The role of facial cues in signalling cooperativeness is limited and nuanced

Humans display a remarkable tendency to cooperate with strangers; however, identifying prospective cooperation partners accurately before entering any new relationship is essential to mitigate the risk of being exploited. Visual appearance, as inferrable, for example, from facial images on job portals and dating sites, may serve as a potential signal of cooperativeness. This experimental study examines whether static images enable the correct detection of an individual’s propensity to cooperate. Participants first played the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) game, a standard cooperation task. Subsequently, they were asked to predict the cooperativeness of participants from a prior PD study relying solely on their static facial photographs. While our main results indicate only marginal accuracy improvements over random guessing, a more detailed analysis reveals that participants were more successful at identifying cooperative tendencies similar to their own. Despite no detectable main effect in our primary treatment variations (time pressure versus time delay), participants exhibited increased accuracy in identifying male cooperators under time pressure. These findings point towards a limited yet nuanced role of static facial images in predicting cooperativeness, advancing our understanding of non-behavioral cues in cooperative interactions.