JUST THE CASH, SIS:

We trust people more if they resemble us (Becky McCall, 9/17/09, Cosmos Online)

Using computer graphics, a team led by Lisa DeBruine from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, manipulated faces so they looked more or less similar to participants in their study. Effectively, the faces either resembled siblings or not, said DeBruine.

One experiment involved the participant deciding whether they would trust another person to make an important decision about money which could go in their favour or not.

“We found that normally people trusted the other player 50% of the time but when the face was manipulated to look like them then trust increased to 73%,” said DeBruine – probably because we perceived these hypothetical people to be relatives.

In a follow-up investigation, the team wanted to find out when the appearance of genetic relatedness might be seen as bad thing. Again, using computer graphics, faces of the opposite sex to the (heterosexual) participants were manipulated to look more or less like a sibling.