Do you see what I see? A Cross-cultural Comparison of Social Impressions of Faces.

Garrison W. Cottrell, Amanda Song, Weifeng Hu, Devendra Yadav, Fangfang Wen, Bin Zuo, Edward Vul

Abstract:

Research has suggested that social impressions of faces made
by Western and Eastern people have different underlying dimensionalities. However, the individual level consistency, the
group-level agreement of rater groups, and the interactions
between face ethnicity, rater ethnicity, and social impression
traits remain largely unknown. In this paper, we perform a
large-scale data-driven cross-cultural study of facial impressions, and illustrate the idiosyncrasies and similarities behind
Caucasian and Asian participants in their social impressions of
faces from both ethnicity groups. Our study illustrates multiple interesting findings: (1) Asians rate faces lower on most
positive traits, compared with Caucasian raters, and they have
more diverse opinions than Caucasians. (2) Caucasian faces receive higher average ratings on social impression traits related
to warmth due to the preponderance of smiles in Caucasian
images, but similar mean scores on traits related to capability,
compared to Asian faces. (3) Caucasians and Asians disagree
most on capability related traits, especially on “responsible”
and “successful.” Opinions on these two traits diverge more
on Asian than on Caucasian faces. Our findings provide new
insights on the nuances of cross-cultural differences in social
impressions of faces.