A familiar face in the
crowd is something we look for and instantly makes us feel more relaxed and at
home (– unless it is someone we don’t want to meet because, well perhaps we
shouldn’t ask.)
So if we see someone who
looks like us, then we feel good about that as we see someone familiar who is
probably related as our doppelgangers are few and far between. Kinship is a
good thing and we can obviously trust our kin
to do the right thing by us.
That was the starting point
of Giang et al who published their
study in last weeks Public Library of Science (1). They took 58 men and women
in their early 20’s as their subjects to play with themselves (unwittingly of
course). They game was on.
Specifically it was a
social cooperation game in which you and the other player invested money, only
small sums, so the players didn’t have to be one percenters. If the partner
invested the same amount, you did well, but if they cheated and only said they
would and didn’t, you lost money.
In past published
experiments, players tended to invest more money when the image of the other
player looked like a likeable person. Now what’s not to liked about a possible
family member? Well, we’ll see.
The experiment started with
photographs of the participants and then these were morphed a little to look
like someone different, but not totally. Hence you would be playing with
yourself, but not quite yourself, more a familiar face.
When all the results came
in, shock horror but not the expected outcome. What happened was that the
players didn’t trust themselves (well familiar face person) any more that
someone different. Of, course not everybody would look “likeable” after
morphing, but not trusting people that could look like a possible sibling? Well
who’d have thought it.
Sibling rivalry seems to be
alive and well amongst the students of Heinrich Heine U in Düsseldorf.
