Pupil-mimicry conditions trust in partners: moderation by oxytocin and group membership.

ABSTRACT: Across species, oxytocin, an evolutionarily ancient neuropeptide, facilitates social communication by attuning individuals to conspecifics' social signals, fostering trust and bonding. The eyes have an important signalling function; and humans use their salient and communicative eyes to intentionally and unintentionally send social signals to others, by contracting the muscles around their eyes and pupils. In our earlier research, we observed that interaction partners with dilating pupils are trusted more than partners with constricting pupils. But over and beyond this effect, we found that the pupil sizes of partners synchronize and that when pupils synchronously dilate, trust is further boosted. Critically, this linkage between mimicry and trust was bound to interactions between ingroup

SUBMITTER: Kret ME 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5360920 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature