A Study Shows The Effect Of Smiling On Trust Toward A Recommendation Agent

Trust is a significant factor in e-commerce businesses. Lui et al. (2010) conducted an experiment to determine whether smile of an online recommendation agent affects the trust of users. 

A recommendation agent is software that determines the preferences of users and recommends products and services in online shopping activities. 

Naturalistic avatar, a humanoid in form of human-like appearance, was used as a recommendation agent in this study. The trusting beliefs were decided as ‘competence’, ‘integrity’ and ‘benevolence’. An experimental website was developed for shopping a laptop by participants. They were told that they were supposed to choose a laptop for a friend who does not know much about laptops. Before making a choice, they interacted with a recommendation agent.

After making a final choice of laptop, the conclusions were drawn. The smiling agents were perceived as more competent than non-smiling agents; while smiling agents were not perceived to have higher integrity and more benevolence than non-smiling agents. 

The trust can be built using facial expression of a recommendation agent. So, while designing avatars as recommendations agents for websites, design a smiling agent to interact with people. It will make them believe they are interacting with competent avatars who recommend them a better product.

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Reference - Siu Man Lui, School of Business (Information Technology), James Cook University, Cairns, Australia. And Wendy Hui, The University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China. 

Research paper name - Effects of Smiling and Gender on Trust toward a Recommendation Agent.

Published in - International Conference on Cyberworlds (2010)

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How We Smile While Lying

Using a smile to conceal negative or genuine feelings can be a smart thing to avoid dispute or exposing honest feelings which can create problems. Ekman et al. conducted an experiment to know the difference between how people smile genuinely and how they smile when they are lying about pleasant feelings. 

47 student nurses were recruited for this study. They were videotaped while watching two short films. One short film was arousing pleasant feelings and another, arousing upsetting feelings.  Two scenarios were set to give their responses to an interviewer. In honest scenario, they were asked to discuss their honest feelings about film arousing pleasant feelings. 

In deceptive scenario, they had to convince interviewer that they experienced pleasant feelings while watching film arousing upsetting and depressing feelings.

Two types of smiles were distinguished as felt happy smiles and masking smiles. Felt happy smiles were identified by the activity of muscles around the eyes along with corners of mouth raised.

While masking smile is identified by raising corners of mouth only. It was found that when enjoyment was experienced, felt happy smiles occurred more often than masking smile. 

When subjects attempted to hide strong negative emotions, masking smile occurred more often than felt happy smiles. When you don’t see any activity around the eyes when someone is smiling; tell them you caught them lying and ask what is that they are hiding.

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Reference – Paul Ekman, Wallace Friesen, University of California, San Francisco. Maureen O’Sullivan, University of San Francisco. 

Research paper name – Smiles When Lying. 

Published in – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1988)

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