Even in our complex economy trust remains a central prerequisite for social exchange (reciprocal altruism). Since the outcome of non-cooperative deals might be dramatic, partners are reluctant to engage themselves in risky transactions without sufficient guarantee of others’ trustworthiness. From ancient times it has been believed that the human face reveals valuable information about people’s cooperative intentions. Our basic experiments confirm that one single image might be sufficient to predict the cooperativeness of a person above chance-level. People are able to predict the cooperativeness of partners, but only in response to event-related pictures originating from non-cooperative partners. Evolutionary-inspired research understands this predictive cheating detection capacity as the outcome of adaptive forces. Human survival might depend on the ability to scrutinize faces in order to pass over harmful deals. In further research we extended these finding to a dot probe design in order to elucidate the automatic and pre-attentive nature of this process. Recently we started ERPstudies (event-related potentials) and fMRI-research to discover the neural correlates of predictive cheater detection