Casting a Wary Eye: Individuals Higher in Dispositional Distrust Demonstrate More Accurate Discrimination of Trustworthy and Untrustworthy Faces

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-1-2017

School

Psychology

Abstract

Past research demonstrates that individuals are relatively accurate at discriminating trustworthiness from untrustworthiness utilizing facial cues alone, and that this capacity is augmented for those with activated self-protection threat concerns. In the current study, we predicted that individuals who are dispositionally more wary of trusting others (those scoring high in dispositional distrust) would be more accurate at discriminating trustworthy from untrustworthy faces. Participants viewed a series of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces and indicated whether each target was trustworthy or untrustworthy; participants then completed a general distrust inventory. Consistent with predictions, those higher in dispositional distrust demonstrated more accurate discrimination of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces. Additionally, higher dispositional distrust was associated with a higher criterion for reporting targets as trustworthy. Interestingly, the higher discriminability and criterion of more distrustful individuals seemed to be driven by a tendency to make fewer false alarms (i.e., decisions to categorize an untrustworthy face as trustworthy), but not at the expense of fewer hits (i.e., decisions to categorize a trustworthy face as such). Despite the necessity of trust for social affiliation, these results suggest greater dispositional distrust may facilitate the identification of favorable conspecifics for social exchange and poor social exchange partners to be avoided.

Publication Title

Evolutionary Psychological Science

Volume

3

Issue

1

First Page

34

Last Page

39

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