People often tend to seek similarity - we like being friends with someone who's similar to us, and we also trust people with similar views more.
A new study shows that we even trust people more if they have similar facial structure to ours.
Let's find out more!
A study on trustworthiness
Researchers from Osaka University in Japan have discovered that the level of trustworthiness attributed to strangers is influenced by both facial resemblance and the sex of the observer and the stranger.
Their study, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, found that facial similarity impacted trustworthiness ratings when the stranger and observer were of the same sex, but not when they were of opposite sexes.
The study aimed to correlate estimations of facial similarity made by a deep learning neural network with real-life trustworthiness ratings.
Surprisingly, participants tended to trust individuals with similar facial features more, but this didn't hold true for opposite-sex evaluations.
Why it's important
The research suggests that facial similarity plays a significant role in same-sex social judgments and could be harnessed by online technologies, such as personalized suggestions and avatar creation.
