Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University.
Department of Psychology, Utrecht University.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2016 Nov;111(5):655-664. doi: 10.1037/pspa0000062.
It is widely assumed among psychologists that people spontaneously form trustworthiness impressions of newly encountered people from their facial appearance. However, most existing studies directly or indirectly induced an impression formation goal, which means that the existing empirical support for spontaneous facial trustworthiness impressions remains insufficient. In particular, it remains an open question whether trustworthiness from facial appearance is encoded in memory. Using the 'who said what' paradigm, we indirectly measured to what extent people encoded the trustworthiness of observed faces. The results of 4 studies demonstrated a reliable tendency toward trustworthiness encoding. This was shown under conditions of varying context-relevance, and salience of trustworthiness. Moreover, evidence for this tendency was obtained using both (experimentally controlled) artificial and (naturalistic varying) real faces. Taken together, these results suggest that there is a spontaneous tendency to form relatively stable trustworthiness impressions from facial appearance, which is relatively independent of the context. As such, our results further underline how widespread influences of facial trustworthiness may be in our everyday life. (PsycINFO Database Record
心理学家普遍认为,人们会根据新遇到的人的面部表情自发地形成可信赖的印象。然而,大多数现有研究直接或间接地诱导了印象形成的目标,这意味着现有的关于面部可信度的实证支持仍然不足。特别是,面部外观的可信度是否被编码在记忆中仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。我们使用“谁说了什么”的范式,间接地测量了人们对观察到的面部的可信度的编码程度。四项研究的结果显示出对可信度编码的可靠倾向。这在信任度的语境相关性和显著性不同的情况下得到了证明。此外,使用(实验控制的)人工面孔和(自然变化的)真实面孔都获得了这种趋势的证据。总的来说,这些结果表明,从面部表情自发地形成相对稳定的可信度印象是一种普遍存在的倾向,这种倾向相对独立于语境。因此,我们的结果进一步强调了面部可信度在我们日常生活中的广泛影响。