How Face Feedback Drives Learning and Generosity
Receiving feedback through facial expressions makes people more generous and helps them learn social norms better than abstract symbols do.
Source
Benefits of social vs. non-social feedback on learning and generosity. Results from the Tipping Game
What they did
In separate experiments, the researchers tested groups of forty university students playing a computerized game. In the initial experiment, the task consisted of three blocks of trials where participants decided how much to tip virtual servers. They received either social feedback in the form of facial expressions, or non-social feedback in the form of symbols.
What they found
The researchers found that participants who received social feedback tipped more generously and aligned closer to the underlying norms. Specifically, the social group tipped more by 1, 4.9, and 8.2 percent in the respective blocks. Computer modeling showed that this difference was driven by social feedback making participants less sensitive to the economic costs of tipping.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study has several limitations. One limitation is that the observed effect sizes of social versus non-social feedback were quite small. Another limitation is that the researchers used highly unreliable feedback schedules, which made learning difficult for all participants. Finally, because the facial expressions combined both social and emotional dimensions, the design cannot determine whether the findings were driven by the social nature of the faces or just their emotional valence.
Key terms
- Rescorla-Wagner model
- A mathematical framework used to describe how organisms learn the association between stimuli and outcomes based on prediction errors.
- Social norm
- A shared, unwritten rule or expectation about how individuals should behave within a community or social context.
- Reinforcement learning
- An area of science focused on how agents learn to take actions in an environment to maximize cumulative reward.
- Inverse temperature parameter
- A modeling variable that dictates how exploratory or exploitative an agent's choices are based on expected values.
- Ecological validity
- The degree to which the materials and settings of an experiment represent real-world situations.
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Quiz yourself
What is the name of the novel associative learning task introduced in this study to examine how social norms are learned?
Common questions
Why would facial feedback make people care less about losing money?
According to the researchers, emotional expressions like anger signal social disapproval. To avoid the negative feelings associated with social disapproval, participants become willing to pay a higher economic cost, resulting in more generous tipping.
How did the researchers define whether a participant actually learned the norm?
A participant was classified as a learner if their average tip amount significantly shifted between blocks in the direction of the true underlying social norm.
Did personality traits like empathy affect the results?
Although the researchers measured traits like empathy and altruism, they found no significant differences between the social and non-social feedback groups, indicating the differences were driven by the feedback itself.
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