| This research investigated how target's facial attractiveness and facial maturity and perceiver's social value orientation (SVO) affected selection of interaction partner, perception of cooperativeness, and actual cooperative behavior in a mixed-motive situation. The physical appearance stereotypes literature has established that target's attractiveness elicits favorable impressions such as sociability, competence and honesty, and that target's babyfaceness elicits impressions such as warmth and incompetence. The SVO literature has shown that prosocials consider cooperation along the dimension of morality or evaluation, whereas proselfs consider cooperation along the dimension of power or potency, and their different goals affect what each thinks constitutes rational behavior. Building on those findings, this study tested the hypotheses that SVO moderates the effect of target attractiveness, but not facial maturity, on perceived cooperativeness; that prosocials cooperate with targets according to their perception of target cooperativeness, but proselfs are not cooperative; and that both prosocials and proselfs' selection preference corresponds to their perception of target cooperativeness. Sixty-four college undergraduates played one-shot prisoner's dilemma games with presumed other participants, who were in reality pre-selected target photographs whose levels of attractiveness and babyfaceness were controlled. Participants selected targets with whom to play the game, decided how cooperative to be by choosing the amount of money to offer, estimated how cooperative the targets had been, and rated targets on trait impressions. Consistent with the hypotheses, prosocials but not proselfs expected more cooperation from attractive targets than from unattractive targets, although only for female targets. Also, both prosocials and proselfs expected more cooperation from babyfaced targets. Contrary to the a priori hypotheses, however, participants cooperated slightly more with attractive targets regardless of their SVO, and chose them more frequently than unattractive targets. Facial maturity did not affect how cooperative participants were, and prosocials chose babyfaced targets more frequently but proselfs chose babyfaced and maturefaced targets similarly often. Overall the results replicated the prior literature on the function of physical appearance stereotypes, while providing limited support for the hypothesized role of SVO as a variable moderating this effect. |
