Peng Junning, Isoni Andrea, Luckman Ashley, Zeitoun Hossam, Vlaev Ivo, Eubanks Dawn, Read Daniel
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom.
University of Exeter Business School, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2025 Sep 12;20(9):e0331918. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0331918. eCollection 2025.
Face coverings can potentially impact how trustworthy someone appears through two channels: by hiding important facial cues associated with trust; or by signalling the wearer's intentions or personal characteristics. The facemasks widely adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic both obscured the face and were associated with pro-social attitudes or intentions. The goal of this paper is to investigate how facemasks impact judgments about the trustworthiness of the wearer, and whether this would affect interactions with others. We report three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 examined decisions in a two-player trust game when participants interacted with a single masked or unmasked counterpart. Experiment 3 explored whether participants were more likely to trust a masked or an unmasked person in a straight choice between them. In all experiments, masked faces were judged more trustworthy than unmasked ones. While in Experiments 1 and 2 this was not reflected in trust behaviour, in Experiment 3 over 70% of participants chose to trust the masked person, a decision predicted by the difference in perceived trustworthiness between the masked and unmasked counterparts. This suggests that in settings where facemasks or similar trust related cues are more salient, such as in joint evaluation, they can lead to enhanced trust.
一是隐藏与信任相关的重要面部线索；二是传达佩戴者的意图或个人特征。在新冠疫情期间广泛使用的口罩既遮挡了面部，又与亲社会态度或意图相关联。本文的目的是研究口罩如何影响对佩戴者可信度的判断，以及这是否会影响与他人的互动。我们报告了三项实验。实验1和实验2考察了在两人信任博弈中，参与者与一个戴口罩或不戴口罩的对手互动时的决策情况。实验3探究了在直接选择中，参与者是否更有可能信任戴口罩的人还是不戴口罩的人。在所有实验中，戴口罩的面孔被认为比不戴口罩的面孔更值得信任。虽然在实验1和实验2中，这一点并未在信任行为中体现出来，但在实验3中，超过70%的参与者选择信任戴口罩的人，这一决策是由戴口罩和不戴口罩的对手在感知可信度上的差异所预测的。这表明，在口罩或类似与信任相关的线索更为突出的情境中，比如在联合评估中，它们会导致信任增强。
