University of Toronto, Department of Psychology, Toronto, Canada.
Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2011 Nov;37(11):1499-507. doi: 10.1177/0146167211415630. Epub 2011 Aug 1.
Across cultures, people converge in some behaviors and diverge in others. As little is known about the accuracy of judgments across cultures outside of the domain of emotion recognition, the present study investigated the influence of culture in another area: the social categorization of men's sexual orientations. Participants from nations varying in their acceptance of homosexuality (United States, Japan, and Spain) categorized the faces of men from all three cultures significantly better than chance guessing. Moreover, categorizations of individual faces were significantly correlated among the three groups of perceivers. Americans were significantly faster and more accurate than the Japanese and Spanish perceivers. Categorization strategies (i.e., response bias) also varied such that perceivers from cultures less accepting of homosexuality were more likely to categorize targets as straight. Male sexual orientation therefore appears to be legible across cultures.
在不同的文化中，人们在某些行为上趋同，而在其他行为上则存在差异。由于人们对于文化间情感识别以外的领域的判断准确性知之甚少，本研究调查了文化在另一个领域的影响：男性性取向的社会分类。来自对同性恋接受程度不同的国家（美国、日本和西班牙）的参与者对来自所有三个文化的男性面孔的分类明显优于随机猜测。此外，三个感知群体的个体面孔分类之间存在显著相关性。与日本和西班牙的参与者相比，美国人的反应速度更快，准确性更高。分类策略（即反应偏差）也存在差异，对同性恋接受程度较低的文化中的感知者更有可能将目标归类为异性恋。因此，男性性取向似乎在不同文化中都是可以识别的。
