Lab #4: Trust!

How much do our fellow Americans trust each other? One study says only 30 percent of Americans do! Another interesting question is why do Americans trust or distrust each other? This is what Kevin and I conducted a study to discover, and we found some interesting results.
We showed about 50 people (of all races, of both genders, of all ages, and from all over NC and from other states including Virginia, Kentucky, and Florida) one of 8 groups of either 2 or 4 people and asked them one of the following questions: Which of these is the most trustworthy/least trustworthy?
The first two slides were meant to find what age group people view as trustworthy. The first slide showed white males: one teenager, one twenty-something, one middle-aged man, and one old man; the results told us overwhelmingly that the older man looked more trustworthy. 11 people (out of 25), versus five as the next most voted (the younger man, whom people often commented on his trusting eyes--an outlier). The second slide was of black women, one from the same age groups as above, except we asked which was the least trustworthy--and got similar results. Younger people are viewed as less trustworthy than older people.
The second set of slides depicted men and women of different races--one each of Caucasian, African-American, Asian, and Latino. The results for this one were very interesting. First, a few people could tell that they were being asked to choose based on race, and refused to give a straight answer--race is a very sensitive issue in our society. But from those who did answer, we got the following results: Mostly, races are trusted equally! There was some discrepancy: our male Asian representative seemed to be particularly untrustworthy, but people didn't choose our female Asian representative any less than the others, so it is safe to say that race doesn't matter very much in our community, at least when it comes to trustworthiness! I have to say, I was kind of surprised; as fair as I try to be, I still thought there would be some racism, even if it was subconscious, but I was wrong. There was a tiny bit of a leaning towards the Caucasians, but I think that may just be because we see Caucasians more often than any other race, in America.
The third set of photos showed two pairs of men and women: one white and one black. In both pairs, the man was less trustworthy than the woman; more so in the second than the first (the woman in the first pair had kind of a mean air about her). I expected this, and it turned out to be true. Women look more trustworthy than men.
The last set of slides showed 4 people: Three looking normally, and one smiling. Of course we should all think that smiling people look more trustworthy than unsmiling people, but the interesting part to me was the extent of this truth. In the first photo, almost every single person thought the smiling man looked trustworthy--for two other photos, 1 person thought they looked more trustworthy, and for one photo not a single person chose them! For the second group, the smiling person (whose smile many people said to be fake) still won, but to a less drastic extent. However, it is still definitely true that smiles make a person seem a lot more trustworthy.
So. The final results: older beats younger, man beats woman, smiling beats unsmiling, and race doesn't really matter very much. If you want to put it all together, you would get a middle-aged, smiling woman! This reminds me of the ideal person my father always used to tell me to find if I got lost at an amusement park: a middle-aged woman with children. (It remains to be said whether children will cause you to have a smile on your face or a frown...)