Category: Social psychology

The facial features that people rate as more trustworthy might surprise you.

While people often expect the most attractive people to inspire the most trust in others, this isn’t the case.

Average-looking faces are considered most trustworthy, psychological research finds.

The reason may be down to the ‘typicality’ of an average-looking face.

Dr Carmel Sofer, who led the research, said:

“Face typicality likely indicates familiarity and cultural affiliation — as such, these findings have important implications for understanding social perception, including cross-cultural perceptions and interactions.”

As people’s faces get more distinctive — irrespective of whether it is more or less attractive — it gets less trustworthy.

Dr Sofer said:

“Although face typicality did not matter for attractiveness judgments, it mattered a great deal for trustworthiness judgments.

This effect may have been overlooked, because trustworthiness and attractiveness judgments are generally highly correlated in research.”

The study’s authors write:

“By showing the influence of face typicality on perceived trustworthiness, our findings cast a new light on how face typicality influences social perception.

They highlight the social meaning of the typical face because trustworthiness judgments approximate the general evaluation of faces.”

Dr Sofer said:

“We are interested in how people judge face trustworthiness when visiting other countries and how the locals perceive the visitors.

In addition, we plan to study how face typicality influences trustworthiness judgments, when other factors such as emotional expressions are present.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Sofer et al., 2014).

Certain words can reduce both social pain and physical pain.

Swearing can help to relieve hurt feelings and an aching heart, research has found.

Swearing aloud helps to quickly reduce various types of ‘social distress’ such as being socially excluded.

The experiment was carried out to test ‘Pain Overlap Theory’.

This is the idea that physical pain is processed in a similar way by the brain as social pain, the kind you get from being rejected or embarrassed.

Dr Michael Philipp, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“The results suggest that socially distressed participants who swore out loud experienced less social pain than those who did not.

Previous research suggests that social stressors, like rejection and ostracism, not only feel painful but also increase peoples’ sensitivity to physical pain.

Pain Overlap Theory suggests that social distress feels painful because both social and physical pain is biologically coupled.

Pain overlap theory predicts that anything affecting physical pain should have similar effects on social pain.”

In the study some people shouted out swear words in response to social pain.

Others shouted out non-swear words.

Swearing reduced the social pain and also reduced people’s sensitivity to physical pain.

This suggests that physical and social pain are related, as the theory suggests.

It means the hurt you feel when someone gives you the silent treatment is, in some sense, similar to that caused by banging your thumb with a hammer.

Dr Philipp said:

“There is still speculation about why swearing aloud has the effect it does on physical pain and social pain.

What’s clear is that swearing is not a completely maladaptive reaction to a sore thumb or a broken heart.”

Dr Philipp was also quick to warn that swearing all the time reduces its power.

So save it up for when you really need it.

The study was published in the European Journal of Social Psychology (Phillip et al., 2017).