Neville Chamberlain famously remarked after meeting with Adolf Hitler that he was a man of his word. 60 or so years later, George W. Bush made similar remarks after meeting with Vladimir Putin. Both demonstrate our willingness to ascribe trustworthiness to those we meet based on largely cosmetic, gut feelings.

Such apparent ability has obvious merit in a negotiation setting, but research from Rice University suggests that it may not have a great deal of merit behind it.

Reading faces

The researchers used decisions made in experimental trust games from previous academic studies and asked subjects to view photos of the individuals who made those decisions and guess their trustworthiness. Despite being motivated by the potential to be paid for correct guesses, the subjects had low accuracy.

Our general inability to accurately gauge the personalities of the faces we observe is likely to be tied to certain, distinctive characteristics of the human face.

“We found that subjects were influenced by stereotypes based on the features seen in the photos, including gender, skin color or attractiveness,” the researchers explain. “Our results revealed that people are fooling themselves when they think they can predict trustworthiness from appearance alone.”

As a result, when people claim that they’re able to judge whether someone is trustworthy or not having met face-to-face, we should probably view those claims with a healthy dope of skepticism.

“While people are confident in their ability to quickly read the faces of others, they rarely do better than chance,” the researchers conclude.