I want to help you, but I am not sure why: Gaze-cuing induces altruistic giving.

Abstract

Detecting subtle indicators of trustworthiness is highly adaptive for moving effectively amongst social partners. One powerful signal is gaze direction, which individuals can use to inform (or deceive) by looking toward (or away from) important objects or events in the environment. Here, across 5 experiments, we investigate whether implicit learning about gaze cues can influence subsequent economic transactions; we also examine some of the underlying mechanisms. In the 1st experiment, we demonstrate that people invest more money with individuals whose gaze information has previously been helpful, possibly reflecting enhanced trust appraisals. However, in 2 further experiments, we show that other mechanisms driving this behavior include obligations to fairness or (painful) altruism, since people also make more generous offers and allocations of money to individuals with reliable gaze cues in adapted 1-shot ultimatum games and 1-shot dictator games. In 2 final experiments, we show that the introduction of perceptual noise while following gaze can disrupt these effects, but only when the social partners are unfamiliar. Nonconscious detection of reliable gaze cues can prompt altruism toward others, probably reflecting the interplay of systems that encode identity and control gaze-evoked attention, integrating the reinforcement value of gaze cues.

Incidental learning of trust: Examining the role of emotion and visuomotor fluency.

“…However, subtle behaviours that can be used to deceive others, such as gaze shifts, could have quite specific effects on trust. For example, whether to invest money with another person is influenced by incidental learning of patterns of gaze shifts, as is the decision to be altruistic while computing the likelihood that such an act will be reciprocated in the future INCIDENTAL LEARNING OF TRUST 6 (Rogers, Bayliss et al, 2014). Such decisions might not be affected by general feelings of liking, for example we may trust a lawyer to do their utmost to preserve our freedom, but we may not like them on a personal level; the two feelings are distinct, and can be separated.…”

The late positive potential indexes a role for emotion during learning of trust from eye-gaze cues

“…At the end of the trial, participants saw a screen saying Please Relax for 1000 ms. A 500 ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between gaze-cue and target object was used to ensure that it was long enough for gaze to be most strongly encoded and produce measurable ERPs but at the same time short enough to reflexively cue attention (Friesen & Kingstone, 1998 ). This SOA has also been used in all other studies of identity-contingent gaze-cueing and trust (Bayliss et al, 2009 ; Bayliss & Tipper, 2006 ; Rogers et al, 2014 ), facilitating comparison. We did not vary SOA, as this would not allow for a sufficient number of ERP trials to be calculated in the trial period when the gaze-shift occurred.…”

“…For all ERP analyses, we collapsed across the factor of face gender, as this was not of primary interest to our hypotheses and also to retain a sufficient number of trials in the analysis. Trials with errors or reaction times exceeding 1500 ms or two standard deviations above or below each participants mean ( M = 4.6%, SD = 1.5) were removed from the reaction time analyses (in accordance with Bayliss et al ( 2009 ), Bayliss and Tipper ( 2006 ), and Rogers et al ( 2014 )).…”

Memory for incidentally perceived social cues: Effects on person judgment

“…Affective learning can be seen in the way that facial cues shape our lasting impressions of others. In gaze cueing experiments, for example, participants view faces which incidentally gaze to the left or right (e.g., Bayliss, Griffiths, & Tipper, 2009;Bayliss & Tipper, 2006;Rogers et al, 2014). The gaze direction of the face may match or mismatch with the location of a simultaneously appearing target, which the participant is tasked with rapidly identifying.…”

“…Importantly, the faces in these experiments gaze in a manner that is consistently helpful or unhelpful. The participants later rate faces that gazed unhelpfully as being less trustworthy than those who were helpful (Bayliss & Tipper, 2006;Bayliss et al, 2009), and show less willingness to financially invest in them (Rogers et al, 2014). Subsequent work has demonstrated that emotional reactions during gaze cueing (as measured via facial electromyography) mediate this learning of trust (Manssuer, Pawling, Hayes, & Tipper, 2015).…”