Culture-free perceptual invariant for trustworthiness

Humans beings decide to trust others selectively, often based on the appearance of a face. But how do observers deal with the wide variety of facial morphologies and, in particular, those outside their own familiar cultural group? Using reverse correlation, a data-driven approach to explore how indi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2022-02, Vol.17 (2), p.e0263348
Main Authors: Mo, Ce, Cristofori, Irene, Lio, Guillaume, Gomez, Alice, Duhamel, Jean-René, Qu, Chen, Sirigu, Angela
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Asian People
Attraction
Autism
Biology and Life Sciences
Cognitive science
Cross-Cultural Comparison
Culture
Demographic aspects
Engineering and Technology
Face
Face - anatomy & histology
Female
Humans
Hypotheses
Male
Medicine and Health Sciences
Noise
People and Places
Social aspects
Social Sciences
Trust
Trust - psychology
Trustworthiness
Young Adult
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Summary:Humans beings decide to trust others selectively, often based on the appearance of a face. But how do observers deal with the wide variety of facial morphologies and, in particular, those outside their own familiar cultural group? Using reverse correlation, a data-driven approach to explore how individuals create internal representations without external biases, we studied the generation of trustworthy faces by French and Chinese participants (N = 160) within and outside their own cultural group. Participants selected the most trustworthy or attractive (control condition) face from two identical European or Asian descent faces that had been modified by different noise masks. A conjunction analysis to reveal facial features common to both cultures showed that Chinese and French participants unconsciously increased the contrast of the "pupil-iris area" to make the face appear more trustworthy. No significant effects common to both groups were found for the attraction condition suggesting that attraction judgements are dependent on cultural processes. These results suggest the presence of universal cross-cultural mechanisms for the construction of implicit first impressions of trust, and highlight the importance of the eyes area in this process.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0263348