You can judge a book by its cover - Evidence that cheaters may look different from cooperators

Cosmides and Tooby argue that humans possess a domain-specific cheater detection module, which allows them to keep track of who has honored and who has violated social contracts. Consistent with this logic, others demonstrate that humans better recognize faces of known cheaters than those of known cooperators. We show, in Experiments 1-3, that humans better recognize faces of cheaters than those of cooperators when they do not know who are cheaters and cooperators. Experiment 4 demonstrates, however, that humans think they recognize cheaters' faces even when they have not seen them before. The results of these experiments suggest that cheaters might look different from cooperators, possibly due to beliefs and personality traits that make them less ideal exchange partners, and the human mind might be capable of picking up on subtle visual cues that cheaters' faces give off. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.