International Law

Judging Reputation

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Here is a very tall claim by reported by the BPS Research Digest:

"It takes just a tenth of a second for people to make judgements about you based on your facial appearance.

Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov asked university students to rate the attractiveness, likeability, competence, trustworthiness, and aggressiveness of actors' faces after looking at their photos for just 100ms.

The ratings they gave the faces correlated strongly with ratings given by other students who were allowed as long as they wanted to rate the faces.

The strongest correlation was for trustworthiness. "Maybe as soon as a face is there, you know whether to trust it", the researchers surmised."

Here is the link to the article on trustworthiness and face recognition.

But do you believe this?  I could stare at a face all day and not know anything more about whether the person was trust worthy if I only looked for 10 seconds.

What extra information could I possibly get?  If there is no information about reputation to begin with, and people simply anchor on a answer, why would we think giving them extra time to investigate the nothingness is going to change matters.

The researchers are not saying something like people can objectively determine a property in very short order - that would be amazing.

What they are saying is that people don't change their minds about their instant impressions - which is amazing, but for a completely different reason.

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on July 30, 2008 (boomark / email).