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When playing single-shot behavioral economic games like the Trust and Dictator Games, European Americans and East Asians invested in and gave more to targets whose smiles matched their culture’s idealaffect (the affective states they value; Blevins et al., 2024; Park et al., 2017), suggesting that smiles signal something about targets’ traits. But what happens when participants are given direct information about targets’ traits; do targets’ smiles still matter for resource sharing? To answer this question, we conducted four studies from 2019 to 2022 in which 429 European Americans and 413 Taiwanese played single-shot Trust Games with open, toothy “excited” smiling targets, closed “calm” smiling targets, and nonsmiling “neutral” targets that varied in their reputations for being trustworthy, competent, and emotionally stable. When targets’ reputations were ambiguous (e.g., “50% of previous players said they were trustworthy”), European American and Taiwanese participants invested more in targets whose smiles matched their culture’s ideal affect. However, when targets’ reputations were clearly good (e.g., “80% of previous players said they were trustworthy”) or bad (e.g., “20% of previous players said they were trustworthy”), European Americans invested equally in all targets, suggesting that reputational information about targets’ traits mattered more than targets’ smiles. The pattern for Taiwanese, however, differed: Taiwanese invested equally in calm and neutral targets when targets’ reputations were clear, but regardless of their reputations, Taiwanese invested in excited targets the least. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding cultural differences in the meaning of an excited smile in the context of resource sharing. 

Abstract European Americans view high-intensity, open-mouthed ‘excited’ smiles more positively than Chinese because they value excitement and other high arousal positive states more. This difference is supported by reward-related neural activity, with European Americans showing greater Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc) activity to excited (vs calm) smiles than Chinese. But do these cultural differences generalize to all rewards, and are they related to real-world social behavior? European American (N = 26) and Chinese (N = 27) participants completed social and monetary incentive delay tasks that distinguished between the anticipation and receipt (outcome) of social and monetary rewards while undergoing Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI). The groups did not differ in NAcc activity when anticipating social or monetary rewards. However, as predicted, European Americans showed greater NAcc activity than Chinese when viewing excited smiles during outcome (the receipt of social reward). No cultural differences emerged when participants received monetary outcomes. Individuals who showed increased NAcc activity to excited smiles during outcome had friends with more intense smiles on social media. These findings suggest that culture plays a specific role in modulating reward-related neural responses to excited smiles during outcome, which are associated with real-world relationships.