Should I trust you? Autistic traits predict reduced appearance‐based trust decisions

Abstract

Facial impressions of trustworthiness guide social decisions in the general population, as shown by financial lending in economic Trust Games. As an exception, autistic boys fail to use facial impressions to guide trust decisions, despite forming typical facial trustworthiness impressions (Autism, 19, 2015a, 1002). Here, we tested whether this dissociation between forming and using facial impressions of trustworthiness extends to neurotypical men with high levels of autistic traits. Forty‐six Caucasian men completed a multi‐turn Trust Game, a facial trustworthiness impressions task, the Autism‐Spectrum Quotient, and two Theory of Mind tasks. As hypothesized, participants’ levels of autistic traits had no observed effect on the impressions formed, but negatively predicted the use of those impressions in trust decisions. Thus, the dissociation between forming and using facial impressions of trustworthiness extends to the broader autism phenotype. More broadly, our results identify autistic traits as an important source of individual variation in the use of facial impressions to guide behaviour. Interestingly, failure to use these impressions could potentially represent rational behaviour, given their limited validity.

Appearance‐based trust processing in schizophrenia

“…Participants played a multi‐turn Trust Game previously used with students (Hooper et al ., ; see Figure ). After two practice trials with cartoon partners, participants played eight turns with four virtual ‘partners’ (32 trials).…”

“…The face shown in the game here is an example due to copyright reasons and was not one of the faces used in the Trust Game, although it is representative. Figure previously published in Hooper et al ., . [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]…”

“…Participants rated the trustworthiness of 40 faces in a pseudo‐randomized order (after two practice images) using a 9‐point scale (1 = not at all trustworthy, 9 = very trustworthy). We measured mean trustworthiness impressions and agreement with consensus trustworthiness impressions (from Hooper et al ., ). Face images were taken from the US10K (Bainbridge, Isola, & Oliva, ) and restricted to Caucasian females to avoid stereotyping (Hooper et al ., ).…”

“…Partners were Caucasian females only, to avoid stereotyping, and were taken from the US10K (Bainbridge et al ., ). Two partners were trustworthy‐looking, and two were untrustworthy‐looking (Hooper et al ., ).…”

Role of the right temporoparietal junction in intergroup bias in trust decisions

“…We modified a multi-round trust game task that has been used in previous studies (Berg et al, 1995;Hooper et al, 2019;Lemmers-Jansen, Fett, Hanssen, Veltman, & Krabbendam, 2019;Maurer et al, 2018). In this study, all participants played the role of investors.…”