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My purpose in this study was to evaluate the role of photographs in online peer-to-peer lending behavior. I recruited 92 college students to rate trustworthiness or emotion by viewing the photographs of borrowers on a peer-to-peer lending platform. Following this, I showed 209 college students an advertisement with a photograph and asked how much money they would be willing to lend the person in the photograph. The lending amount was higher for advertisements with a photograph rated trustworthy than for a photograph rated untrustworthy, and higher for advertisements with a photograph rated happy than for a photograph rated sad. These results indicate that judgments of both trustworthiness and happiness as perceived in photographs play an important role in lending behaviors.
Xiaolan Yang (Tue,) studied this question.