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Emotion expressions shape human social norms and reputations.

ABSTRACT: The emergence of pro-social behaviors remains a key open challenge across disciplines. In this context, there is growing evidence that expressing emotions may foster human cooperation. However, it remains unclear how emotions shape individual choices and interact with other cooperation mechanisms. Here, we provide a comprehensive experimental analysis of the interplay of emotion expressions with two important mechanisms: direct and indirect reciprocity. We show that cooperation in an iterated prisoner's dilemma emerges from the combination of the opponent's initial reputation, past behaviors, and emotion expressions. Moreover, all factors influenced the social norm adopted when assessing the action of others - i.e., how their counterparts' reputations are updated - thus, reflecting longer-term consequences. We expose a new class of emotion-based social norms, where emotions are used to forgive those that defect but also punish those that cooperate. These findings emphasize the importance of emotion expressions in fostering, directly and indirectly, cooperation in society.

SUBMITTER: de Melo CM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7898177 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Emotion expressions shape human social norms and reputations.

de Melo Celso M CM Terada Kazunori K Santos Francisco C FC

iScience 20210204 3

The emergence of pro-social behaviors remains a key open challenge across disciplines. In this context, there is growing evidence that expressing emotions may foster human cooperation. However, it remains unclear how emotions shape individual choices and interact with other cooperation mechanisms. Here, we provide a comprehensive experimental analysis of the interplay of emotion expressions with two important mechanisms: direct and indirect reciprocity. We show that cooperation in an iterated pr ...[more]

PMID: 33665560

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Project description:It is commonly assumed that a person's emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices; guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications; and pervades everyday social interactions as well as research in other scientific fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and computer vision. In this article, we survey examples of this widespread assumption, which we refer to as the common view, and we then examine the scientific evidence that tests this view, focusing on the six most popular emotion categories used by consumers of emotion research: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, as proposed by the common view, more than what would be expected by chance. Yet how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation. Furthermore, similar configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category. In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something other than an emotional state. Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of information and are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise. But our review suggests an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions and how they infer emotional meaning from facial movements in situations of everyday life. This research is crucial to provide consumers of emotion research with the translational information they require.

Dataset Information

Emotion expressions shape human social norms and reputations.

Publications

Emotion expressions shape human social norms and reputations.

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