Perceptual judgements are resistant to the advisor's perceived level of trustworthiness: a deep fake approach

As we navigate our environment, we often make spontaneous judgments about others. Trustworthiness is a key characteristic that we judge instantly and then use when making decisions, especially when we are uncertain. While the effect of trustworthiness on social behaviour has been extensively investigated, it remains unclear how trustworthiness affects more ‘basic’ cognitive processes such as perceptual decision-making. The present study aims to fill this gap. In the first experiment (N = 100), we validated a new trustworthiness manipulation by using deep fake technology to create animated versions of perceptually trustworthy, untrustworthy, and neutral static computer-generated faces. In the second experiment (N = 199), the deep fake procedure was applied to a new set of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces that served as advisors during a perceptual decision-making task. Here participants had to indicate the direction of dots that were either moving coherently to the left or to the right (i.e., random dot motion task). Contrary to our predictions, participants did not follow the advice of the trustworthy advisors more often than the advice of the untrustworthy advisors. We did find that participants decided faster and were more confident when following the advice, but this was also not influenced by the trustworthiness of the advisors. We integrate our findings within theoretical frameworks of advice taking, domain specificity of facial trustworthiness, and task requirements.