A recent psychological study revealed that older people are equal to, and sometimes superior to, younger people in their ability to evaluate faces and choose the most trustworthy people, even with prior information about negative behavior. This finding contradicts the common idea that age impairs the ability to be suspicious and makes first impressions more lenient and risky.
The wisdom of the elderly
The study, led by researcher Atsunobu Suzuki from the University of Tokyo, compared the judgments of young people and older people in Japan and Britain as they evaluated the same faces. Strikingly, older adults were not only more gullible, but more often avoided the negative tendencies that influenced younger people’s judgments.
To ensure a verifiable reference standard, researchers linked faces to documented behaviors. In one experiment, Japanese participants evaluated pictures of young people whose previous choices in a money-dividing game were known. In another experiment, British participants rated photos of elderly politicians whose court records showed who had been convicted of corruption. This connection allowed impressions to be compared with reality.
However, overall accuracy remained limited, at only about 55%, barely higher than random guessing. This ceiling is understandable because the judgment was based on only two options, and because facial features are often inconclusive, they appear expressive but do not predict actual behavior. What is more dangerous is that high confidence in an impression does not necessarily mean its validity, which affects hiring, assistance, and suspicion decisions.
The results showed that young people tended to be suspicious beforehand, rating faces that appeared relatively cold as untrustworthy even when the record showed their faces being cooperative. In contrast, older adults did not show this tendency, and their judgments were less extreme and closer to documented behavior, without falling into a naïve positive bias.
Experiments have also shown that smiling reduces judgment for everyone, a reminder that expressions can be misleading, and that artificial warmth can be deceiving.
The study, published in the journal PNAS, calls for a reconsideration of fraud prevention methods by training people to update their judgments when evidence becomes available, rather than blaming age for gullibility.
