Face Masks and Interpersonal Perceptions: Null Effects on Perceived Trust and Credibility
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract During the COVID-19 pandemic, many courtrooms implemented physical distancing protocols, including face-mask requirements for testifying witnesses. These precautions prompted debate among academics and practitioners about whether face coverings might impair jurors’ ability to assess a witness’s credibility. To examine this question, we conducted two experimental studies using simulated video-recorded testimony. We hypothesized that face masks would reduce perceived credibility as measured by ratings of trustworthiness and overall witness credibility. Across both studies, our results provided no evidence that face masks diminished perceptions of credibility or trust. These results suggest that, in such settings, face mask use may not significantly interfere with jurors’ interpersonal assessments. We discuss implications for future courtroom procedures should witnesses be required to wear a medical mask, either for public or personal health reasons.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it