Abstract : In social interactions, humans care about knowing their partner’s face. Some experiments report that facial information facilitates trustworthiness detection, while others find it does not. We add to this literature by exploring heterogeneity in the demand for, and in the usefulness of, facial information. The incentivized experimental task consists in predicting strangers’ trustworthiness from neutral portrait pictures. Data from two independent sets of stimuli and two distinct sources of predictions show substantial heterogeneity in facial informativeness. However, we find that trustworthiness detection from facial information is not an ability. Nonetheless, individuals assign excessive value to receiving facial information about others.
WP with Zakaria Babutsidze, Nobuyuki Hanaki, Astrid Hopfensitz
Photo credit: Personal website
