Rezlescu, C., Duchaine, B., Olivola, C. Y., & Chater, N. (2012). Unfakeable Facial Configurations Affect Strategic Choices in Trust Games with or without Information about Past Behavior. PLoS ONE, 7(3).
Rezlescu, C., Duchaine, B., Olivola, C. Y., & Chater, N. (2012). Unfakeable Facial Configurations Affect Strategic Choices in Trust Games with or without Information about Past Behavior. PLoS ONE, 7(3).
Stirrat, M., & Perrett, D. I. (2010). Valid Facial Cues to Cooperation and Trust: Male Facial Width and Trustworthiness. Psychological Science, 21(3), 349-354.
The following study uses neutral faces from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Face set; subjects judged trustworthiness, and the authors looked at consensus ratings as well as individual trait judgments.
Engell, A. D., Haxby, J. V., & Todorov, A. (2007). Implicit trustworthiness decisions: automatic coding of face properties in the human amygdala. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19(9), 1508-1519.
Thank you so much, Alexandra! But I have to reformulate my question: I am less interested in the neuronal correlates of trustworthiness but more in the accuracy of the rating, e.g. are participants able to judge fairness or trustworthiness of others. For example there is evidence that people can judge personality traits of others based on photographs:
Penton-Voak, I. S., Pound, N., Little, A. C., & Perrett, D. I. (2006). Personality Judgments from Natural and Composite Facial Images: More Evidence For A “Kernel Of Truth” In Social Perception. Social Cognition, 24(5), 607-640. doi: 10.1521/soco.2006.24.5.607
For example this study is going in the right direction:
Porter, S., England, L., Juodis, M., ten Brinke, L., & Wilson, K. (2008). Is the face a window to the soul? Investigation of the accuracy of intuitive judgments of the trustworthiness of human faces. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science/Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement, 40(3), 171-177. doi: 10.1037/0008-400X.40.3.171
...but I would be interested in in correlations between other's rating of trustworthiness and actural trust behavior or cooperation. Are you aware of any studies?
Rezlescu, C., Duchaine, B., Olivola, C. Y., & Chater, N. (2012). Unfakeable Facial Configurations Affect Strategic Choices in Trust Games with or without Information about Past Behavior. PLoS ONE, 7(3).
Rezlescu, C., Duchaine, B., Olivola, C. Y., & Chater, N. (2012). Unfakeable Facial Configurations Affect Strategic Choices in Trust Games with or without Information about Past Behavior. PLoS ONE, 7(3).
Stirrat, M., & Perrett, D. I. (2010). Valid Facial Cues to Cooperation and Trust: Male Facial Width and Trustworthiness. Psychological Science, 21(3), 349-354.
We recently conducted a study that shows that subjects do use facial cues to make inferences about a partner´s trustworthiness in the context of a standard trust game, but that this is not at all predictive of the actual pro-social behavior of the person that was judged. This effect remains, even if such trustworthiness judgments are incentivized. Specifically, we asked our subjects to predict backtransfer rates of trustees based on trustee photographs and payed our subjects based on the accuracy of their predictions. Despite their payment depending on their judgments, subjects were unable to accurately predict pro-sociality from facial cues. An abstract of this study can be found here:
To my knowledge, there are two major research groups focussing on the question of inferring trustworthiness from faces: Alexander Todorov, Princeton University, and David Ian Perrett, University of St. Andrews (it seems most of the papers recommended above are also from these groups, or affiliated labs). Maybe directly assessing the publication list of these two groups on their homepage would be useful for you.
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The earlier studies of the Todorov group published a lot on trustworthiness, from which I find the following summary review most useful:
Todorov, A. (2008). Evaluating Faces on Trustworthiness: An Extension of Systems for Recognition of Emotions Signaling Approach/Avoidance Behaviors. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1124: 208–224.
The most recent studies published on this topic seem to ask the question whether trustworthiness judgments made by children (with comparably less social experience) are also accurate, and whether these judgments also hold across faces from different ethnicities (cross-cultural studies):
Cogsdill, E.J., Todorov, A.T., Spelke, E.S., Banaji, M.R. (2014). Inferring Character From Faces: A Developmental Study. Psychological Science, 25(5).
Ewing, L., Caulfield, F., Read, A., Rhodes, G. (2014). Perceived trustworthiness of faces drives trust behaviour in children. Developmental Science, DOI: 10.1111/desc.12218
Birkás, B., Dzhelyova, M., Lábadi, B., Bereczkei, T., Perrett, D.I. (2014). Cross-cultural perception of trustworthiness: The effect of ethnicity features on evaluation of faces’ observed trustworthiness across four samples. Personality and Individual Differences, 69: 56-61.
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Your question of "correlations between other's rating of trustworthiness and actural trust behavior or cooperation" seems to be definitely a hot question these days (there seem to be a few people working on this question). Here is one study which tried to link both using a Trust Game:
Chang, L.J., Doll, B.B., van 't Wout, M., Frank, M.J., Sanfey, A.G. (2010). Seeing is believing: Trustworthiness as a dynamic belief. Cognitive Psychology, 61(2): 87-105.
This paper is from Alan Sanfey's group, and one of their focus is also the question of "actual trust behavior or cooperation". Other major groups working on this question are Ernst Fehr's Group in Zurich (more game-theoretical, economical), and David Rand's Group in Yale (the rising star in this field!). But research focussing on actual cooperative behavior is growing really fast, and I am sure there are lots of other groups working on this topic as well.
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In our group, we tried to link "actual trust behavior or cooperation" not directly to facial cues, but body movement cues. Work is still in progress. Here you can find an abstract:
Olivola, C. Y., & Todorov, A. (2010). Fooled by first impressions? Reexamining the diagnostic value of appearance-based inferences. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 315-324.
Verplaetse, J., Vanneste, S., & Braeckman, J. (2007). You can judge a book by its cover: The sequel. A kernel of truth in predictive cheating detection. Evolution and Human Behavior, 28, 260-271.
Thank you so much Jan and Raoul and especially Dong-Seon for this comprehensive overview. It is great from how many perspectives the question is adressed, whether we are able to judge trustworthiness from simple static pictures of neutral face expressions. Of course it is crucial to understand the exact nature of positive findings. This is why studies with large sample sizes investigating the diagnostic validity of appearance-based inferences (Olivola & Todorov, 2010) are very important.