2012/06/11 by Jean-François Bonnefon, Jean‐François Bonnefon, Astrid Hopfensitz +1 · 125 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Cognitive psychology #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #Facilitator #Psychology #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Social psychology #Trustworthiness
paper · doi:10.1037/a0028930
published in Journal of Experimental Psychology General 142(1), 143-150 (American Psychological Association)
openalex publication_date 2012/06/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The capacity to trust wisely is a critical facilitator of success and prosperity, and it has been conjectured that people of higher intelligence are better able to detect signs of untrustworthiness from potential partners. In contrast, this article reports five trust game studies suggesting that reading trustworthiness of the faces of strangers is a modular process. Trustworthiness detection from faces is independent of general intelligence (Study 1) and effortless (Study 2). Pictures that include nonfacial features such as hair and clothing impair trustworthiness detection (Study 3) by increasing reliance on conscious judgments (Study 4), but people largely prefer to make decisions from this sort of pictures (Study 5). In sum, trustworthiness detection in an economic interaction is a genuine and effortless ability, possessed in equal amount by people of all cognitive capacities, but whose impenetrability leads to inaccurate conscious judgments and inappropriate informational preferences.