Smile or Cry? – The Impact of a Victim’s Facial Expression on Helping Behavior in Emergency Applications

Today’s wide spread of smartphones bares high potential for the effectiveness of emergency or helping applications. But helping is a complex psycho-social process. This has important implications for the UI design of such applications. In our research, we tested the effect of a victim’s facial expression (sad vs. happy) on a potential helper’s willingness to help in an online scenario. We further investigated, how the facial expression interacts with another well researched social phenomenon: the bystander effect. The results of this early research were mostly not as expected, but reveal interesting insights that are discussed and that open an exciting research avenue with important practical implications when it comes to the design of digital helping systems.