Cultural influences on Facebook photographs

Chih‐Mao Huang · Denise C. Park

113 citations0/0 files storedInternational Journal of Psychology

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Cultural Differences and Values Face Recognition and Perception Social Representations and Identity

Abstract

Prior research in social psychology indicates that East Asians from collectivistic and interdependent sociocultural systems are more sensitive to contextual information than Westerners, whereas Westerners with individualistic and independent representation have a tendency to process focal and discrete attributes of the environment. Here we have demonstrated that such systematic cultural variations can also be observed in cyberspace, focusing on self-presentation of photographs on Facebook, the most popular worldwide online social network site. We examined cultural differences in face/frame ratios for Facebook profile photographs in two studies. For Study 1, 200 digital profile face photographs of active Facebook users were randomly selected from native and immigrant Taiwanese and Americans. For Study 2, 312 Facebook profiles of undergraduate students of six public universities in East Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan) and the United States (California and Texas) were randomly selected. Overall, the two studies clearly showed that East Asian Facebook users are more likely to deemphasize their faces compared to Americans. Specifically, East Asians living in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan exhibited a predilection for context inclusiveness in their profile photographs, whereas Americans tended to prioritize their focal face at the expense of the background. Moreover, East Asian Facebook users had lower intensity of facial expression than Americans on their photographs. These results demonstrate marked cultural differences in context-inclusive styles versus object-focused styles between East Asian and American Facebook users. Our findings extend previous findings from the real world to cyberspace, and provide a novel approach to investigate cognition and behaviors across cultures by using Facebook as a data collection platform.

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References

1991Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation 2002Rethinking individualism and collectivism: Evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses.2001Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition.2006Managing Impressions Online: Self-Presentation Processes in the Online Dating Environment 2001Attending holistically versus analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans.2006Cultural variation in affect valuation.2010Facebook Profiles Reflect Actual Personality, Not Self-Idealization 2000Culture, Emotion, and Well-being: Good Feelings in Japan and the United States

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