You Look Like Someone I Can Trust!
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It seems that my mother was not alone in trusting strangers. In a January 29, 2018 post entitled This Is Why You Trust Some strangers and Not Others, Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer at LiveScience.com, notes that researchers have found that our ability to trust strangers depends on how much they resemble others that we know to be trustworthy or not so trustworthy. (Id.) In short, it is an “appearance” bias that operates like the Pavlovian response we all learned about in school. If a stranger even minimally resembles someone we do not trust, we will unconsciously not trust the stranger even though we know nothing about her.
Based on this experiment, the researchers concluded that we make decisions about whether we can trust a stranger solely based on whether they look like someone we know and trust or someone we know and distrust. This is so, even though we have no direct or indirect information about the person before asking them to do us a favor and “watch” our stuff while we are waiting at an airport gate to board a plane and want to go to the restroom or grab a coffee. (Id.) As the article concludes, it seems that our past experiences embedded deep into our unconscious guides the choices we make in the future; to trust someone we do not even know to watch “our stuff” or in my mother’s case, my older sister.
A moment’s reflection will reveal that this “appearance” bias plays out in resolving disputes. If the other side resembles someone from our past that we deemed trustworthy, no doubt the matter will be more easily settled. In contrast, if the other side reminds us of a “scoundrel” from our past, we will unwittingly and unconsciously, not trust a word she says, making any settlement more difficult. In sum, appearances do matter… in more ways than we realize!
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