TY - JOUR
T1 - Individual differences in trust evaluations are shaped mostly by environments, not genes
AU - Sutherland, Clare A. M.
AU - Burton, Nichola S.
AU - Wilmer, Jeremy B.
AU - Blokland, Gabriella A. M.
AU - Germine, Laura
AU - Palermo, Romina
AU - Collova, Jemma R.
AU - Rhodes, Gillian
N1 - Funding Information:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. This research was supported by Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Research Award DE190101043 (to C.A.M.S.), ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders Award CE110001021 (to G.R. and R.P.), and ARC Discovery Award DP170104602 (to G.R., C.A.M.S., and R.P.). We thank the staff at Twins Research Australia for their help with twin recruitment; staff at Testable for their help with data collection software; Scott Brindley, Jacob Hackett, and Joel Gray for help with pilot testing; and Neil Macrae for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/5/12
Y1 - 2020/5/12
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - trust
KW - face evaluation
KW - first impressions
KW - behavioral genetics
KW - classical twin design
KW - FACIAL 1ST IMPRESSIONS
KW - SOCIAL ATTRIBUTIONS
KW - FACE RECOGNITION
KW - INFERENCES
KW - JUDGMENTS
KW - UNIQUE
U2 - 10.1073/pnas.1920131117
DO - 10.1073/pnas.1920131117
M3 - Article
C2 - 32341163
SN - 0027-8424
VL - 117
SP - 10218
EP - 10224
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
IS - 19
ER -