TY - JOUR

T1 - The subjective value of a smile alters social behaviour

AU - Heerey, Erin

AU - Gilder, Thandi S.E.

PY - 2019/12/2

Y1 - 2019/12/2

N2 - Face-to-face social behaviour is difficult to explain, leading some researchers to call it the “dark matter” of psychology/neuroscience [1]. We apply an idea from neuroeconomics to this problem, suggesting that how people subjectively value facial expressions should predict usage differences during unconstrained interaction. Specifically, we ask whether the subjective value of smiles is malleable as a consequence of immediate social experience and how this relates to smiling during face-to-face interactions. We measured the value of asmile in monetary terms and found that increases in people’s social neediness caused devaluation of polite smiles but no changes in how they valued genuine smiles. This result predicts that participants induced to feel high levels of social need should be less responsive to their social partners’ polite smiles in a subsequent unconstrained social interaction. As expected, high social-need participants returned fewer polite smiles when interacting with a partner, leading to poor interaction outcomes. Genuine smile reciprocity remainedunchanged. Findings show that social states influence real-world interactions by changing social-cue valuation, highlighting a potential mechanism for understanding the moment-to-moment control of social behaviour and how behaviour changes based on people’s subjective evaluations of the social environment.

AB - Face-to-face social behaviour is difficult to explain, leading some researchers to call it the “dark matter” of psychology/neuroscience [1]. We apply an idea from neuroeconomics to this problem, suggesting that how people subjectively value facial expressions should predict usage differences during unconstrained interaction. Specifically, we ask whether the subjective value of smiles is malleable as a consequence of immediate social experience and how this relates to smiling during face-to-face interactions. We measured the value of asmile in monetary terms and found that increases in people’s social neediness caused devaluation of polite smiles but no changes in how they valued genuine smiles. This result predicts that participants induced to feel high levels of social need should be less responsive to their social partners’ polite smiles in a subsequent unconstrained social interaction. As expected, high social-need participants returned fewer polite smiles when interacting with a partner, leading to poor interaction outcomes. Genuine smile reciprocity remainedunchanged. Findings show that social states influence real-world interactions by changing social-cue valuation, highlighting a potential mechanism for understanding the moment-to-moment control of social behaviour and how behaviour changes based on people’s subjective evaluations of the social environment.

KW - decision making

KW - behaviour

KW - face

KW - emotions

KW - personality

KW - social reseearch

KW - neuroeconomics

KW - research laboratories

U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0225284

DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0225284

M3 - Article

VL - 14

JO - PLoS ONE

JF - PLoS ONE

SN - 1932-6203

IS - 12

M1 - e0225284

ER -