JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

“Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors – where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin – can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone’s trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so – tendencies that apply even more strongly if we’ve grown close.

“‘Trust is the baseline,’ says Susan Fiske, a social psychologist at Princeton University. ‘Trustworthiness is the very first thing that we decide about a person, and once we’ve decided, we do all kinds of elaborate gymnastics to believe in people. . .”

Confidence game: How impostors capture our trust instantly, and why we’re so eager to give it to them by Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe.