Department of Psychology, Tufts University Medford, Massachusetts 02155, USA.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2010 Jan;98(1):1-15. doi: 10.1037/a0017673.
Previous work has shown that individuals agree across cultures on the traits that they infer from faces. Previous work has also shown that inferences from faces can be predictive of important outcomes within cultures. The current research merges these two lines of work. In a series of cross-cultural studies, the authors asked American and Japanese participants to provide naïve inferences of traits from the faces of U.S. political candidates (Studies 1 and 3) and Japanese political candidates (Studies 2 and 4). Perceivers showed high agreement in their ratings of the faces, regardless of culture, and both sets of judgments were predictive of an important ecological outcome (the percentage of votes that each candidate received in the actual election). The traits predicting electoral success differed, however, depending on the targets' culture. Thus, when American and Japanese participants were asked to provide explicit inferences of how likely each candidate would be to win an election (Studies 3-4), judgments were predictive only for same-culture candidates. Attempts to infer the electoral success for the foreign culture showed evidence of self-projection. Therefore, perceivers can reliably infer predictive information from faces but require knowledge about the target's culture to make these predictions accurately.
先前的研究表明，个体在从面部推断特征方面在跨文化上具有一致性。先前的研究还表明，从面部得出的推断可以预测文化内部的重要结果。当前的研究融合了这两条研究线索。在一系列跨文化研究中，作者要求美国和日本的参与者从美国政治候选人（研究 1 和 3）和日本政治候选人（研究 2 和 4）的面部提供天真的特征推断。无论文化如何，观察者在他们的面部评价中表现出高度的一致性，并且这两组判断都可以预测一个重要的生态结果（每个候选人在实际选举中获得的选票百分比）。然而，预测选举成功的特征因目标文化而异。因此，当美国和日本的参与者被要求提供每个候选人获胜的可能性的明确推断（研究 3-4）时，只有对于同文化的候选人，判断才具有预测性。对于外国文化的选举成功的推断尝试显示出自我投射的证据。因此，观察者可以从面部可靠地推断出预测性信息，但需要了解目标文化才能准确地做出这些预测。
