Not to follow because of distrust: perceived trust modulates the gaze cueing effect

In social life, people spontaneously form stable trustworthiness impressions from faces. However, the precise role of extracting trustworthiness information remains unclear. This study aims to elucidate whether discerning facial trustworthiness influences social interactions. Specifically, it explores the gaze cueing effect (GCE), wherein individuals exhibit quicker responses to targets appearing in the direction of gaze compared to other locations. Given conflicting perspectives in existing literature regarding the potential modulation of trustworthiness on the GCE, two plausible hypotheses are proposed to explain divergent result patterns. The reflexive hypothesis posits that the GCE operates automatically. In contrast, the flexible hypothesis underscores the potential modulatory role of trustworthiness in the GCE. To provide a comprehensive understanding of whether trustworthiness modulates the GCE, we employed face stimuli incorporating trustworthiness information within Posner' s cue-target task. The findings of Experiment 1 revealed that the perception of trustworthiness indeed influenced the GCE. Specifically, when facial stimuli were perceived as trustworthy, they elicited a more pronounced GCE compared to untrustworthy stimuli. This modulation effect was replicated using a different stimulus set in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, we employed the same stimuli as in Experiment 2, setting the trustworthiness information to baseline as a control experiment. The results demonstrated that the trustworthiness modulation effect disappeared, indicating its specificity to the trustworthiness attribute of the stimuli rather than other characteristics. Collectively, these findings lend support to the flexible hypothesis, highlighting that the extraction of trustworthiness information plays a pivotal role in modulating the GCE, consequently influencing social interactions.