Trustworthiness Perception in the Absence of Any Persons
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: People rely on their perception of a person’s trustworthiness to make important social decisions. Consequently, the misperception of trustworthiness may lead to undesirable outcomes. Trustworthiness perception has been widely studied with unnatural and static faces, however, people must also consider contextual information when making social inferences. In this study, we investigated the importance of context in trustworthiness judgments by having 124 observers continuously rate the perceived trustworthiness of a blurred-out (invisible) target character in 12 videos. We found that contextual and facial cues contribute similar amounts of information to trustworthiness judgments (~20% variance explained), however, observers can better infer others’ trustworthiness (t(80) = -3.40, p = 0.001) and agree more with each other (t(80) = -592.56, p < 0.001) when using contextual information than face and body information. Our findings highlight the importance of using contextual information when inferring the trustworthiness of others.
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7164052316