Detecting trustworthiness in strangers: human faces vary in their informativeness, but cannot be accurately judged

Adam Zylbersztejn, Zakaria Babutsidze, Nobuyuki Hanaki and Astrid Hopfensitz
Additional contact information
Adam Zylbersztejn: GATE Lyon Saint-Étienne - Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon - Saint-Etienne - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - UJM - Université Jean Monnet - Saint-Étienne - UJM EPE - Université Jean Monnet (EPSCPE) - EM - EMLyon Business School - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Zakaria Babutsidze: SKEMA Business School (France, Lille) - SKEMA BS
Nobuyuki Hanaki: UOsaka - The University of Osaka

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: In social interactions, humans care about knowing their partner's face. Some experiments report that facial information facilitates trustworthiness detection, while others find it does not. We add to this literature by exploring heterogeneity in the demand for, and in the usefulness of, facial information. The incentivized experimental task consists in predicting strangers' trustworthiness from neutral portrait pictures. Using data from a three-stage laboratory experiment ( N=357 ) including two independent sets of stimuli coupled with two distinct sources of predictions, we document substantial heterogeneity in facial informativeness. However, we find that trustworthiness detection from facial information is not an ability. Nonetheless, individuals assign excessive value to receiving facial information about others.

Keywords: Trustworthiness; Inference; Facial information; Individual heterogeneity; Hidden action game; Economic experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07-27
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Theory and Decision, In press, pp.28. ⟨10.1007/s11238-026-10151-6⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: Detecting trustworthiness in strangers: human faces vary in their informativeness, but cannot be accurately judged (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05731805

DOI: 10.1007/s11238-026-10151-6

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().