Appearance-based trust behaviour is reduced in children with autism spectrum disorder.
Kids with ASD skip face trust cues and rely only on spoken facts, so we must teach them to read faces.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ewing et al. (2015) asked the kids with ASD and 24 typical peers to play a trust game. The kids saw photos of faces that looked either trustworthy or untrustworthy. Then they chose whether to give their game tokens to the person in the photo.
The team also told the kids if the person had a good or bad reputation from past games. This let them test two cues: face looks and verbal reputation.
What they found
Typical kids gave more tokens to trustworthy-looking faces and fewer to untrustworthy ones. Kids with ASD ignored how the face looked. They used only the spoken reputation to decide.
Both groups heard the same hints, so the difference was in reading faces, not hearing facts.
How this fits with other research
Gillespie-Lynch et al. (2019) seem to disagree. They showed that kids with ASD want the same things in a friend as typical kids do, like kindness and reliability. Louise’s kids ignored faces, yet Kristen’s kids still value trust. The gap is method: Kristen asked what kids think, Louise watched what kids do. Knowing the rule is not the same as using the cue in real time.
Reed (2023) used a similar lab game and also found autistic kids lean on spoken words too much. When the rule changed, verbal feedback hurt their learning. Together these studies say: autistic kids trust words, not faces, so we must teach them to look at faces too.
Ozonoff et al. (2008) and Laposa et al. (2017) flag early sensory red flags like spinning toys or odd visual habits. Louise adds a later red flag—missing facial trust cues—giving us a timeline from infancy to school age.
Why it matters
If you run social-skills groups, do not assume a child will pick up who looks safe. Point out facial features: wide eyes, relaxed mouth, smile angle. Pair photos with clear rules like “soft eyes = safer choice.” Practice with real photos, then move to live peers. Five extra minutes on face checking can cut risky peer choices later.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Typical individuals make rapid and reliable evaluations of trustworthiness from facial appearances, which can powerfully influence behaviour. However, the same may not be true for children with autism spectrum disorder. Using an economic trust game, the current study revealed that like typical children, children with autism spectrum disorder rationally modulate their trust behaviour based on non-face cues to partner trustworthiness (e.g. reputation information). Critically, however, they are no more likely to place their trust in partners with faces that look trustworthy to them, than those that look untrustworthy. These results cannot be accounted for by any group differences in children's conceptualization of trustworthiness, ability to read trustworthiness from faces or understanding of the experimental paradigm. Instead, they seem to suggest that there may be a selective failure to spontaneously use facial cues to trustworthiness to guide behaviour in an ecologically valid context.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2015 · doi:10.1177/1362361314559431