The Effects of Advice Seeker&#x02019;s Gaze Direction and Expression on Advice Giving

Song Aijia; Duan Jinyun

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240326

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2024, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (3) : 718-725. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240326

Social，Personality & Organizational Psychology

The Effects of Advice Seeker’s Gaze Direction and Expression on Advice Giving

Song Aijia, Duan Jinyun

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Abstract

Advice giving is a new hot topic in behavioral decision research. For the recipient, advice is helpful in many situations. However, the proposer is faced with relatively difficult work, and usually is difficult to judge whether his proposal is useful or welcome in advance. Advice is not always needed, advice giving can be perceived as challenging and face-threatening. Individuals usually collect sufficient information and consider before giving advice.
In this interpersonal interaction process, facial information is first involved, yet few researches have probed into the effects of the combination of gaze direction and expression, which are both significant facial signals during communication. To fill this gap, this study focuses on the influences of gaze direction and expression of the advice seeker on advisor’s advice giving, exploring the mediating effects of advisor’s perceived authenticity and state prosocial motive. Based on the Shared Signal Hypothesis, individuals have a greater sensitivity for the congruent emotion-gaze combination. The congruent expression-gaze signal enhances relative emotion perception and increases advice taking. Furthermore, during the advice-giving process, the authenticity of emotional performance is an important dimension that affects adviser's trust on the advice seeker, and the degree of a person's being trust is closely related to his or her persuasiveness and influence. Also, adviser will spontaneously generate moral emotion and state prosocial motivation according to the need of help from others, which may play a role as well.
This research used a mixed design -- 2 gaze direction (forward and strabismus; between subjects) * 2 expressions (sad and smile). Subjects were recruited through an online platform and randomly assigned to the forward group or strabismus group. There were 81 participants (38 males) with an average age of 29.35 years (± 5.53 years).
The results showed that: (1) When advice seekers’ signals of gaze direction and expression are consistent, advisors are more likely to take the advice. Specifically, compared with the front sad face group, when seeing a strabismus sad face, advisors are more inclined to give advice. (2) Advisor’s perceived authenticity and state prosocial motive play as mediators between advice seeker’s gaze direction and advice giving. We confirmed that specific combination of gaze direction and expression has different effect on advice giving, which is of great significance to the development of theoretical and practical research in the field of advice giving. Our results supported the shared signal theory and the EASI model. Meanwhile, the importance of contextual factors such as gaze direction on facial expression understanding is emphasized. In addition, the revelation of the mediations of advisor’s perceived authenticity and state prosocial motive is instructive to the field of behavioral decision research. We measured the perceived authenticity of advisors, emphasizing the importance of individuals' subjective perception, and fill in some gap that need to be supplemented in related fields. The results suggest that, in the process of seeking advice, we can better promote others' advices by maintaining the consistency of the signals of expression and gaze direction.

Key words

advice giving / gaze direction / expression / perceived authenticity / state prosocial motive / shared signal hypothesis

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Song Aijia, Duan Jinyun. The Effects of Advice Seeker’s Gaze Direction and Expression on Advice Giving[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2024, 47(3): 718-725 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240326

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