Facial trustworthiness judgments: Attractiveness effect and consensus with others

A total of 677 Chinese participants—237 children (age 9–11), 262 adolescents (age 12–14), and 178 adults (age 18–53)—rated 52 Chinese adult faces on trustworthiness and attractiveness. The face stimuli, selected from the Tsinghua Facial Expression Database, include young and older men and women.

Through a pilot study, only faces with trustworthiness and attractiveness ratings within ±1 SD of the group mean were retained, avoiding ceiling/floor effects.The data contain raw ratings, participant demographics (age, gender, grade), facial characteristics (age, gender), and derived variables such as cluster‑mean centered predictors and effect‑coded categorical variables. The dataset is designed for hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to examine how the influence of facial attractiveness on trustworthiness judgments changes with age, and how consensus within age groups and between children and adults (i.e., shared social reality) develops across age.