether static images can predict a person's cooperativeness. Participants first played the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a standard method for measuring cooperativeness, and were then asked to predict the cooperativeness of individuals from a previous study based solely on their photographs. The results show that the accuracy of predictions was only slightly better than random guessing. Interestingly, participants were better at identifying cooperative tendencies in individuals who were similar to themselves. Additionally, predictions under time pressure improved, particularly when evaluating male cooperation partners. These findings suggest that static facial images play only a limited but nuanced role in predicting cooperativeness.
The full study is available under an Open Access license at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-71685-9