A new study has revealed that people tend to believe average-looking faces, who aren't seen as the most attractive, while assessing trustworthiness.
The research indicated that being "average," which was often considered a bad thing, wins when people assess the trustworthiness of a face.
Carmel Sofer, lead researcher Carmel Sofer of Princeton University and Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands said that face typicality likely indicates familiarity and cultural affiliation; as such, these findings have important implications for understanding social perception, including cross-cultural perceptions and interaction.
The resulting ratings revealed a sort of U-shaped relationship between face typicality and trustworthiness: the closer a face was to the most typical face, the more trustworthy it was considered to be.
When it came to attractiveness, however, typicality didn't seem to play a role, participants rated faces as increasingly more attractive beyond the midpoint of the most typical face.
The experiment confirmed that the relationship between averageness and trustworthiness was not driven by the specific faces used or the by the transformation process that the researchers had employed to digitally combine and alter the faces.
The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.