Abstract
To date, research into the construct of trustworthiness has assumed that it is a single overarching quality and that individuals fall somewhere along a single dimension from untrustworthy to trustworthy. The current study considers the possibility that trustworthiness has multiple facets and identifies four social scenarios in which trustworthiness plays a significant role: sexual fidelity, keeping a secret, repaying borrowed money, and dependability in intrapersonal conflict. Senders self-reported their trustworthiness in each of these conditions, and intercorrelations revealed that individuals did not self-report a unitary construct of trustworthiness. Video clips of senders role-playing emotion-eliciting scenarios were evaluated by receivers who appeared to assume a unitary construct of trustworthiness. More fine-grained analyses looking at receivers' judgments of trustworthiness across scenario, gender of target, and gender of receiver revealed scenario specific accuracy in which males were more accurate at judging females in monogamy and ability to keep a secret, and males were more accurate than females at the latter judgment. The theoretical and empirical implications of these findings are discussed.