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Published July 21, 2010 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Human Wagering Behavior Depends on Opponents' Faces

Abstract

Research in competitive games has exclusively focused on how opponent models are developed through previous outcomes and how peoples' decisions relate to normative predictions. Little is known about how rapid impressions of opponents operate and influence behavior in competitive economic situations, although such subjective impressions have been shown to influence cooperative decision-making. This study investigates whether an opponent's face influences players' wagering decisions in a zero-sum game with hidden information. Participants made risky choices in a simplified poker task while being presented opponents whose faces differentially correlated with subjective impressions of trust. Surprisingly, we find that threatening face information has little influence on wagering behavior, but faces relaying positive emotional characteristics impact peoples' decisions. Thus, people took significantly longer and made more mistakes against emotionally positive opponents. Differences in reaction times and percent correct were greatest around the optimal decision boundary, indicating that face information is predominantly used when making decisions during medium-value gambles. Mistakes against emotionally positive opponents resulted from increased folding rates, suggesting that participants may have believed that these opponents were betting with hands of greater value than other opponents. According to these results, the best "poker face" for bluffing may not be a neutral face, but rather a face that contains emotional correlates of trustworthiness. Moreover, it suggests that rapid impressions of an opponent play an important role in competitive games, especially when people have little or no experience with an opponent.

Additional Information

© 2010 Schlicht et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Received December 17, 2009; Accepted June 20, 2010; Published July 21, 2010. Editor: Aldo Rustichini, University of Minnesota, United States of America. Funding: This work was funded by a Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology (ERATO) grant (to S.S.) and partially supported by National Eye Institute (NEI) grant R01 EY01362 (to K.N.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The authors thank Stephanie Wang for her work collecting data for the face rating task used in Materials S1, in addition to the thoughtful feedback and advice of Jon Freeman during the questionnaire development process. Author Contributions: Conceived and designed the experiments: EJS. Performed the experiments: EJS. Analyzed the data: EJS PWB. Contributed reagents/materials/ analysis tools: SS CC KN. Wrote the paper: EJS.

Attached Files

Published - Schlicht2010p10940PLoS_ONE.pdf

Supplemental Material - journal.pone.0011663.s001.doc

Supplemental Material - journal.pone.0011663.s002.pdf

Supplemental Material - journal.pone.0011663.s003.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
March 5, 2024