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Beauty is but Beauty is but skin deepskin deep

Attractiveness and cooperation in social exchange.

Chisato Takahashi

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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.

How physical attractiveness How physical attractiveness affects behavior in social affects behavior in social exchange ?exchange ?

Attractive people are advantageous in social exchange

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How physical attractiveness How physical attractiveness affects behavior in social affects behavior in social exchange ?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 1Experiment 1

Please rate the “Physical attractiveness” of this person.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9not veryattractive attractive

Photographed people have already participated in the game.

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Result 1Result 1

Cooperators’ faces were rated more Cooperators’ faces were rated more attractive than defectors’ faces.attractive than defectors’ faces.

This relationship was observed only This relationship was observed only among male players regardless of raters’ among male players regardless of raters’ sex.sex.

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Experiment 2Experiment 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 facesAveraged facesCooperators’ face Defectors’ face

Please judge which person is more attractive.

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Result 2Result 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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