Little Between-Region and Between-Country Variance When People Form Impressions of Others

Abstract

To what extent are perceivers’ first impressions of other individuals dictated by cultural background rather than personal idiosyncrasies? To address this question, we analyzed a globally diverse data set containing 11,481 adult participants’ ratings of 120 targets across 45 countries (2,597,624 total ratings). Across ratings of 13 traits, we found that perceivers’ idiosyncratic differences accounted for approximately 29% of variance and impressions on their own and approximately 16% in conjunction with target characteristics. However, country- and region-level differences, here a proxy for culture, accounted for 3.2% on average (i.e., both alone and in conjunction with target characteristics). We replicated this pattern of effects in a preregistered analysis on an entirely novel data set containing 7,007 participants’ ratings of 100 targets across 41 countries (24,886 total ratings). Together, these results suggest that perceivers’ impressions of other people are largely dictated by their individual characteristics and local environment rather than their cultural background.

Generative models for visualizing idiosyncratic impressions

“…the interaction of perceiver and stimulus; the other component is the perceiver's variance) and to remove the error variance from the meaningful variance. Nevertheless, their estimates are comparable to other more recent studies (Albohn et al, 2022; Hester et al, 2021; Martinez et al, 2020). In cases of complex judgements such as perceived trustworthiness and competence, the idiosyncratic variance trumps shared variance.…”

The cultural learning account of first impressions

“…Importantly, as predicted by TIM, we have also seen mounting evidence of cross-cultural differences in first impressions [19-21, 58, 60, 72-74], but see [75]. For example, Zebrowitz et al [20] compared the first impressions of undergraduate observers from the U.S. with those of adults from the isolated Tsimane people in Bolivia.…”

Ethics 4.0: Ethical Dilemmas in Healthcare Mediated by Social Robots

“…In addition, based on the dataset shared by the Wellcome Global Monitor [ 44 ], which addresses how people think about major science and health challenges worldwide, most participants from both countries also expressed high levels of trust in doctors and nurses, and in their medical and health advice, although the percentages were slightly higher for the Portuguese respondents (88%) than for the Brazilians (71–72%). In addition, a recent study [ 45 ] indicates that people’s first impressions about the attributes of others, such as trustworthiness, competence, and caring, seem to be more affected by the perceiver’s own individual characteristics than by their culture background.…”