The Social Cognitive Mechanism And Functional Equivalence Of How Emoji/Face Expressions Affect Cooperative Behaviour

Based on the assumption of Homo Economicus,classical game theories mainly concerned with proximal variables such as the trade-off between self-interest and fairness,and resulted in complex models of cooperation such as Nash equilibrium.However,these models relatively ignored the role of distal variables such as expressions of emotions.Recent studies have shown that human facial expressions and even emojis,which are widely popular and increasingly important in contemporary digital online communication,both can influence people's cooperative behaviour even in highly rationality-dependent social interactions such as economic games.However,these works has not fully revealed the underlying mechanism of how such information affects individual's cooperative behaviour,especially little is known about the consistency and functional equivalence of these two expressive modalities.Moving forward,these findings are inconsistent with each other when compared across studies.Based on the emotion-as-social-information theory,the social function theories of emotions,and the dual-process theories of judgement and decision-making(JDM),the present research focuses on these issues and adopts the strategy of dissecting a sparrow by selecting three typical emoji/facial expressions,i.e.,happiness,neutrality and anger.Based on the collected data of participants' trust perception and expectation of cooperation toward partners,and their own cooperative behaviour in the prisoner's dilemmas game(PDG),the present research first aimed to to address the problem of whether the social effects of emotions are functionally equivalent across these two expressive modalities,and the second aim of this research was to construct and validate the social cognitive model of how emotional expressions affect cooperative behaviour.The present study includes four interconnected sub-studies: Study 1 initially examined whether emoji/face expressions affect cooperative behaviour.Experiment 1a and Experiment 1b manipulated emotional expressions by happy,neutral,and angry emoji/face from emojipedia and Chinese affective picture system(CAPS),respectively,and measured the participants' cooperative behaviours in the PDG.Study 2 further examined how emoji/face expressions affect cooperative behaviour,i.e.,exploring the underlying mechanisms of social cognitive processes that produce this effect.Experiment 2a and Experiment 2b manipulated emotional expressions as Experiment 1a and Experiment 1b,respectively,and serially measured the participants' trust perception,expectations of cooperation and own cooperative behaviour in the PDG.Based on the above two studies,Study 3 aimed to explore whether or how decision modes moderate the effect of emoji/face expressions on cooperative behaviour.The manipulated emotional expressions and the measured dependent variables were the same as Experiment 2a and Experiment2 b.In order to investigate whether and how decision modes,i.e.,intuition and deliberation,moderate the effects of emotional information on participants' trust perception,expectations of cooperation,and own cooperative behaviour in the PDG,the manipulation of decision modes was gradually strengthened from loose to strict.Experiments 3a and Experiment 3b measured the decision modes by the Rational and Intuitive Decision Style Scale,Experiments 4a and Experiment 4b induced decision modes by instructions,and Experiments 5a and Experiment 5b manipulated decision modes by imposing a time constraint.Based on the collected data from the above three studies,Study 4 conducted a single-paper meta-analysis(SPM)to more accurately and precisely estimate the functional equivalence and overall effect size of the two expressive modalities,and also conducted a meta-analytic structural equation modeling(MASEM)to validate the social cognition model of how emotional expressions affect cooperative behaviour.The results showed that:(1)Both emoji and facial expressions showed similar patterns of results in all experiments,i.e.,happy and neutral expressions induced more cooperative behaviours than angry ones,although there was no difference between neutral and angry expressions in some of the experiments.(2)Individuals' trust perception and expectations of cooperation serially mediated the effect of emotional expressions on cooperative behaviour,i.e.the more individuals' trust perception of partners based on emotional expressions,the higher their expectations of cooperation,and thus the more cooperative behaviour they would show in the PDG.(3)No moderating effects of intuition and deliberation were found in scale measured,instructions induced,or time pressure manipulated decision modes.(4)The social effects of the two expressive modalities on cooperative behaviour showed the functional equivalence in the PDG,and the effects of the two expressive modalities on trust perception and expectations of cooperation did not show the functional equivalence.(5)The social cognition model of how emotional expressions affect cooperative behaviour was supported by MASEM.In summary,these results supported the emotion-as-social-information theory and the social function theories of emotions,and it suggest that task-irrelevant distal information,such as emoji and facial expressions,still plays an important role even in economic game tasks that highly rely on complex cognitive abilities.The results of this research did not support the social heuristics hypothesis(SHH)that based on dual-process theory of JDM,which means that this theory is not applicable to cooperation dilemmas framed with prominent emotional information.These results,together with the findings that emoji and facial expressions were functionally(dis)equivalent and the established social cognitive model,make up for the deficiency of existing literature and help to deepen the understanding of the complex mechanism of how emotional information affects cooperative behaviour.It has implications for people to make strategical cooperative decisions based on social information cued by emotional expressions in daily social interactions.And these findings may have certain practical reference value for deep affective learning of artificial intelligence(AI),affective AI design and so on.