Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Reading Hairstyles?

We focus a lot on reading people’s nonverbal behavior, but is there something to be read into about our hair also?

This is precisely what Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang argue in a recent paper. Essentially, while past research has argued that emotional expressions can reveal one’s culture, they argue that differing hairstyles, which are often culturally-linked, confounds these impressions and significantly shape our identifications of other people’s nationalities.

Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang are responding to past research (Marsh et al., 2003) which found a distinctive “accent” between Japanese national and Japanese-American expressions. Essentially, this research asked participants to identify the subject’s nationality (Japanese or American), based on their facial expression. When participants were able to do this, it was attributed to fundamental cultural differences in the form of expression.

However, this may have ignored striking confounders that are not linked just to the facial expression.

For context, when we see a person’s face, we process a host of information, such as their facial structure, expressions, and other artificial features, like piercings, glasses, or hairstyle. Each of these have important impacts on our assessment that are often hard for researchers to untangle.

It was these artificial features which Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang turned to in their study. Because hairstyles often differ between people in different nations, even if they have cultural ties, they developed an experiment to see if this accounted for past findings.

After collecting almost 200 students, they exposed them to a series of images displaying basic emotional expressions on Japanese faces, including the photographs used in the previous study to divide between Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans. However, half of the photographs were edited to switch hairstyles between the groups, giving Japanese nationals American hairstyles, for instance.

Once the participants were divided between “original” and “switched” groups, participants were shown a series of images and told that some were Japanese nationals and others were Japanese-Americans. Then, upon being shown each image again individually, they were asked to mark the nationality of each.

As hypothesized, hairstyles did impact evaluations for Japanese nationals and reduced the accuracy for Japanese-American neutral expressions. While it is interesting that Japanese-American emotional expressions were not impacted, it is clear that hairstyle plays a significant role.

This necessarily challenges the idea that emotional expressions have a certain “accent” or “cultural dialect.” Instead, many of those differences could be attributed to proclivities to artificial features, like jewelry or hairstyles.

Not only does this demonstrate the importance of universal emotions, as they really are universal, but it also serves as an important lesson for anyone trying to read emotions across cultures. Our brain immediately picks up on these artificial features as it holistically recognizes the face and emotion, so it might take some training to learn to disentangle them!

Embracing Nuances Across Cultures

It is very easy to fall into the trap of assuming that everyone from a given culture thinks similarly. Psychologists have been doing it for years!

Last month, we blogged about Drs. Takano and Osaka’s research challenging the “common sense” idea that Japanese are invariably and typically collectivist in their thinking, while Americans are individualists. But if this common view has been refuted, what is supposed to take its place? Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto has a few suggestions, elaborating on the problems with that view and offering an exciting path forward for cross-cultural communication.

To review, the common view of Japanese collectivism and American individualism refers to the alleged existence of culture-wide traits ascribing collectivism or individualism to all cultural members. However, these rely on national averages, aggregating people from diverse regions and incomes, including both the rural poor and affluent urbanites.

As Matsumoto points out, this sort of ecological inference has been challenged for years, but Takano and Osaka’s work acts as a final blow to the validity of this “common sense” approach. Instead, it is necessary to focus on the individual and their differences from others, not simply assuming their perspective based on the aggregated culture they live in.

Such stereotyping should be deeply troubling, especially among psychologists. For Matsumoto, “psychology is the very discipline that should celebrate the uniqueness of each individual in each culture.” Not only is this common view methodologically flawed, but it is also deeply problematic ethically.

The traditional reliance of this view does a disservice to our ability to rigorously study cultural norms. American culture may be individualistic on the whole, but many individuals can be seen as deviating from that norm. Still, determining cultural level effects cannot be done by aggregating individuals but instead ought to rely on appropriately group-level data, such as by studying mass media or institutional practices.

Dr. Matsumoto envisions an approach where researchers focus on individual-level effects as a separate but related phenomena as group-level effects. Not only does this help resolve the problems of the common view but, by disentangling the two, psychology can delve into a new wealth of questions about the relation between individual and group level psychologies in different cultures.

This is not just an abstract moral or methodological point, as these cultural stereotypes are widespread in everyday parlance. Dr. Matsumoto points out that “American individualism is an ideological concept that is used in everyday language and discourse among U.S. Americans to explain and justify behavior. Likewise, Japanese collectivism is an ideological concept that is used in everyday language and discourse among Japanese to explain and justify behavior.”

Thus, it seems necessary for researchers and laypeople alike to challenge this approach. Not only can this help us better pursue research, but it can also help you better understand and communicate with people from other cultures, including Japan. A great place to start is to see more of what Dr. Matsumoto has to say on developing great cross-cultural communication skills.

Expressing Control or Displaying Expression?

When understanding how other cultures express emotions, it is almost as important to reflect on our own cultural norms as it is to recognize differing ones.

This is essentially what Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and his team find in a recent publication. Dr. Matsumoto studied the role that one’s own cultural norms and sense of emotional regulation have in evaluating the expressions of other people. Excitingly, they found a close link between our cultural norms of emotional displays and our own sense of emotional regulation, as they relate to evaluations of other people’s emotional states.

Their study sought to address the challenges in recognizing the often muted expressions of those from more subdued emotional cultures, but it also hoped to disentangle the perceiver’s own expectations and judgments from their evaluations.

In order to accomplish these aims, Dr. Matsumoto and his team conducted two studies. Both of these asking participants to identify the expression displayed in a series of images of faces, in addition to rating the intensity of the expression. Notably, the judges were split between English speakers raised in the United States and native-born Japanese participants, and the pictures included both American and Japanese faces.

In the first of these studies, judges were also asked to report their own emotional state’s intensity while judging images of faces, and they completed a measure intended to capture “cultural display rules” or the extent to which a culture encourages intense emotional expressions.

They found that cultural differences accounted for significant variations in how the judges evaluated the intensity of expressions, with Japanese judges tending to infer that an expression showcased more emotion than American judges.

The second study built on this work by replicating the same experiment only this time asking judges to evaluate their own emotional responsiveness. Dr. Matsumoto connects this to cultural display rules, because both have to do with the “management and modification of emotional expressions and reactions.”

After being shown expressive images, the judges would again make judgments as to the intensity of the emotion displayed, but this time they would also complete self-reported measures of emotional regulation. The results suggested that emotional regulation was at least as strong in mediating judgments as cultural norms.

The fact that cultural display norms and one’s own emotional regulation both mediate our perception of others’ emotions has profound implications for anyone attempting to better learn to read people. It is not enough for us to learn other people’s cultures, but we also have to critically reflect on our own norms, both personal and cultural.

This makes the process of emotional recognition just that much harder, which is why Humintell is trying to help by training you in the skill of reading people and understanding cultural differences.