Persistent Reliance on Facial Appearance Among Older Adults When Judging Someone's Trustworthiness

When judging someone's trustworthiness, facial appearance is a salient but nondiagnostic cue. Such judgments should ideally be based on the memory of that person's past behaviors during social interaction. Aging may impair memory-based decision making, predicting an age-related decline in individuals' adjustment of trustworthiness judgment using such behavioral information. However, aging may also facilitate the use of diagnostic information for social inference, predicting an age-related improvement. I tested these competing predictions to obtain insight into the effects of aging on fraud victimization.

Thirty-six older adults (OAs) and 36 younger adults (YAs) played four rounds of a trust game wherein they were the truster and had to learn the distinction between "good" and "bad" trustees who always cooperated with and cheated participants, respectively. The trustee's facial appearance (trustworthy- and untrustworthy looking) and character (good and bad) were manipulated orthogonally.

A memory test of the trustees' characters revealed that even after four rounds of the game, OAs, but not YAs, were biased to guess that trustworthy-looking persons were good trustees.

Persistent reliance on facial trustworthiness could increase one's risk of repeated fraud victimization among OAs, because fraudulent people can pretend to look trustworthy to acquire another's trust.