First impressions of child faces: Facial trustworthiness influences adults’ interpretations of children’s behavior in ambiguous situations

The cultural learning account of first impressions

“…Consistent with this possibility, it has recently been shown that adults' impressions of children's facial trustworthiness influence their interpretation of ambiguous situations [83]. For example, children with trustworthy appearance were given the benefit of the doubt (e.g., that a negative outcome was accidental rather than deliberate) more often than those with untrustworthy appearance [83].…”

Face masks have a limited influence on first impressions: evidence from three experiments

“…Perceived niceness in child faces (a dimension comparable to trustworthiness) influences adults’ expectations of children (Collova et al, 2019) and adults’ behaviour towards children in an economic trust game (Ewing et al, 2019). Perceived niceness also influences adults’ interpretations of children's behaviour in ambiguous situations, such that children with high-nice faces receive the benefit of the doubt (Thierry & Mondloch, 2021). The Ambiguous Situations Protocol is comprised of two tasks.…”

“…Participants are asked to indicate whether the misbehaviour was done on purpose or by accident. We previously reported that the ambiguous scenes were more likely to be described as prosocial, and the misbehaviours were more likely to be perceived as accidental when the target child had a high- as opposed to a low-nice face (Thierry & Mondloch, 2021). One advantage of this protocol is that it captures the real-life use of first impressions.…”

“…Participants completed one practice trial at the start of the task. To maintain the original protocol, participants were asked two additional questions about each child (see Thierry & Mondloch, 2021); these responses were not analysed.…”

“…Participants were shown a photograph of a child's face with their name above the image for 3,000 ms. They then read a vignette about a misbehaviour (e.g., Today at school, Sally spilled paint on their classmate's drawing ; see Thierry & Mondloch, 2021 for a complete list of the vignettes used in this task). The vignettes were worded such that the child's intentions were unclear (i.e., the behaviour might have been done on purpose or by accident).…”