Strangers' moral characters tend to be judged by their appearances: study

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 (Xinhua) -- A team of psychology researchers find that our trust in strangers is dependent on their resemblance to others we've previously known.

The research, reported in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, shows that strangers resembling past individuals known to be trustworthy are trusted more but those similar to others known to be untrustworthy are trusted less.

"Like Pavlov's dog, who, despite being conditioned on a single bell, continues to salivate to bells that have similar tones, we use information about a person's moral character, in this case whether they can be trusted, as a basic Pavlovian learning mechanism in order to make judgments about strangers," explains the work's lead author, Oriel FeldmanHall, who led research as a post-doctoral fellow at New York University and who is now an assistant professor in Brown University's Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences.

"We make decisions about a stranger's reputation without any direct or explicit information about them based on their similarity to others we've encountered, even when we're unaware of this resemblance," adds Elizabeth Phelps, a professor in New York University's Department of Psychology and the paper's senior author.

Also, the scientists found that when deciding whether or not the strangers could be trusted, the subjects' brains tapped the same neurological regions that were involved when learning about the acquaintances, including the amygdala, a region that plays a large role in emotional learning.

This finding points to the highly adaptive nature of the brain as it shows we make moral assessments of strangers drawn from previous learning experiences. Enditem