Face Reading: Can Individuals Judge The Cooperativeness Of Machiavellians Based On Appearance?

Cooperation is the one and only option in the long history of human society formation and development,and it plays an important role on the development of individuals and organizations.Individuals,however,need to take the risk of being exploited by uncooperative counterparts if they choose to cooperate.According to the Social Brain Hypothesis,individuals need to develop the ability to identify potential exploiters in situations where being cooperative risks being exploited.Machiavellian is a typical kind of exploiter who intends to manipulate and betray others to advance their personal gain,and occupy a high proportion in the population from ancient times to now.It is of great practical significance to explore whether individuals can identify the cooperativeness of machiavellian quickly and effectively,and what are the influencing factors of this process and how these factors contribute to the process of selecting counterparts under cooperative situations and avoid needless cost.Previous studies have found that people often use appearance as clues to identify others' level of Machiavellianism,trustworthiness and cooperativeness.However,little is to known that whether machiavellians' cooperativeness can be judged from their appearance.Based on that,this study intends to explore whether people can judge the cooperativeness of Machiavellian by their appearance systematically,and whether the gender of the targets and the level of Machiavellianism of the raters affect and how they play roles on that process as well.The pre-experiment of this study used the standard tools and procedures to collect the standard facial photos with neutral expression of high and low Machiavellian.Experiment 1 aims to investigate whether individuals can recognize cooperativeness of machiavellian and whether this recognition process is influenced by the gender of the targets by observing their appearance showing on facial photos.Meanwhile,experiment 1a and experiment 1b used two different cooperativenessjudgment tasks separately for verifying whether the results are robust.Experiment 2illustrates whether raters' machiavellinism can influence upon judging machiavellians' cooperativeness based on appearance.Results showed that:(1)Individuals judged high machiavellians as having lower cooperativeness comparing to low machiavellians based on their appearance,and this difference just exists when the targets were men,not when they were women(experiment 1a,experiment 1b,experiment 2).(2)Raters with low machiavellianism can judge high Machiavellian targets as having lower cooperativeness than low machiavellan targets more accurately,comparing to raters with high machiavelliansm(experiment 2).In summary,results showing above illustrate that individuals have evolved the ability to judge the cooperativeness of machiavellians based on their appearance.To be precise,that ability is limited in a way that it only works when the target of cooperativeness judgement is male,and it is more pronounced in low machiavellians.It seems that,although low Machiavellians take the high risk of being exploited by high machiavellians,they have already evolved the adaptive mechanism to cope with it.While high machiavellians who are good at manipulating and exploiting others are relatively lack of the ability of judging others' cooperativeness.Those findings,to some extent,have clarified the boundary conditions of face reading and enrichs the content of evolutionary psychological research.