Trust in Darkness: Individuals with high dark triad traits gain others' trust through facial attractiveness and other associated facial features

The Dark Triad represents a constellation of personality traits often linked to negative behaviors. However, individuals exhibiting high levels of these traits may employ unique strategies to gain others' trust, particularly in short-term cooperative contexts. This research, encompassing four studies, primarily utilized trustworthiness rating tasks and trust games to investigate this hypothesis. The findings revealed that participants, despite encountering the targets' faces for the first time and only once, perceived targets with high Dark Triad traits as significantly more trustworthy and exhibited increased trust behaviors toward them in the trust game. Moreover, perceived facial attractiveness was found to mediate the relationship between the targets' Dark Triad traits and the trust ratings they received. This mediating effect was also evident in the relationship between the targets' Dark Triad levels and trust behaviors. However, perceived dominance and extraversion did not significantly mediate these relationships. Importantly, even when controlling for perceived traits like attractiveness, dominance, and extraversion, faces of individuals with high Dark Triad traits continued to evoke increased perceptions of trustworthiness and trust behaviors. These results uncover adaptive mechanisms employed by individuals with Dark Triad in short-term cooperation, highlighting the influence of their facial features and attractiveness on gaining others' trust. • Faces of individuals with high Dark Triad traits are perceived as more trustworthy. • Faces of those with high Dark Triad traits elicited more trusting behaviors. • Individuals with high Dark Triad traits gain trust through distinct facial features. • They can also gain others' trust through their perceived attractiveness.