The current research examined whether fair consideration—a social norm that people inherently prefer to confirm—would modulate face recognition. Each neutral face was associated with fair offers or unfair offers via an economic decision task, the Ultimatum Game (UG) task. After the UG, participants were asked to identify the faces of proposers who made different offers. Enhanced memory was observed for fair-related faces compared to unfair-related faces. Furthermore, high trait anxiety was associated with reduced memory for fair-related faces. These results were (...) further confirmed by signal detection theory. The current research provided initial evidence that people showed enhanced memory for faces that made fair offers from the economic decision task, and that high trait anxiety was associated with reduced fair-related memory. Possible neural mechanisms and the implication in economic and social situations have been discussed. (shrink)

Detection of genuine altruists could be a solution to the problem of subtle cheating. Brown et al. (Evol Psychol 1:42–69, 2003) found that humans could detect altruists using nonverbal cues. However, their experiments can be improved upon in several ways, and further investigation is needed to determine whether altruist-detection abilities are human universals. In our experiment, we used video clips of natural conversations as the stimulus. We asked a sample of Japanese undergraduates to rate their own level of altruism and (...) then to estimate the videotaped targets’ altruism using the same scale. The perceivers were able to estimate the targets’ altruism levels accurately. Perceivers’ altruism score did not affect their ability to discriminate between altruists and non-altruists. Perceivers’ impressions of the altruist and non-altruist targets were also found to be different. Coding of nonverbal behavior of the targets revealed that altruists exhibited more “felt smiles” than non-altruists, which also supports the results of the previous study. (shrink)

We argue that Tomasello's account overlooks important psychological distinctions between how humans judge different types of moral obligations, such as prescriptive obligations (i.e., what oneshoulddo) and proscriptive obligations (i.e., what oneshould notdo). Specifically, evaluating these different types of obligations rests on different psychological inputs and has distinct downstream consequences for judgments of moral character.