Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Economic interactions often imply to gauge the trustworthiness of others. Recent studies showed that when makingtrust decisions in economic games, people have some accuracy in detecting trustworthiness from the facial features of unknownpartners. Here we provide evidence that this face-based trustworthiness detection is a fast and intuitive process by testing itsperformance at split-second levels of exposure. Participants played a Trust game, in which they made decisions whether totrust another player based on their picture. In two studies, we manipulated the exposure time of the picture. We observed thattrustworthiness detection remained better than chance for exposure times as short as 100 ms, although it disappeared with anexposure time of 33ms. We discuss implications for ongoing debates on the use of facial inferences for social and economicdecisions.