Vocal Attractiveness Matters: Social Preferences in Cooperative Behavior

Influence of male's facial attractiveness, vocal attractiveness and social interest on female's decisions of fairness

The present study employed dictator game and ultimatum game to investigate the effect of facial attractiveness, vocal attractiveness and social interest in expressing positive ("I like you") versus negative signals ("I don't like you") on decision making. Female participants played against male recipients in dictator game and ultimatum game while played against male proposers in ultimatum game. Results showed that participants offered recipients with attractive faces more money than recipients with unattractive faces. Participants also offered recipients with attractive voices more money than recipients with unattractive voices, especially under the positive social interest condition. Moreover, participants allocated more money to recipients who expressed positive social interest than those who expressed negative social interest, whereas they would also expect proposers who expressed positive social interest to offer them more money than proposers who expressed negative social interest. Overall, the results inform beauty premium for faces and voices on opposite-sex economic bargaining. Social interest also affects decision outcomes. However, the beauty premium and effect of social interest varies with participants' roles.

A premium for positive social interest and attractive voices in the acceptability of unfair offers? An ERP study

Although the attractiveness of voices plays an important role in social interactions, it is unclear how voice attractiveness and social interest influence social decision-making. Here, we combined the ultimatum game with recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and examined the effect of attractive versus unattractive voices of the proposers, expressing positive versus negative social interest ("I like you" vs. "I don't like you"), on the acceptance of the proposal. Overall, fair offers were accepted at significantly higher rates than unfair offers, and high voice attractiveness increased acceptance rates for all proposals. In ERPs in response to the voices, their attractiveness and expressed social interests yielded early additive effects in the N1 component, followed by interactions in the subsequent P2, P3 and N400 components. More importantly, unfair offers elicited a larger Medial Frontal Negativity (MFN) than fair offers but only when the proposer's voice was unattractive or when the voice carried positive social interest. These results suggest that both voice attractiveness and social interest moderate social decision-making and there is a similar "beauty premium" for voices as for faces.

Voice attractiveness and decision making in third-party punishment

This study examined the impact of an attractive voice compared to an unattractive voice in an economic game. Results showed that proposers with an attractive voice were perceived as more reasonable in their monetary allocations and were less likely to receive punishment for unfair allocation.

The Role of Sex in the Effect of Vocal Attractiveness on Ultimatum Game Decisions

The present research investigated the role of sex in the effect of vocal attractiveness on fairness judgment in a two-person Ultimatum Game. Each participant in the game decided whether to accept offers from a proposer who was either associated with an attractive or unattractive voice. The results showed that while participants were more likely to accept fair offers, they would also accept some unfair offers that were associated with an attractive voice. This effect of vocal attractiveness was more clearly shown by female participants, although all male and female participants took longer to make a decision when an attractive voice was associated with an offer, regardless of whether the voice was from the same sex or the opposite sex. Overall, the results inform the role of sex in the effect of vocal attractiveness and further confirm the beauty premium effect on economic bargaining, where people with an attractive voice would benefit.

The effect of attire attractiveness on students' perception of their teachers

Introduction

Generally, people do judge a book by its cover. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of teachers' attire on students' perception of 34 psychological dimensions.

Methods

The research is an experiment, with self-reported data, in groups, based on a questionnaire. The participants were 173 students (M_age = 12.16, SD = 1.74) from Suceava, Romania. Two groups of students were asked to listen to a sample lesson of a therapeutic story, narrated by a teacher. One group was given a picture of the attractive teacher and the other group a picture of the unattractive teacher, and were told that the teacher who is narrating is the teacher in the picture. After listening to the same story, the respondents had to answer a questionnaire about teachers' personality and characteristics.

Results

The results indicated that when the teacher is perceived as being more attractive, the students have a greater openness for school activities, the evaluation of the teacher's personality is more positive, the evaluation of the teaching effort is more positive, students expect a higher grade, and the perceived age of the teacher is lower.

Discussion

The article underlines the role of clothing in molding student's perception and raises questions about dress codes in schools. Implications for school context are discussed.

The “beauty premium” effect of voice attractiveness of long speech sounds in outcome-evaluation event-related potentials in a trust game

Previous research suggested that people with attractive voices had an advantage in economic games, even if the voices were only presented for 400 ms. The present study investigated the influence of voice attractiveness on the cooperative trust behavior with longer exposure times to the voices. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during the feedback outcome evaluation. Participants heard a voice of the partner for 2,040 ms and decided whether to invest to the partner for a possibility to gain more money. The results showed that participants made more invest choices to the attractive partners, replicating the “beauty premium” effect of the attractive voices. Moreover, participants were more likely to invest to male partners. The ERP analysis for the outcome showed that the difference waves of feedback-related negativity (FRN) amplitude were smaller in the attractive voice condition than in the unattractive voice condition, suggesting that the rewarding effect of attractive voices weakened the frustrating feelings of the loss. In sum, the present study confirms that attractive voices with longer presentation durations facilitate cooperative behavior and modulate the processing of feedback evaluations.