Do we spontaneously form stable trustworthiness impressions from facial appearance?

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Person Perception

Background:

• Psychologists widely assume spontaneous facial trustworthiness impressions.
• Existing research often induces impression formation goals, limiting evidence for spontaneous processes.
• It's unclear if facial trustworthiness is encoded in memory.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate spontaneous trustworthiness impression formation from facial appearance.
• To determine if trustworthiness impressions are encoded in memory.
• To assess the context-dependency of facial trustworthiness encoding.

Main Methods:

• Employed the 'who said what' paradigm to indirectly measure trustworthiness encoding.
• Conducted four studies using artificial and naturalistic faces.
• Varied context-relevance and trustworthiness salience.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated a reliable tendency for spontaneous trustworthiness encoding from faces.
• Encoding occurred regardless of context-relevance or trustworthiness salience.
• Evidence obtained with both artificial and real faces.

Conclusions:

• Suggests a spontaneous and relatively stable tendency to form trustworthiness impressions from facial appearance.
• This impression formation is largely independent of context.
• Facial trustworthiness significantly influences everyday social interactions.