Strategic incentives undermine gaze as a signal of prosocial

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Fischbacher, Urs; Hausfeld, Jan; Renerte, Baiba
• 署名单位: University of Konstanz; University of Amsterdam; University of Amsterdam; University of Bern; University of Zurich
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2022.07.006
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 63-91
• 关键词: Eye -tracking; signaling; social preferences; Type identification; social cognition; Information search

摘要

People often have to judge the social motives of others, for example, to distinguish truly prosocial people from those merely trying to appear prosocial. Gaze can reveal the motives underlying social decisions, as decision-makers dedicate more attention to motive-relevant information. We extend the use of eye-tracking and apply it as a communication device by providing (real-time) eye-tracking information of one participant to another. We find that untrained observers can judge the prosociality of decision-makers from their eye -tracked gaze alone, but only if there are no strategic incentives to be chosen for a future interaction. When there are such strategic incentives, the cues of prosociality are invalidated, as both individualistic and prosocial decision-makers put effort into appearing more prosocial. Overall, we find that gaze carries information about a person's prosociality, but also that gaze is malleable and affected by strategic considerations.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).