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The Many Faces of Trustworthiness: Accuracy and Inaccuracy in Predicting Deception from Facial Appearance

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Abstract

People frequently need to decide whether to trust others. Though a robust literature has documented how accurately people can detect deception, less work has examined the accuracy of impressions of dispositional deceptive tendencies. Research has begun to address whether indirect cues, such as facial appearance, can predict people’s deceptive behavior. The answer is unclear, and results from different domains have been mixed. Because inferences about others’ trustworthiness influence life outcomes, it is vital to understand the circumstances in which deception is accurately perceived. In this chapter, we aim to clarify distinctions between deceptive versus nondeceptive untrustworthy behaviors that can be detected from the face. We hope that this review will foster better hypotheses about the specific cues that predict deceptive behavior.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, USA

    John Paul Wilson

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Nicholas O. Rule

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Correspondence to John Paul Wilson .

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  1. Department of Communication Studies, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI, USA

    Tony Docan-Morgan

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Wilson, J.P., Rule, N.O. (2019). The Many Faces of Trustworthiness: Accuracy and Inaccuracy in Predicting Deception from Facial Appearance. In: Docan-Morgan, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Deceptive Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96334-1_22

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