Neuroscience
What kind of profile picture do you have on Facebook? Is it a close-up shot of your lovely face with little background visible? Or is it zoomed out, so that you appear against a wider context? The answer, according to a new study by psychologists in the USA, likely depends in part on your cultural ancestry.
Chih-Mao Huang and Denise Park first analysed 200 Facebook profiles of users based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the National Taiwan University in Taipei. Half the users in Taiwan were actually US citizens, and half those in Illinois were Taiwanese. Regardless of their current location, there was a significant association between cultural background and style of Facebook picture. Facebook users originally hailing from Taiwan were more likely to have a zoomed-out picture in which they were seen against a background context. Users from the USA, by contrast, were more likely to have a close-up picture in which their face filled up more of the frame.
There was a trend for the students' to adapt to their adopted culture because current location was also associated with picture style (e.g. Taiwanese based in the USA had pictures more focused on their faces, as compared with Taiwanese based in Taiwan), but this effect wasn't statistically significant.
A second study was similar but involved 312 Facebook users at three American universities (University of California, San Diego; University of Texas at Austin; and University of California-Berkekely) and three Asian universities (Chinese University of Hong Kong; National University of Singapore; and National Taiwan University). These locations were selected to be comparable in terms of having a warm climate. Again, Facebook users in America tended to have a profile picture in which their face filled up more of the frame; Asian users, by contrast, showed more background context in their pictures. Americans were also less likely Asians to display other parts of their body, besides their face. And the Americans' smile intensity tended to be greater.
"We believe this may be the first demonstration that culture influences self-presentation on Facebook, the most popular worldwide online social network site," the researchers said.
The new findings complement an existing literature showing cultural associations with attentional and aesthetic habits. For example, a 2008 study (pdf) showed that portrait photographs taken by East Asians tended to show more background (and that participants from that culture preferred pictures of that style), whilst those taken by Westerners were more focused on the target's face (and Americans said they preferred that style). Similarly, eye-movement research has shown that Westerners looking at a scene tend to focus more on embedded central objects, whilst Chinese look more often at the background.
"Our findings further extend previous evidence of systematic cultural differences in the offline world to cyberspace, supporting the extended real-life hypothesis," the researchers said, "which suggests that individuals express and communicate their self-representation at online social network sites as a product of extended social cognitions and behaviours."
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Huang, C., and Park, D. (2012). Cultural influences on Facebook photographs. International Journal of Psychology, 1-10 DOI: 10.1080/00207594.2011.649285
Previously on the Research Digest: Asian Americans and European Americans differ in how they see themselves in the world.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
What your Facebook picture says about your cultural background
Chih-Mao Huang and Denise Park first analysed 200 Facebook profiles of users based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the National Taiwan University in Taipei. Half the users in Taiwan were actually US citizens, and half those in Illinois were Taiwanese. Regardless of their current location, there was a significant association between cultural background and style of Facebook picture. Facebook users originally hailing from Taiwan were more likely to have a zoomed-out picture in which they were seen against a background context. Users from the USA, by contrast, were more likely to have a close-up picture in which their face filled up more of the frame.
There was a trend for the students' to adapt to their adopted culture because current location was also associated with picture style (e.g. Taiwanese based in the USA had pictures more focused on their faces, as compared with Taiwanese based in Taiwan), but this effect wasn't statistically significant.
A second study was similar but involved 312 Facebook users at three American universities (University of California, San Diego; University of Texas at Austin; and University of California-Berkekely) and three Asian universities (Chinese University of Hong Kong; National University of Singapore; and National Taiwan University). These locations were selected to be comparable in terms of having a warm climate. Again, Facebook users in America tended to have a profile picture in which their face filled up more of the frame; Asian users, by contrast, showed more background context in their pictures. Americans were also less likely Asians to display other parts of their body, besides their face. And the Americans' smile intensity tended to be greater.
"We believe this may be the first demonstration that culture influences self-presentation on Facebook, the most popular worldwide online social network site," the researchers said.
The new findings complement an existing literature showing cultural associations with attentional and aesthetic habits. For example, a 2008 study (pdf) showed that portrait photographs taken by East Asians tended to show more background (and that participants from that culture preferred pictures of that style), whilst those taken by Westerners were more focused on the target's face (and Americans said they preferred that style). Similarly, eye-movement research has shown that Westerners looking at a scene tend to focus more on embedded central objects, whilst Chinese look more often at the background.
"Our findings further extend previous evidence of systematic cultural differences in the offline world to cyberspace, supporting the extended real-life hypothesis," the researchers said, "which suggests that individuals express and communicate their self-representation at online social network sites as a product of extended social cognitions and behaviours."
_________________________________
Huang, C., and Park, D. (2012). Cultural influences on Facebook photographs. International Journal of Psychology, 1-10 DOI: 10.1080/00207594.2011.649285
Previously on the Research Digest: Asian Americans and European Americans differ in how they see themselves in the world.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
- The Psychology Of Facebook, Digested
With over a billion users, Facebook is changing the social life of our species. Cultural commentators ponder the effects. Is it bringing us together or tearing us apart? Psychologists have responded too - Google Scholar lists more than 27,000 references...
- Looking At Their Own Face Tunes Westerners To Their Heartbeat; Not So For East Asians
In this study of cross-cultural differences in body representation participants were challenged to keep count of their own heartbeat simply by listening to their body - a measure of what's known as interoceptive awareness (IA). A cue signalled when...
- Facebook Or Twitter: What Does Your Choice Of Social Networking Site Say About You?
Social networking sites have changed our lives. There were 500 million active Facebook users in 2011 and approximately 200 million Twitter accounts. As users will know, the sites have important differences. Facebook places more of an emphasis on...
- Danah Boyd On The Social Networking Class Divide
myspacebook From the Annals of the Ever-Expanding Universe of Danah Boyd1 comes an article from the BBC: Social sites reveal class divide Fans of MySpace and Facebook are divided by much more than which music they like, suggests a study. A six-month...
- Abstract Of The Day: The Eye Of The Beholder
Hannah Faye Chua, Julie E. Boland, & Richard E. Nisbett. Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; 2005. ePub ahead of publication. 10.1073/pnas.0506162102 Department of Psychology,...