Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia;
School of Psychology, King's College, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, AB24 3FX, Scotland.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 May 12;117(19):10218-10224. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1920131117. Epub 2020 Apr 27.
People evaluate a stranger's trustworthiness from their facial features in a fraction of a second, despite common advice "not to judge a book by its cover." Evaluations of trustworthiness have critical and widespread social impact, predicting financial lending, mate selection, and even criminal justice outcomes. Consequently, understanding how people perceive trustworthiness from faces has been a major focus of scientific inquiry, and detailed models explain how consensus impressions of trustworthiness are driven by facial attributes. However, facial impression models do not consider variation between observers. Here, we develop a sensitive test of trustworthiness evaluation and use it to document substantial, stable individual differences in trustworthiness impressions. Via a twin study, we show that these individual differences are largely shaped by variation in personal experience, rather than genes or shared environments. Finally, using multivariate twin modeling, we show that variation in trustworthiness evaluation is specific, dissociating from other key facial evaluations of dominance and attractiveness. Our finding that variation in facial trustworthiness evaluation is driven mostly by personal experience represents a rare example of a core social perceptual capacity being predominantly shaped by a person's unique environment. Notably, it stands in sharp contrast to variation in facial recognition ability, which is driven mostly by genes. Our study provides insights into the development of the social brain, offers a different perspective on disagreement in trust in wider society, and motivates new research into the origins and potential malleability of face evaluation, a critical aspect of human social cognition.
尽管有“不要以貌取人”的普遍建议，但人们会在一瞬间通过面部特征来评估陌生人的可信度。可信度的评估对社会具有重要而广泛的影响，它可以预测金融借贷、伴侣选择，甚至刑事司法结果。因此，了解人们如何通过面部来感知可信度一直是科学研究的重点，详细的模型解释了信任印象是如何受到面部特征的驱动。然而，面部印象模型并没有考虑到观察者之间的差异。在这里，我们开发了一种对可信度评估的敏感测试，并利用它来记录可信度印象中存在的大量、稳定的个体差异。通过一项双胞胎研究，我们表明这些个体差异主要是由个人经历的变化塑造的，而不是由基因或共同环境决定的。最后，通过多元双胞胎模型分析，我们发现可信度评估的变化是特定的，与其他关键的面部评估（如支配力和吸引力）是分离的。我们的发现表明，面部可信度评估的变化主要是由个人经历驱动的，这代表了一种罕见的情况，即核心社会感知能力主要是由一个人的独特环境塑造的。值得注意的是，这与面部识别能力的变化形成鲜明对比，后者主要是由基因驱动的。我们的研究为社会大脑的发展提供了新的见解，为更广泛的社会中对信任的分歧提供了新的视角，并激发了对脸的评价的起源和潜在可塑性的研究，这是人类社会认知的一个关键方面。
