Do we spontaneously form stable trustworthiness impressions from facial appearance

Bibliographic Data

ID6204594
AuthorsAndré Klapper (0000-0003-0731-6844, Radboud University Nijmegen, corresponding author), Ron Dotsch (0000-0002-3429-660X, Radboud University Nijmegen), Iris Van Rooij (0000-0001-6520-4635, Radboud University Nijmegen), Daniël Wigboldus (0000-0002-5138-1574, Radboud University Nijmegen), Daniël H J Wigboldus
Year2016
Volume111
Issue5
Pages655-664
Publication date2016-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Personality and Social Psychology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-3514 • E-ISSN: 1939-1315
PublisherAmerican Psychological Association (APA) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1037/pspa0000062
PMID27762574
OpenAlexW2533461258
LanguageEN
Citations received23
References cited19

It is widely assumed among psychologists that people spontaneously form trustworthiness impressions of newly encountered people from their facial appearance. However, most existing studies directly or indirectly induced an impression formation goal, which means that the existing empirical support for spontaneous facial trustworthiness impressions remains insufficient. In particular, it remains an open question whether trustworthiness from facial appearance is encoded in memory. Using the 'who said what' paradigm, we indirectly measured to what extent people encoded the trustworthiness of observed faces. The results of 4 studies demonstrated a reliable tendency toward trustworthiness encoding. This was shown under conditions of varying context-relevance, and salience of trustworthiness. Moreover, evidence for this tendency was obtained using both (experimentally controlled) artificial and (naturalistic varying) real faces. Taken together, these results suggest that there is a spontaneous tendency to form relatively stable trustworthiness impressions from facial appearance, which is relatively independent of the context. As such, our results further underline how widespread influences of facial trustworthiness may be in our everyday life. (PsycINFO Database Record

Cognitive psychology · Context (archaeology) · Face perception · Facial expression · Impression formation · MEDLINE · Perception · PsycINFO · Salience (neuroscience) · Social perception · Trustworthiness · Communication · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Face Recognition and Perception · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Social Psychology

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