Introduction
Beauty premium belongs to an innate human behaviour bias and has severely affected social justice and social development. It is an interesting question that how much beauty is actually worth. The more interesting point that has not been studied is whether the effect of beauty can be substituted by social influence, such as trust. This study investigated these issues by using a modified trust game.
Method
314 male participants were recruited as trustees determined what proportion of the investment income would be returned to female trustors who had different attractiveness levels. Three investment levels, i.e., CNY 1, 3, and 5 (meaning low, medium, high trust levels), were designed to explore the influence of trust level on return rate. The marginal effect of beauty was calculated at each of three trust levels, and the marginal rate of substitution (MRS) between beauty and trust was explored based on a mixed-effect model.
Results
Regression models implied a strongly positive linear relationship between facial attractiveness and reciprocal behaviour. And results showed an increase of one unit in facial attractiveness leads to a 24.0%, 21.2%, 21.9% increase in return rate for low, medium and high trust levels respectively. Results also indicated that the effect of attractiveness on return rates is moderated by trust. The MRS of trust for facial attractiveness was also calculated to represent the rate at which trust can substitute for attractiveness while maintaining the same return rate.
Discussion
This study suggested that the value of beauty can be reflected in the specific amount of money and that the marginal effect of beauty varies with trust levels. This study also found a substitution effect of trust for beauty and proposed the marginal rate of beauty-trust substitution.
扫码关注我们
求助内容:
应助结果提醒方式:
