Affective information about other people’s social behavior may prejudice social interactions and
bias person judgments. The trustworthiness of person-related information, however, can vary
considerably, as in the case of gossip, rumours, lies, or so-called “fake news”. Here, we
investigated how spontaneous person-likability and explicit person judgments are influenced by
trustworthiness, employing event-related potentials as indexes of emotional brain responses.
Social-emotional information about the (im)moral behaviour of previously unknown persons was
verbally presented as trustworthy fact, (e.g. “He bullied his apprentice”) or marked as
untrustworthy gossip (by adding e.g. allegedly), using verbal qualifiers that are frequently used
in conversations, news and social media to indicate the questionable trustworthiness of the
information and as a precaution against wrong accusations. In Experiment 1, spontaneous
likability, deliberate person judgments and electrophysiological measures of emotional person
evaluation were strongly influenced by negative information, yet remarkably unaffected by the
trustworthiness of the information. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and extended them to
positive information. Our findings demonstrate a tendency for strong emotional evaluations and
person judgments even when they are knowingly based on unclear evidence.
Keywords: trustworthiness, gossip, face perception, person evaluation, event-related
potentials