Oh, that’s why!
Culture shapes perception so fundamentally that it may determine the way we look at faces.
East Asians focus their gazes on the center of faces; Westerners looked to first the eyes, and then to the mouth.
The findings were produced by University of Glasgow psychologists who tracked the eye motions of observers as they looked at portraits.
The study was small and hasn’t been replicated, but the differences were stark.
Facial recognition patterns were different, too:
“Western society is very individualist. Asian societies are much more collectivistic,” said study co-author Roberto Caldara.
From that perspective, the Western approach to facial recognition is piece-by-piece and intimate. The East Asian approach is both more formal and holistic: peripheral information is gathered, but without direct confrontation.
But is this tendency a product of a particular approach to life — or vice versa?
Interesting.
21 Comments
I usually focus my gaze on giant moles, gaps in teeth, and hair coming out of people’s noses. If none of those exist, I focus mostly on the breasts for women and just don’t look at men at all.
Not sure if it is well documented, but staring is a game people play. It is very easy to neutralize the Asian stare, and switch the game to staring at them, and make them have the same” i.e.: (subconscious) feeling the “other” initially had.
Interesting. I can’t recall what I look at first, but I’ll be more observant about this next time.
#1,
I first noticed this tendency when reading anti-communist propaganda, which illustrated Kim Il Song with his wen much enlarged (unless it really was as big as his head).
“Western society is very individualist. Asian societies are much more collectivistic,”
You can flip it either way to suit your desire. And, why is Western society singular while Asian societies plural? Is there an Eastern Society?
This is a mostly a pile of hot, steaming horse manure. Why is it that these studies based upon the hackneyed “East Asian societies are collectivist, Western societies are individualistic” meme, never use a people that are neither East Asian nor Western, like, say, the Kombai hunter-gatherer tribe of New Guinea, as a control group?
Good point Netizen. Also a mixed control group of all cultures. The lack of one weakens the sturdy and makes you wonder about bias on the part of the researchers.
An apparent proclivity among South Korean Costco shoppers - staring at items in non-Koreans’ shopping carts - requires further study.
Yes, I’ve long noticed that I focus on a person’s eyes and mouth when I look at them. I also noticed that if I first focus on a person’s nose, cheeks, and chin, he/she won’t appear the same to me. A beautiful woman usually appears much less so, for example.
…’people’s’, not ‘person’s’
#6,
Good point.
Reminds me of an incident a few weeks ago… A Korean co-worker just returned from a three-year posting in Beijing, invited me to a Chinese restaurant with 10 other co-workers. The moment we sat down he gazed intently at me… The center of my face and blurted out… “You look very old!”… I am 56 this year.
Now, I’m not one who lets personal insults go unanswered so I retorted… And you look very ugly!” (which he is, incidentally)
Needless to say, we are not on speaking terms anymore.
A younger colleague who was present later tried to explain it to me in very Confucian terms… Saying his boss did not actually mean to insult me, but was merely trying to say that because I was older than him he would have to show respect to me. Strange logic… To think that someone who has lived in a foreign country still has such an anachronistic Confucian mindset.
#12
Do you really expect that someone who spent three years in China would somehow become less Confucian.
I think this says it all.
There’s actually a serious book length study of this by Richard Nisbett, a respected psychologist at the University of Michigan, based on a lot of experiments and research conducted by him and others: The Geography of Thought : How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why
It’s a good book. He reaches the same conclusion twenty different ways, so you don’t need to read the whole thing, but there’s a good 100 pages of very interesting stuff in there.
lol…Linkd is dead on…
Nisbett wants to prove his point a million ways.. and nearly does..
I’d be interested to hear Korean-American opinions on this one. I have an ethnic Korean friend from Uzbekistan who has trouble telling Koreans apart. When we’re at meetings together he keeps asking me if he has met so-and-so before. He says he finds it hard to tell which Koreans he has met before.
This would suggest that facial recognition is more nurture than nature. I speculate that somehow he has picked up cultural facial recognition techniques from Russians despite having a Korean mother, father, family…
Either that or East Asians are objectively harder to distinguish than Caucasians.
Nisbett would agree it’s one of the principal claims of his book, and I doubt that the authors of the study cited in the original post would disagree (if they even considered the issue - which I also doubt). Why would you imagine that they think otherwise?
Possible. Modern Chinese culture is less Confucianist than modern Korean culture.
“Western society is very individualist. Asian societies are much more collectivistic,” said study co-author Roberto Caldara.
How much you suppose they got funded to recycle this trite and hackneyed line? yawn…
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