Looks Overshadow Reputation When Deciding Who To Trust

LiveScience:

When faced with a decision of who to trust with money, people will often choose the face that looks the most trustworthy, shunning those who they deem look sketchy.

Interestingly, a new study shows that the person’s track record doesn’t impact this choice — people will still choose the most trustworthy face, even if they are told that the owner of that face has a bad reputation.

“The temptation to judge strangers by their faces is hard to resist. Trustworthiness is one of the most important traits for social and economic interactions and our study examines whether people take potentially costly actions in line with their face-based trustworthiness judgments,” study researcher Chris Olivola, of the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. “It seems we are still willing to go with our own instincts about whether we think someone looks like we can trust them.”

How trustworthy a person looks is determined by the width of their faces, a study published in March of 2010 in the journal Psychological Science showed. Those with wider faces are perceived as less trustworthy, while people with narrower faces are seen as more trustworthy. This was also backed up by more recent work, published in July of 2011, which indicates that these wide-faced people act unethical.

Read the whole story: LiveScience