We have all heard that how we appear matters: that people judge us by our appearance without even realizing it. People will look at our faces and based on what they perceive unconsciously, will decide whether we are trustworthy.
A recent study confirms this link between appearance and trustworthiness. In the July 25, 2015 edition of The Economist (and reported on other websites as well), the author of “Looks Could Kill” reports on a study by John Wilson and Nicholas Rule, psychologists at the University of Toronto, published in the July 2015 issue of Psychological Science that concludes that people really do decide quite quickly how trustworthy is a stranger based on what her face looks like.
In their Psychological Science article, “Facial Trustworthiness Predicts Extreme Criminal-Sentencing Outcomes”, Wilson and Rule describe their study in which they used photos of 371 male inmates as the object of their experiment. As explained in Science Daily:
