What to do
- Smile mildly, and let it build slowly: over half a second to a second.
- Let it fade slowly too, over at least a second.
- Keep your brows at their resting height or higher. Do not lower them.
- Keep your chin level, within 5° up or down.
- Look at their eyes for about 3 seconds at a time, then glance to the side, never down.
Be in the look when your eyes meet theirs: people settle on a face within about a tenth of a second (Willis & Todorov 2006; Todorov, Pakrashi & Oosterhof 2009).
Practise it live
Open How I Land and choose “trustworthy” after “Be seen as”. Your camera shows your face with this look drawn on it, and one instruction at a time tells you what to move. When it fits, hold it for five seconds to remember the position.
Free. Nothing is recorded, stored or sent.
Why it reads this way
- Trustworthiness is the main axis of first impressions. Pushing a face toward “trustworthy” made it look happy; the other way, angry (Oosterhof & Todorov 2008).
- Smiling raised perceived honesty in most of 44 cultures, and a broad smile added no further trust, so a mild one does it (Krys et al. 2016; Li et al. 2021).
- A chin 10° down cut trust; 10° up left it unchanged (Torrance et al. 2020).
- Timing is the trust signal: spontaneous smiles rise more slowly than posed ones (Guo et al. 2018), and smiles rated genuine drew more trust and more money in trust games (Centorrino et al. 2015).
- In a mock job interview, a smile that built and faded slowly was rated higher than the same smile switched on fast, which did no better than no smile (Krumhuber et al. 2009).
- Facing the viewer made a smiling face read as more trustworthy (Sutherland, Young & Rhodes 2017).
- About 3 seconds of eye contact at a time is what viewers found most comfortable (Binetti et al. 2016), and a gaze that returns to the viewer raised likeability (Mason, Tatkow & Macrae 2005).
In the app, “Why” shows the target numbers and how each was built, with its sources.
Where the people you meet are from
- South Asia: the smile is optional. There, smiling barely moved perceived honesty; a level head, brows not lowered and steady eyes carry it (Krys et al. 2016).
- Japan and South Korea: eye contact about 2 seconds at a time, aimed softly between the eyes. Japanese raters judged a held, direct gaze in person as angrier and less approachable than Finnish raters did (Akechi et al. 2013), and Japanese adults in conversation look at the eye region and between the eyes (Haensel et al. 2020).
- Nothing else changes by region: the two axes the looks rest on, warmth and dominance, were found again in all 11 world regions tested (Jones et al. 2021).
Good for
First meetings, sales, any moment you ask someone to take your word.
Guides
Slight or broad? How to choose a smile, Your face in a job interview, Smiles and eye contact across 12 culture regions. All guides.
Other looks
Approachable, happy, open, confident, competent, calm, alert, mysterious, intimidating. All ten on one page.