The Relation Between Updated Implicit Evaluations and the Trust Game

Abstract

Recent work has shown that people can update their implicit evaluations based on facial trustworthiness. However, do these updated implicit evaluations map onto subsequent decisions? We examined whether implicit evaluations based on faces but updated in light of new behavioral evidence uniquely predict responses in the trust game. Across six studies ( N = 2,059), we measured participants’ initial implicit evaluations of a target based on the target’s face and then their updated implicit evaluations based on newly learned behavioral evidence. We then tested whether these updated implicit evaluations uniquely predicted (i.e., beyond explicit evaluations) responses in a hypothetical trust game. Although participants consistently based their initial evaluations on the face and updated their evaluations after learning new diagnostic information, their updated implicit evaluations did not uniquely predict their responses in the trust game. We discuss theoretical considerations in this article.

Judging Guilt: Implicit Evaluations of Defendants Predict Verdicts

“…If a self-reported outcome is conceptually overlapping with a self-reported evaluation, there may be little room for an implicit evaluation to predict the outcome. Recently, Shen and colleagues (2022) showed that implicit evaluations of an individual did not uniquely predict self-reported money-allocating decisions. Although speculative, this might be because self-reported evaluations of an individual are highly conceptually redundant with self-reported trust decisions, and past work has indeed argued for the close overlap between positive evaluations and trust (Fiske et al, 2007).…”