The Disadvantage of Atypical People

Of course, in hiring a babysitter (or for any job) the most important trait you are looking for is trustworthiness. After screening the applications, you find that Mary and Emily may both be good candidates. To get additional information about them you look at their Facebook profiles. You find out that Mary has a degree in business, that she likes Justin Bieber, and In-N-Out Burger. Mary seems like a typical American girl. Emily has a degree in Viticulture and Oenology, Dananananaykroyd seems to be her favorite band, and she likes to eat bird's nest soup. Emily seems like an interesting person—but would you hire her as a babysitter?

Our research suggests that you would rather hire Mary than Emily. When people judge a person's trustworthiness, they rely among other things on the typicality of that person. People with typical characteristics are perceived as more trustworthy than people with exotic attributes. Even when a person's typical or atypical attributes are more or less meaningless, they seem to influence whether or not they appear trustworthy.

We first told participants that we had asked 1,000 US citizens to pick their preferred shape from a triangle, a square, and a circle. We then presented them with the alleged results of this study, which in reality never took place. Participants would for example be shown the following results:

For each of the three shapes, participants then rated whether they would hire a person who chose that shape as a babysitter, whether they would be willing to lend money to such a person, and how trustworthy they would find such a person. They also indicated their own shape preferences. Unsurprisingly, participants gave more favorable ratings to those persons who had the same shape preference as themselves. More surprisingly, perceived trustworthiness was equally strongly influenced by the typicality of other people's supposed shape preferences. Participants would rather hire someone with a circle preference as a babysitter, followed by someone with a triangle preference; someone with a square preference was perceived as least trustworthy. This effect was not due to any specific shapes because for each participant, we randomly determined which of the shapes were typical, medium-typical, or atypical.

The Downside of Being Different

Thus, atypical people may face a number of disadvantages in their daily lives because other people rely too much on a typical-is-trustworthy rule of thumb. If someone is like most other people, that person is most likely seen as not harmful. If someone is unlike most other people, it makes others worry that this person might be a bad person. An exception to this rule occurs when people meet each other who are atypical in the same respect (for example, Goths). These people are likely to perceive each other as trustworthy because the bonding power of similarity erases any atypicality-disadvantages. 

At this point, we do not have a definite answer to why people apply the typical-is-trustworthy assumption. One idea is that in many life contexts, there may be some truth to it. Harmful or malfunctional personalities, for example, tend to be atypical personalities, as most people are friendly and well-functioning most of the time. Bad person characteristics are not typical, but rather the exception. Possibly, people then overgeneralize this rule, even to those person attributes which are obviously unrelated to trustworthiness, including shape preferences as we described earlier.

Our findings are bad news for people who like to be different. They need to be prepared that their social environment may rely on their exotic characteristics to infer low trustworthiness. If you are an accused in front of a jury, displaying a desire for eccentric clothing, exotic hairstyles, or using unusual demeanors may influence the jury to your disadvantage. Likewise, the typical-is-trustworthy rule of thumb may contribute to the many social disadvantages that members of minority groups face in their daily lives. These possible consequences of typical-is-trustworthy thinking do however remain quite speculative at this point and should be investigated by future research.

One thing does seem clear from our research. If you want to make a trustworthy impression, you'd better try to come across as the average person and not as the colorful dog. 

For Further Reading

Alves, H., Uğurlar, P., & Unkelbach, C. (2022). Typical is trustworthy - Evidence for a generalized heuristic. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 13, 446–455. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506211031722

Hans Alves is an associate professor of Social Cognition at the Faculty of Psychology at the Ruhr University Bochum. He researches how people come to like and dislike different persons, groups, and objects.