Christopher Y. Olivola

Social Attributions from Faces: Determinants, Consequences, Accuracy, and Functional Significance

Since the early twentieth century, psychologists have known that there is consensus in attributing social and personality characteristics from facial appearance. Recent studies have shown that surprisingly little time and effort are needed to arrive at this consensus. Here we review recent research on social attributions from faces. Section I outlines data-driven methods capable of identifying the perceptual basis of consensus in social attributions from faces (e.g., What makes a face look threatening?). Section II describes nonperceptual determinants of social attributions (e.g., person knowledge and incidental associations). Section III discusses evidence that attributions from faces predict important social outcomes in diverse domains (e.g., investment decisions and leader selection). In Section IV, we argue that the diagnostic validity of these attributions has been greatly overstated in the literature. In the final section, we offer an account of the functional significance of these attributions.

Unfakeable facial configurations affect strategic choices in trust games with or without information about past behavior.

Background Many human interactions are built on trust, so widespread confidence in first impressions generally favors individuals with trustworthy-looking appearances. However, few studies have explicitly examined: 1) the contribution of unfakeable facial features to trust-based decisions, and 2) how these cues are integrated with information about past behavior. Methodology/Principal Findings Using highly controlled stimuli and an improved experimental procedure, we show that unfakeable facial features associated with the appearance of trustworthiness attract higher investments in trust games. The facial trustworthiness premium is large for decisions based solely on faces, with trustworthy identities attracting 42% more money (Study 1), and remains significant though reduced to 6% when reputational information is also available (Study 2). The face trustworthiness premium persists with real (rather than virtual) currency and when higher payoffs are at stake (Study 3). Conclusions/Significance Our results demonstrate that cooperation may be affected not only by controllable appearance cues (e.g., clothing, facial expressions) as shown previously, but also by features that are impossible to mimic (e.g., individual facial structure). This unfakeable face trustworthiness effect is not limited to the rare situations where people lack any information about their partners, but survives in richer environments where relevant details about partner past behavior are available.

Axe the Tax: Taxes Are Disliked More than Equivalent Costs

Tax collection is critical for the proper functioning of society. However, many people strongly dislike paying taxes. Although this distaste could be rational on economic grounds, the authors show that this attitude extends beyond simply disliking the costs incurred and affects behavior in coun-ternormative ways. They demonstrate the phenomenon of tax aversion: a desire to avoid taxes per se that exceeds the rational economic motivation to avoid a monetary cost. Across five experiments, the authors provide evidence that people have a stronger preference to avoid tax-related costs than to avoid equal-sized (or larger) monetary costs unrelated to taxes. Tax aversion affects consumer preferences in a variety of domains, including standard store purchases, financial investments, and job selection. Furthermore, this tendency is most prevalent among people who identify with political parties that generally favor less taxation. Finally, encouraging participants who identify with “antitax” parties to consider positive uses of their tax payments mitigates tax aversion. This article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results for consumer behavior research and tax policies.

Social attributions from faces bias human choices

Our success and well-being, as individuals and societies, depend on our ability to make wise social decisions about important interpersonal matters, such as the leaders we select and the individuals we choose to trust. Nevertheless, our impressions of people are shaped by their facial appearances and, consequently, so too are these social decisions. This article summarizes research linking facial morphological traits to important social outcomes and discusses various factors that moderate this relationship.

The Martyrdom Effect: When Pain and Effort Increase Prosocial Contributions

Most theories of motivation and behavior (and lay intuitions alike) consider pain and effort to be deterrents. In contrast to this widely held view, we provide evidence that the prospect of enduring pain and exerting effort for a prosocial cause can promote contributions to the cause. Specifically, we show that willingness to contribute to a charitable or collective cause increases when the contribution process is expected to be painful and effortful rather than easy and enjoyable. Across five experiments, we document this “martyrdom effect,” show that the observed patterns defy standard economic and psychological accounts, and identify a mediator and moderator of the effect. Experiment 1 showed that people are willing to donate more to charity when they anticipate having to suffer to raise money. Experiment 2 extended these findings to a non-charity laboratory context that involved real money and actual pain. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the martyrdom effect is not the result of an attribute substitution strategy (whereby people use the amount of pain and effort involved in fundraising to determine donation worthiness). Experiment 4 showed that perceptions of meaningfulness partially mediate the martyrdom effect. Finally, Experiment 5 demonstrated that the nature of the prosocial cause moderates the martyrdom effect: the effect is strongest for causes associated with human suffering. We propose that anticipated pain and effort lead people to ascribe greater meaning to their contributions and to the experience of contributing, thereby motivating higher prosocial contributions. We conclude by considering some implications of this puzzling phenomenon. Copyright

Using big data to predict collective behavior in the real world.

Recent studies provide convincing evidence that data on online information gathering, alongside massive real-world datasets, can give new insights into real-world collective decision making and can even anticipate future actions. We argue that Bentley et al.s timely account should consider the full breadth, and, above all, the predictive power of big data.

Republicans Prefer Republican-Looking Leaders Political Facial Stereotypes Predict Candidate Electoral Success Among Right-Leaning Voters

Previous research suggests that voting in elections is influenced by appearance-based personality inferences (e.g., whether a political candidate has a competent-looking face). However, since voters cannot objectively evaluate politicians’ personality traits, it remains to be seen whether appearance-based inferences about a characteristic continue to influence voting when clear information about that characteristic is available. The authors examine the impact of appearance-based inferences for a characteristic that is well known about candidates: their political affiliation. Across two studies, the authors show that U.S. candidates facing conservative electorates benefit from looking more stereotypically Republican than their rivals (controlling for gender, ethnicity, and age). In contrast, no relationship between political facial stereotypes and voting is found for liberal electorates (using identical controls). The authors further show that this contrast between liberal and conservative electorates has more to do with individual-level differences between liberal and conservative voters than with macro-level differences between liberal and conservative states.

Distributions of observed death tolls govern sensitivity to human fatalities

How we react to humanitarian crises, epidemics, and other tragic events involving the loss of human lives depends largely on the extent to which we are moved by the size of their associated death tolls. Many studies have demonstrated that people generally exhibit a diminishing sensitivity to the number of human fatalities and, equivalently, a preference for risky (vs. sure) alternatives in decisions under risk involving human losses. However, the reason for this tendency remains unknown. Here we show that the distributions of event-related death tolls that people observe govern their evaluations of, and risk preferences concerning, human fatalities. In particular, we show that our diminishing sensitivity to human fatalities follows from the fact that these death tolls are approximately power-law distributed. We further show that, by manipulating the distribution of mortality-related events that people observe, we can alter their risk preferences in decisions involving fatalities. Finally, we show that the tendency to be risk-seeking in mortality-related decisions is lower in countries in which high-mortality events are more frequently observed. Our results support a model of magnitude evaluation based on memory sampling and relative judgment. This model departs from the utility-based approaches typically encountered in psychology and economics in that it does not rely on stable, underlying value representations to explain valuation and choice, or on choice behavior to derive value functions. Instead, preferences concerning human fatalities emerge spontaneously from the distributions of sampled events and the relative nature of the evaluation process.

Randomness in retrospect: Exploring the interactions between memory and randomness cognition

People tend to believe that sequences of random events produce fewer and shorter streaks than is actually the case. Although this error has been demonstrated repeatedly and in many forms, nearly all studies of randomness cognition have focused on how people think about random events occurring in the present or future. This article examines how our biased beliefs about randomness interact with properties of memory to influence our judgments about and memory for past random events. We explore this interaction by examining how beliefs about randomness affect our memory for random events and how certain properties of memory alter our tendency to categorize events as random. Across three experiments, we demonstrate an interaction between randomness cognition and three well-established but distinct properties of memory: (1) the reconstructive nature of memory, (2) primacy and recency effects, and (3) duration neglect. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Characterizing the Time-Perspective of Nations with Search Engine Query Data

Vast quantities of data on human behavior are being created by our everyday internet usage. Building upon a recent study by Preis, Moat, Stanley, and Bishop (2012), we used search engine query data to construct measures of the time-perspective of nations, and tested these measures against per-capita gross domestic product (GDP). The results indicate that nations with higher per-capita GDP are more focused on the future and less on the past, and that when these nations do focus on the past, it is more likely to be the distant past. These results demonstrate the viability of using nation-level data to build psychological constructs.