Facial Trustworthiness Predicts Extreme Criminal-Sentencing Outcomes

Abstract

Untrustworthy faces incur negative judgments across numerous domains. Existing work in this area has focused on situations in which the target's trustworthiness is relevant to the judgment (e.g., criminal verdicts and economic games). Yet in the present studies, we found that people also overgeneralized trustworthiness in criminal-sentencing decisions when trustworthiness should not be judicially relevant, and they did so even for the most extreme sentencing decision: condemning someone to death. In Study 1, we found that perceptions of untrustworthiness predicted death sentences (vs. life sentences) for convicted murderers in Florida (N = 742). Moreover, in Study 2, we found that the link between trustworthiness and the death sentence occurred even when participants viewed innocent people who had been exonerated after originally being sentenced to death. These results highlight the power of facial appearance to prejudice perceivers and affect life outcomes even to the point of execution, which suggests an alarming bias in the criminal-justice system.

Modelling perceptions of criminality and remorse from faces using a data-driven computational approach

“…Criminal appearance has been found to affect decisions related to the criminal justice system (see for instance Flowe & Humphries, 2011;Funk & Todorov, 2013). For researchers, our findings present two tools to create faces that systematically vary along the perceived criminality dimension in order to advance our knowledge on the effect of appearance on legal outcomes (see for instance recent findings by Wilson & Rule, 2015, on the link between untrustworthy appearance and extreme sentencing outcomes).…”

Configural face processing impacts race disparities in humanization and trust

“…People dehumanize convicts (Bastian, Denson, & Haslam, 2013), finding it easier to punish those for whom they engage in less configural processing (Fincher & Tetlock, 2016). Trustworthiness predicts the harshness of sentencing (Wilson & Rule, 2015, 2016). Because Black versus White convicts are more dehumanized even if their crimes are similar (Goff et al, 2008), it suggests that the interface between configural face processing and reduced trust may affect how people of different races are sentenced.…”

Trusting the “Look and Feel”: Situational Normality, Situational Aesthetics, and the Perceived Trustworthiness of Organizations

“…For example, Sofer, Dotsch, Wigboldus, and Todorov (2015) examined the linkage between facial typicality and facial attractiveness on the perceived trustworthiness of the person being pictured. As another example, Wilson and Rule (2015) showed that judgments about how trustworthy criminals' faces looked predicted sentencing decisions, even in the presence of more seemingly relevant data (see also Wilson & Rule, 2016). Applying such findings to a protégé forming trust in a potential mentor, the results suggest that the protégé might be influenced by how typical the mentor's face looks, or how attractive it seems.…”