Perception of Facial Trustworthiness

Through a trustworthiness rating task and an investment task, we assessed trust ratings, investment amount (trust behavior), and investment income (trust expectation) based on the presentation of full faces, top halves, and bottom halves of faces with low, moderate, or high initial trustworthiness levels.

Results indicate that trustworthiness judgments can be made from partial facial information, with the top half of the face providing more discriminative cues than the bottom half. Both top and bottom halves significantly contribute to overall trust judgments, accounting for approximately 80% of the variance in full-face trust assessments.