Evidence for a kernel of truth in children’s facial impressions of children’s niceness, but not shyness.

Abstract

Acknowledgements:We are grateful to the parents and children who helped make this research possible. We would like to thank Romina Palermo for providing us the opportunity to contact her sample of participants and to use some existing data. We also thank Lou Ewing for sharing the Zeb the Alien Scientist testing materials, and Saba Siddique for comments regarding a manuscript draft. Finally, we would like to thank Kaitlyn Turbett, Dielle Horne, Saba Siddique, Chloe Giffard, and Maira Vicente Braga, for help testing participants. JC, LJ, GR, and CS conceived the study and helped to draft and edit the manuscript. JC programmed the experiment, collected most participant data, performed the statistical analyses and drafted the first manuscript draft. EB coordinated image collection and testing schedules.All authors participated in the study design, and read, provided critical revisions and approved the final manuscript. The study methods, hypotheses and analyses were pre-registered (https://osf.io/kjtva/registrations).

Children’s dynamic use of face- and behavior-based cues in an economic trust game.

“…The current results show that 8- to-10-year-old children emphasize accurate trust cues (behavioral fairness) over facial trustworthiness when both cues were available. We chose this age group because previous research suggests children of this age can show mature patterns of face perception (Mondloch et al, 2003), social cognition and trait reasoning (Alvarez et al, 2001), and trust impression formation (Caulfield et al, 2016; Collova et al, 2021; Ewing et al, 2015). In the current study, we aimed to determine whether children could show adult-like patterns by also overcoming face-based impressions.…”

“…We sampled children aged between 8 and 10 years because this period is critical for the development of face perception (Mondloch et al, 2003), social cognition and trait reasoning (Alvarez et al, 2001), and trust impression formation (Caulfield et al, 2016; Collova et al, 2021; Ewing et al, 2015). We had several preregistered hypotheses for this study.…”

Understanding trait impressions from faces

“…The strong dependence of facial impressions on highly changeable (including environmental) cues alongside relatively invariant cues may help explain the initially surprising finding that impressions can differ as much based on the different photographs of the same people, as by different target people depicted (Collova et al, 2020, 2021; Jenkins et al, 2011; Sutherland, Young, et al, 2016; Todorov & Porter, 2014). It is a common misinterpretation to think that an impression based on a face image is the same thing as an impression of the face itself (a classic perceptual conundrum: ‘ ceci n'est pas une pipe’ ).…”