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Facial electromyography reveals dissociable affective responses in social and non-social cooperation

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Abstract

While economic standard theory explains cooperation in terms of rational decision-making, empirical studies suggest that humans have social preferences for cooperating with others. We investigated the specificity of these social preferences for interactions with human, relative to non-human, agents in a prisoner’s dilemma game. To obtain insights into emotional processes during cooperation, we measured activity of the corrugator supercilii muscle as indicator of spontaneous emotional responding during cooperation. After unreciprocated defection (free-riding), participants switched more often to a cooperative strategy and showed increased corrugator activity (suggesting more negative emotional responses) when playing with a human relative to a computer. This suggests that humans have a specific preference for cooperating with other humans and that cooperation may be promoted by unpleasant affect in response to the outcome of one’s own “free-riding”.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Nadja Wiebe, Angelique Zessin, and Antonia Papadakis for help with data collection.

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Author notes

  1. Alexander Soutschek and André Weinreich have contributed equally to this work (shared first authorship, names in alphabetic order).

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research, Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Blumlisalpstr. 10, 8006, Zurich, Switzerland

    Alexander Soutschek

  2. Institute for Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    André Weinreich & Torsten Schubert

  3. Department of Psychology, Martin-Luther University, Halle, Germany

    Torsten Schubert

Authors
  1. Alexander Soutschek
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  2. André Weinreich
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  3. Torsten Schubert
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Correspondence to Alexander Soutschek or André Weinreich.

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The authors declare no conflicting financial interests.

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All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments.

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Informed consent was obtained by all participants included in the study.

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Soutschek, A., Weinreich, A. & Schubert, T. Facial electromyography reveals dissociable affective responses in social and non-social cooperation. Motiv Emot 42, 118–125 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-017-9662-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-017-9662-2

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