Trial reportEvolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior
Emotional Tears: An Honest Signal of Trustworthiness Increasing Prosocial Behavior?
Trial report in Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Identifying Indigenous People's Grieving and Funeral Practices as Components for Establishing a Grief Support Framework: An Integrative Literature Review.Journal of psychiatric and mental health nursing · 2026Review
- The Emotional Crying Behavior Dataset (ECBD): A comprehensive resource to study the multifaceted nature of emotional crying.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Evolution of indirect reciprocity under emotion expression.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The honesty behind tears: Situational, individual, and cultural influences on the perception of emotional tears as sincere.PloS one · 2025Article
- Propensity to trust shapes perceptions of comforting touch between trustworthy human and robot partners.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Effects of co-players' identity and reputation in the public goods game.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The red-beard evolutionary explanation of human sociality.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2021Article
- Viewpoint: Why do we cry? Are tears 'purposeless'?The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How do our emotional tears affect the way we are treated? We tested whether tears, paired with either a neutral or a sad facial expression, elicited prosocial behavior among perceivers. Participants viewed a video clip depicting a confederate partner with or without tears displaying either a neutral or sad facial expression before making a behavioral decision in one of two economic games. In a Trust game (Experiment 1), participants who played the role of the investor were more likely to share an endowment after viewing a confederate trustee with tears (paired with either a neutral or a sad facial expression) in comparison to a confederate trustee without tears. However, in a Dictator game (Experiment 2), participants who played the role of allocator were no more likely to share an endowment after viewing a confederate recipient with tears (paired with either a neutral or sad facial expression) in comparison to a confederate recipient without tears. Taken together, these findings suggest that tears increase prosocial behavior by increasing trustworthiness as opposed to generally increasing other-regarding altruistic tendencies.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.