Facial appearance and judgments of credibility: the effects of facial babyishness and age on statement credibility.

Abstract

Researchers have found that facial appearance influences social judgments. For example, evidence has shown that facial babyishness and age affect perceivers' impressions of the stimulus person's veracity. In this experiment, the researchers examined whether these variables also influenced the credibility attributed to written statements purportedly made by these people in addition to several topics of interest in deception-detection research. Undergraduates (N = 270) were presented babyfaced or mature-faced photographs that depicted a child, an adult, or an older individual, in addition to a written truthful or deceptive statement purportedly made by the person in the photograph. Results showed that, as predicted, when the statements were accompanied by babyfaced pictures, participants tended to judge them as truthful, but only if the pictures did not depict children. Also, when the statements were accompanied by childen's pictures, participants tended to judge them as deceptive, but only if the pictures depicted a babyish face. Overall detection accuracy was close to chance and did not correlate with either judgmental confidence or with the respondents' estimated lie-detection accuracy. However, confidence and estimated ability were significantly correlated. Also, more confidence was placed in judgments of truthfulness than in judgments of deceptiveness. Respondents' truth bias and the existence of a veracity effect in the diverse experimental conditions were examined as well.