02/22/2023

Health diary editor

Judging reliability

We cannot judge a person’s trustworthiness just by looking at their appearance.

Many people claim that they can gauge a person’s credibility just by sitting down at the negotiating table. This would be a really valuable skill.

But how often do these people get their assessments of each other right?

Not often.

Using decisions made in experimental trust games, professors Rick Wilson (Rice University) and Katherine Eckel (Texas A&M University) asked several volunteers to look at pictures of decision-makers and guess their levels of trustworthiness.

Even when the researchers offered cash prizes for correct guesses, the volunteers showed significantly less accuracy in their judgments.

“We found that volunteers were influenced by stereotypes based on characteristics seen in the photos, including gender, skin color, or attractiveness,” Wilson said. “Our results revealed that people deceive themselves when they think they can predict reliability by appearance alone.”

Even world leaders gave speeches about the credibility of other heads of state after the protocol meeting. But researchers are skeptical about the validity of these assessments.

The researchers concluded that “although people are confident in their ability to read other people’s faces quickly, they are rarely better than chance.”