| In the busy city life,there is tremendous opportunity for us to come into contact with a lot of novel face,which would influence human intention and behavior without our attention.For example,when we are shopping in the mall,we will enjoy increased feeling of happiness when we are faced with attractive salesperson,which would further make us more likely to adopt the purchasing behavior.In the working environment,the beautiful employees may be more likely to get the attention from employers in the condition that the professional qualifications of employees are similar with each other.Meanwhile,beautiful employees are more likely to create positive impacts within group.When buying financial products in the bank,those trustworthy-looking financial advisers will make us feel more comfortable and assured when taking the investment behavior.At the same time,with the rapid development of information and technology,the influence of face on human behavior has been gradually penetrated into the online environment.Evidence from certain empirical research demonstrated that among the elements presented on the webpage,pictures including human face can efficiently attract users'attention and motive their cognitive and emotive response,like feeling more sense of warmth,friendness and experiencing more positive emotion,which would promote users' preference for the website and the next possible purchasing behavior.As mentioned above,face exerts influence on individual behavior to a certain extent in many circumstances in our daily life.Numerous empirical evidence from psychology,management,sociology and other related subjects demonstrated that an individual's face conveys a large number of information and certain positive characters of face indeed induce positive effects.Trait inference from face,acting as the mainstream research directions based on face,has always been one of the hot research topics followed by scholars.The trait inference from face refers to the notion that people infer others' personality by observing their faces.Facial attractiveness and facial trustworthiness are the two most common trait inferences which have been widely studied by scholars.Empirical evidence from multiple disciplines revealed that attractive or trustworthy-looking faces indeed preferred by people,which is also supported by evidence from cognitive neuroscience,namely there exists specific brain areas which is mainly processing information related to face.Furthermore,the judgment of attractiveness or trustworthiness based on face is completed automatically and efficiently.It is necessary to point out that most of the previous research often focused on the effect of only one kind of trait inferences on individual behavior and a small amount of research focused on facial attractiveness and facial trustworthiness simultaneously were often conducted through correlation analysis.On the basis of previous research,we conducted a series of experiments in this paper from the perspective of management and decision science which involved different scenarios.First,we explored the effects of facial trustworthiness on individual intention and behavior preference alone.Then we explored the effects of these two facial trait inferences simultaneously through ANOVA analysis and explained the mechanism of these effects from subjective cognitive perspective.Regarding to the research methods,there exists two commonly adopted methods in the disciplines of management and decision science.One is behavioral experiments,namely researchers need to design experimental paradigms which simulate practical situations and then invite subjects to complete the experiment in the laboratory.The other is questionnaire survey,which can be conducted either during and after behavioral experiments or independently.In both conditions,subjects need to evaluate their own willingness according to the questionnaire in order to collect their subjective cognition in response to the research topic.The advantage of these two methods is obvious,like the experimental cost is relatively small and the experiment is easy to operate and carry out.While it is undeniable that there also exist certain drawbacks,like it cannot achieve real-time response,and also lack of objectivity to a certain extent,which would lead to subjective deviation.Fortunately,with the rapid development of cognitive neuroscience in the past decades,the cross-field research of neuroscience and other social disciplines,such as decision-making science,economics and management,has been realized.With the assistance of neuroscientific technology,like functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)and event related potential(ERP),we can directly measure human brain activity involved in the cognitive processing,which can help people accurately understand the neural mechanism underlying behavior and formulate corresponding strategies.Sanfey et al.(2003)published an article on Science,who innovatively adopted fMRI to explore the neural mechanism underlying responder's decision-making process in the ultimatum game.This article pioneered the research in the field of neuroeconomics.Considering this situation,the current research also attempts to further explain the effects of facial trait inference from brain level on the basis of behavioral results.In this paper,we designed four studies including six experiments to explore the effects of facial trait inferences on individual preferences from perspectives of behavioral,cognitive and neuroscientific respectively.In Experiment 1 of Study 1,we adopted the ultimatum game to explore the effects of proposer's facial trustworthiness and gender on responder's fairness consideration and decision behavior.Also,we are interested in the relationship between emotional response elicited by faces of different trustworthiness and decision behavior.In Experiment 2 of Study 1,we designed online webpages including faces of different trustworthiness and gender acting as endorsers,which combined with utilitarian or hedonic products,to explore the impacts of these elements on individual browsing preference.These two experiments of Study 1 help us learn the effects of facial trustworthiness more directly and completed the related research focused on facial trustworthiness.In Study 2,we adopted the experimental paradigms used in Study 1 and made certain adjustments.Through two experiments we explored the effects of facial attractiveness and facial trustworthiness simultaneously on individual preference under fairness-related decision-making and marketing situations respectively.Previous research had made certain distinctions between the judgments of attractiveness and trustworthiness from face based on certain dimensions,including different evaluation criteria,different correlations with certain behavior and different activities in brain areas when processing these two judgments.We further supported this point through variance analysis in the current research.On the basis of Study 2,we conducted a large-scale questionnaire survey in Study 3.We collected users' perceptions regarding to the importance of endorser's facial attractiveness and facial trustworthiness presented in the webpage.Then we established associations with users'cognitive and emotional experience when browsing the webpage.Finally,we constructed a theory model from subjective perspective to explain the effects of facial trait inferences on user's online loyalty.In Study 4,we selected facial attractiveness as research variable and adopted fMRI to explore individual's neural activities in response to the unfair allocations when they were faced with female proposers either attractive or less attractive look.We mainly focused on the moderation effects of proposer's facial attractiveness on responder's fairness consideration.Besides,we also paid attention to the correlation between activities in different brain areas and responder's decision behavior.Through the above four studies,we mainly obtained the four conclusions described as follows:(1)In the ultimatum game,trustworthy-looking proposers can efficiently undermine individual's considerations regarding to unfairness,namely,people are more likely to accept the unfair allocations proposed by trustworthy-looking proposers.Meanwhile,facial trustworthiness plays a more important role for male proposer compared with female proposer.Under the online browsing situation,trustworthy-looking endorsers can boost users' revisiting preference for the webpage promoting both utilitarian and hedonic products.In this condition,facial trustworthiness plays a more important role for female endorser compared with male endorser and utilitarian product compared with hedonic product.(2)In the ultimatum game,the effects of proposer's facial attractiveness and facial trustworthiness on responder's decision in response to unfair allocation are independent.Similarly,in the simulated marketing situation,the effects of endorser's facial attractiveness and facial trustworthiness on individual's preference are also independent.Furthermore,the effect size of facial attractiveness is greater than facial trustworthiness in both situations.(3)User's increased perception of endorser's facial attractiveness and facial trustworthiness presented in the webpage can efficiently promote user's cognitive and emotional experience during the viewing process,which would further contribute to the formation of online loyalty.By comparing the path coefficients,we further find that the influence of user's perception of facial attractiveness on cognitive and emotive experience is higher than that of facial trustworthiness.(4)In the ultimatum game,unfair allocation indeed activates the mPFC of responder.The correlation between the activity of mPFC and acceptance rate is positive,which is significant when the unfair offers are proposed by proposer with high facial attractiveness.Meanwhile,unfair allocation also activates the Insula of responder.Contrary to the activity of mPFC,the correlation between the activity of Insula and acceptance rate is negative,which is significant when the unfair offers are proposed by proposer with low facial attractiveness.In the current research,we explored the effects of facial trait inferences on individual behavior and the possible underlying mechanism from four dimensions.The main conclusions obtained in the paper contributes to the theory development of disciplines including management,decision science and cognitive neuroscience.This paper also provides future research related to the topic certain referential value by designing several experimental scenarios to explore the effects of one or two kinds of facial trait inferences on intention and behavior.Meanwhile,the research has certain practical implications for business.For example,when enterprises are selecting representatives for business negotiation,they should pay more attention to the positive effects of facial trait inferences,and then select suitable faces to participate in the negotiation.For online merchants,when they are designing the browsing interface,it's better for them to introduce a face with high facial attractiveness and facial trustworthiness,which is helpful to promote user's online preference and loyalty. |
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