Viewing men's faces does not lead to accurate predictions of trustworthiness

Abstract

The evolution of cooperation requires some mechanism that reduces the risk of exploitation for cooperative individuals. Recent studies have shown that men with wide faces are anti-social, and they are perceived that way by others. This suggests that people could use facial width to identify anti-social men and thus limit the risk of exploitation. To see if people can make accurate inferences like this, we conducted a two-part experiment. First, males played a sequential social dilemma, and we took photographs of their faces. Second, raters then viewed these photographs and guessed how second movers behaved. Raters achieved significant accuracy by guessing that second movers exhibited reciprocal behaviour. Raters were not able to use the photographs to further improve accuracy. Indeed, some raters used the photographs to their detriment; they could have potentially achieved greater accuracy and earned more money by ignoring the photographs and assuming all second movers reciprocate.