'The Confidence Game' is a fascinating article in The Boston Globe that spotlights how and why we trust, and the indelible nature of first impressions.
It's a must read for would-be con men, and skeptics looking to refine their bullshit detectors.
Two key takeaways from the article are: 1) That having the right type of face (high inner eyebrows, shallow brow line indentation, pronounced cheekbones and a wide chin) makes others subconsciously perceive you as trustworthy; AND 2) Mimickry, even to the point of overtly imitating another's actions and tonality, puts others at ease, which again, imbues you with a sense of trustworthiness.
Here is an excerpt:
But recently, behavioral scientists have also begun to unravel the inner workings of trust. Their aim is to decode the subtle signals that we send out and pick up, the cues that, often without our knowledge, shape our sense of someone's reliability. Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone's trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we've grown close.
When deciding who to trust, the research suggests, people use shortcuts. For example, they look at faces. According to recent work by Nikolaas Oosterhof and Alexander Todorov of Princeton's psychology department, we form our first opinions of someone's trustworthiness through a quick physiognomic snapshot. By studying people's reactions to a range of artificially-generated faces, Oosterhof and Todorov were able to identify a set of features that seemed to engender trust. Working from those findings, they were able to create a continuum: faces with high inner eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones struck people as trustworthy, faces with low inner eyebrows and shallow cheekbones untrustworthy.
Read the full article by clicking HERE.
