Abstract
People form the first impression of trustworthiness mainly based on face when interacting with strangers. Majority of facial trustworthiness judgment tasks used in the laboratory present one face only. In real life interaction, a face usually appears in certain contexts, such as different scenes or accompanied by others. Very few studies have investigated the effect of social contexts on trustworthiness judgments. The current work examined the influence of a simultaneously presented face as a context on trustworthiness judgment of a target face. The pre-rated neutral-looking faces served the target faces that was either paired by a neutral-looking face or presented alone in Experiment 1 (N = 33). No contextual effect was found except for one condition where a male face was paired by another male face. Experiment 2 (N = 36) manipulated the trustworthiness of the context face. The results showed that the neutral-looking faces were rated more trustworthy when paired by an untrustworthy-looking face than by a neutral- or trustworthy-looking face. Experiment 3 (N = 36) replicated the results of Experiment 2 via manipulating both the trustworthiness of target and context faces. Across three experiments, we found a contrast effect of an untrustworthy context. The current findings provided new evidence for the development of theories on the effects of social context on perceived trustworthiness. A different explanation was discussed.
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The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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This work is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China (Grant number: 19XNB033).
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Both authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Xuemei Yu. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Yongna Li and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China (Date: September 7th, 2020/No. 20–027).
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Li, Y., Yu, X. Effects of social context on facial trustworthiness judgments. Curr Psychol 42, 31216–31226 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-04143-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-04143-2