By The Jury Room, December 12, 2016
This post has been viewed 3,405 times.
If you try to identify what it is that makes someone trustworthy, you might list their forthrightness, values consistent with your own, or even their willingness to embrace unpopular positions. And that is all well and good but it likely is untrue. Instead, researchers tell us, we draw “relatively stable trustworthinesss impressions from facial appearance”.
Apparently, based on the photo illustrating this post (taken from the research article) we define trust as having less prominent eyebrows and jawlines, softer lips and slightly narrower noses. Overall, a softer appearance. The more “trustworthy” photos in the left column look younger, with less prominent brows and generally more traditionally feminine than the “untrustworthy” photos in the right column. But this is merely how they strike us— we should point out the researchers described the more trustworthy faces as neutral, neither masculine nor feminine.
