The Social Herding Effect Of Facial Trustworthiness Processing

Facial trustworthiness not only affects how much people trust their faces,but also affects their decision-making behavior.Numerous studies have shown that the processing of facial trustworthiness has occurred in the early visual phase.In addition,the researchers also found that there are many additional factors that have a great impact on the processing of facial trustworthiness,such as face emotions,subject age,social environment.However,most of the current researches use Oosterhof and Todorov(2008)face images of different trustworthiness generated based on the Facegen Modeller.This is quite different from real faces in terms of face symmetry,face structure ratio,and face attraction.Secondly,people's processing of facial trustworthiness is mostly in the social environment.Previous studies have shown that people's preferences,judgments and attitudes are affected by social evaluation.Then,will people's processing of facial trustworthiness be influenced by social evaluation and produce herd behavior? Is this herd behavior a cognitive change or a superficial herd behavior to follow the public? In order to solve the above problems,this study used event-related potentials(ERP)technology to explore the impact of face authenticity on facial trustworthiness processing,and further explore the impact of social evaluation on facial trustworthiness processing.In experiment 1,two faces of different trustworthiness(trustworthy face,untrustworthy face)are presented.The experimental task is to evaluate the trustworthiness of the face.ERP results showed that in the early stage of facial trustworthiness processing,untrustworthy face induced larger EPN components than trustworthy face.In the late stage of facial trustworthiness processing,untrustworthy face also induced greater LPC components than trustworthy face.In the first phase of the second experiment,the faces with medium trustworthiness were first presented,and then the subjects watched the trustworthy evaluation(trustworthy,untrustworthy)of other three people.In stage two,the faces presented in stage one were presented again.At this time,the subject needed to evaluate the trustworthiness of the face(trustworthy,untrustworthy).In stage three,the face presented in the first two stages appeared as a player in the trust game,and the subject needed to make investment choices for the face(high investment,low investment).The ERP results showed that in stage 1,the faces that were trustworthy evaluated by two people induced a larger N400 component than the faces that were trustworthy evaluated by three people and untrustworthy evaluated by three people.The faces that were untrustworthy evaluated by two people induced a larger N400 component than the faces that were untrustworthy evaluated by three people and trustworthy evaluated by three people.In stage two,the face that was trustworthy evaluated by three people induced a larger N170 component and EPN component than the face that was trustworthy evaluated by one person.In the stage three of trust game,although there was no significant difference in investment to the faces affected by different conditions,there was a certain trend,which was reflected in the high proportion of investment on the faces that were trustworthy evaluated and low proportion of investment on the faces that were untrustworthy evaluated.In summary,this study draws the following three conclusions: 1.The authenticity of the face affects the early processing of the facial trustworthiness(P1).2.Social evaluation influence the assessment of the trustworthiness of the face,which is reflected in the early visual processing stage(N170,EPN),but has no effect on the late processing stage(LPC).3.The impact of social evaluation on the processing of facial trustworthiness will be reflected in the subsequent trust decision-making behavior.