The Effect Of Face Preference On Social Mindfulness

Social mindfulness,a prosocial behavior,is paying attention to,respecting and protecting the needs and rights of others.As a kind of social decision,it often happens in real interpersonal interaction,which requires people to make decisions in a very short time.At this time,social information from the interactive target,especially the conspicuous facial attractiveness,is often the key of individuals' behavior.Facial stereotype suggests that attractive people are perceived as kinder,more trustworthy and more competent.And also,good-looking people are usually privileged in social decision-making.For example,attractive candidates are considered better suited to their current job and more likely to be hired in an interview.What's more,in judicial decision-making,compared to the unattractive,attractive people are more likely to be acquitted of the same crime.And people were more likely to cooperate with the attractive partners rather than with unattractive partners.From the above,these decisions are influenced in part by facial attractiveness.Building on this extensive body of research,we transfer the beauty stereotypy decision making to social mindfulness(when meet a stranger,do people make mindful decisions based on their targets' facial attractiveness?)and reason that attractive people are perceived as more trustworthy and therefore treated more mindfully.Specifically,attractive faces stereotypically evoke higher levels of social mindfulness than unattractive faces.The above phenomenon is a kind of facial stereotype in social decision-making.However,previous research shows that this phenomenon is irrational.To be specific,beautiful people are easily treated well by others,while ugly people are discriminated against,which causes great psychological distress to them.Therefore,it is of great necessity to examine how to reduce or eliminate the facial stereotype in making decisions,which will provide methods for reducing social contradictions and eliminating psychological barriers between people.To our relief,the benefits of facial appearance may be context dependent.Unfair or irrational consequences of differences in beauty observed in some situations would change if,in other situations provided other important information,people would tend to discount such “superficial” information.Providing more information about job applicants can weaken the impact of facial attractiveness.It might mean that facial attractiveness stereotype in social interaction may occur only when it is the only source of information available.Other information about the person presumably use an attribution process to form a comprehensive impression of the person when making a decision.So,what will people behave in the social mindfulness decision when they are provided other more relevant information(the person is kind or not)about the person? Will the initial effect of facial attractiveness be eliminated or weaken? This is an approach that looks for ways to reduce stereotypes in decision-making from the perspective of interacting targets.The traits and states of both doer and receiver play an important role in social interaction.Theoretically,social mindfulness interaction consequence should also be influenced by the decision makers themselves.Oxytocin,a prosocial hormone,which promotes social cognitive and traditional prosocial behaviors,is may also positively affect social mindfulness(a kind of prosocial behavior).So,after decision makers nasal oxytocin,their levels of the prosocial hormone go up,and are their social preferences still influenced by their targets' facial attractiveness? That's to say,whether the prosocial hormone oxytocin will change the effect of facial attractiveness on social mindfulness? This will help us to examine ways to reduce facial stereotypes in decision making from the perspective of decision makers themselves.And we will also discuss how oxytocin influence the effect of facial attractiveness on social mindfulness.To examine the effects of facial attractiveness on social mindfulness,three experiments were conducted.Two hundred and thirty-nine(145 males and 94 females)undergraduates in total participated the study.The social mindfulness(SoMi)paradigm was used to assess social mindfulness,in which participants make decisions that either limited(selected the unique one from the 4 objects)or preserved the choices of options(selected one of the 3 same objects from the 4)for the subsequent fictitious interaction partners.We manipulated the degree of facial attractiveness of the partner in each experiment.In experiment 1,participants were just asked to look at faces of the same sex partners and then completed SoMi paradigm according to the instruction.The results showed that compared to low and medium attractive people,high attractive people obviously elicit higher social mindfulness,which is consistent with our hypothesis.It suggests that the degree of individuals' social mindfulness depends on the facial attractiveness of the targets when only faces are available.Based on the results,to further explore whether the other person's level of kindness changes the way people make decisions based on facial attractiveness,we presented both faces and degree of kindness of the partners to the participants at the same time in experiment 2,then required them to conduct SoMi task.The results found that the faces no longer matter.People only focus on whether their partners are kind or not when making decision.Specifically,the kind people get higher social mindfulness.It showed that the facial attractiveness effects could be eliminated by partners' important information.What about the individual themselves? Is there any way to reduce or eliminate the stereotype? To figure this out,in experiment 3,male participants were recruited to self-administer oxytocin or a placebo to manipulate their prosociality,and then they completed the same task as in ex-periment 1 to investigate the influence of oxytocin on the effect of facial attractiveness in social mindfulness.It showed that the facial attractiveness of partners still matters in the social mindfulness choices after the participants spray oxytocin,which means that oxytocin did not alter people's tendency to make decisions based on facial attractiveness.In addition,oxytocin increased individuals' level of social mindfulness compared with placebo,suggesting that oxytocin and facial attractiveness had independent effects on social mindfulness.In short,the study first discussed the social psychological mechanism and neurophysiological mechanism of social mindfulness.If found the kindness of interactive partners changed the effect of facial attractiveness on social mindfulness,but the individual's oxytocin levels have no influence on that.Due to social mindfulness involves understanding other's intentions,the results will be meaningful for autism(lacking of the ability to understanding others' intentions)treatment.Furthermore,it will provide methods to reduce stereotypes decisions,promoting good interpersonal interaction.