You trust a face like yours

Abstract

AbstractThe appraisal of trustworthiness from facial appearance of a stranger is critical for successful social interaction. Although self-resemblance is considered a significant factor affecting the perception of trustworthiness, research is yet to be conducted on whether this theory is applicable to natural unfamiliar faces in real life. We examined this aspect by using a state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network for face recognition to measure the facial similarity of a large sample of people with the evaluators. We found that the more they resembled the rater, the more trustworthy they were evaluated if they were of the same sex as the rater. Contrarily, when the stranger was of the opposite sex, self-resemblance did not affect trustworthiness ratings. These results demonstrate that self-resemblance is an important factor affecting our social judgments of especially same-sex people in real life.