Reverse appraisal: The importance of appraisals for the effect of emotion displays on people's decision making in a social dilemma

Reverse appraisal: The importance of appraisals for the effect of emotion displays on people’s decision making in a social dilemma Celso M. de Melo (demelo@ict.usc.edu) Jonathan Gratch (gratch@ict.usc.edu) Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, 12015 Waterfront Drive, Building #4 Playa Vista, CA 90094-2536, USA Peter Carnevale (peter.carnevale@marshall.usc.edu) USC Marshall School of Business, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0808, USA Stephen Read (read@rcf.usc.edu) USC Department of Psychology, Los Angeles, CA 90089-1061, USA and maximize joint long-term reward (Kollock, 1998). Empirical evidence confirms that facial displays of emotion can impact cooperation (e.g., de Melo, Carnevale, & Gratch, 2012; Schug, Matsumoto, Horita, Yamagishi, & Bonnet, 2010). However, the mechanism by which such social effects of emotion are achieved is less well understood. In this paper we address this issue and look at appraisal theories of emotion to understand what is the information people retrieve from emotion displays and how is that accomplished. In appraisal theories, emotion displays arise from cognitive appraisal of events with respect to an agent’s goals, desires and beliefs (e.g., is this event congruent with my goals? Who is responsible for this event? ). According to the pattern of appraisals that occurs, different emotions are experienced and displayed. Since displays reflect the agent’s intentions through the appraisal process, it is also plausible to ask whether people can infer from emotion displays the agent’s goals by reversing the appraisal mechanism. We refer to this proposal as reverse appraisal. The intuition is that if appraisal, abstractly, is a function that maps from to emotion, reverse appraisal is a function that maps from to mental state. Empirical evidence is still scarce but in a recent study Hareli and Hess (2010) showed that people could, from expressed emotion, make inferences about the character of the person displaying emotion. For instance, a person who reacted with anger to blame was perceived as being more aggressive, self-confident but also as less warm and gentle than a person who reacted with sadness. Moreover, the results showed that such inferences were mediated by appraisal variables. In our case, reverse appraisal predicts that people infer, from emotion displays, how the counterpart is appraising the social dilemma outcomes; then, from these perceptions of appraisal, people infer how likely the counterpart is to cooperate in the future, which we refer to as perceptions of cooperativeness. This causal model is shown in Figure 1. The goal of the paper is to establish this causal model. Abstract Two studies are presented that explore the interpersonal effect of emotion displays in decision making in a social dilemma. Experiment 1 (N=405) showed that facial displays of emotion (joy, sadness, anger and guilt) had an effect on perception of how the person was appraising the social dilemma outcomes (perception of appraisals) and on perception of how likely the person was to cooperate in the future (perception of cooperation). Experiment 1 also showed that perception of appraisals (partially and, in some cases, fully) mediated the effect of emotion displays on perception of cooperation. Experiment 2 (N=202) showed that manipulating perception of appraisals, by expressing them textually, produced an effect on perception of cooperation thus, providing evidence for a causal model where emotion displays cause perception of appraisals which, in turn, cause perception of cooperation. In line with Hareli and Hess’ (2010) findings and a social- functions view of emotion, we advance the reverse appraisal proposal that argues people can infer, from emotion displays, how others are appraising a situation which, in turn, support inferences that are relevant for decision making. We discuss implications of these results and proposal to decision and emotion theory. Keywords: Emotion Displays, Decision Making, Social Dilemma, Appraisal Theories, Reverse Appraisal Introduction Recent decades have seen growing interest on the interpersonal effect of emotion in decision making (e.g., Van Kleef, De Dreu, & Manstead, 2010). Complementing research on the impact of emotion in one’s own decision making (for a recent review see Blanchette & Richards, 2010), this research explores how one’s emotion displays impact another’s decision making and emphasizes that emotional expressions are not simple manifestations of internal experience; rather, expressions are other-directed and communicate intentions, desired courses of actions, expectations and behaviors (Frijda & Mesquita, 1994; Keltner & Kring, 1998). The expression of emotion has also been argued to play a significant role in emergence of cooperation in social dilemmas (Boone & Buck, 2003; Frank, 1988). Social dilemmas, such as the prisoner’s dilemma, are situations where people must choose between pursuing their own self-interest and collect a short-term reward or trust another person to reach mutual cooperation Emotion Display i Perceptions of Appraisals ii Perceptions of Cooperativeness Figure 1: Causal model for the effect of emotion displays in cooperation in a social dilemma.