01/10/2010, Players

Harvard University has recently released a new study on the way humans make decisions under pressure. The study was conducted by Dr. Erik Schlicht and his team, who gathered 14 novice poker players for studying their actions during a Texas Hold'em poker game. Dr. Schlicht's goal was to study the effects of an opponent's facial expressions on a poker player's action.

The 14 subjects, aged 19 to 36, were dealt two-card hands on a computer that displayed various facial expressions, represented on the screen by a photo of a human.
Researchers discovered neutral or untrustworthy expressions had no effects on the participants, while friendly faces confused them and it took longer to decide whether to fold or to call. When friendly faces appeared on the screen, players made less productive decisions.

According to these results, Dr. Schlicht and his team discovered threatening or inexpressive faces which make professional poker players look so menacing, have less impact on their opponents than smiling faces.

“Surprisingly, we find that threatening face information has little influence on wagering behavior, but faces relaying positive emotional characteristics impact people's decisions. People took significantly longer and made more mistakes against emotionally positive opponents,” said the study’s author.

Dr. Schlicht and his team published the results of the study under the title “Human wagering behavior depends on opponents faces”.