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Political Facts or Deceptive Opinions?

It’s no surprise that deception and politics are intertwined, but are you the person to disentangle them?

The Pew Research Center has issued that very challenge, though in the somewhat lighthearted context of an online quiz. This challenges readers to classify given statements as “factual” or simply “opinions,” but it’s harder than you would think!

In fact, only 26 percent of Americans could correctly identify all the factual statements, and only the slightly higher 35 percent could identify the opinion statements. This is somewhat easier if you are politically engaged and follow the news, but even that’s no guarantee!

Can you tell the difference between factual and opinion news statements?

The role of deception in politics is an omnipresent concern. During the election season, Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto published an enlightening series of posts discussing the ways in which language and nonverbal behavior can be used to spin the news or conceal a politician’s motives.

Check our Parts One, Two, and Three here, but especially Dr. Matsumoto’s conclusion here!

Expressing Control or Displaying Expression?

When understanding how other cultures express emotions, it is almost as important to reflect on our own cultural norms as it is to recognize differing ones.

This is essentially what Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and his team find in a recent publication. Dr. Matsumoto studied the role that one’s own cultural norms and sense of emotional regulation have in evaluating the expressions of other people. Excitingly, they found a close link between our cultural norms of emotional displays and our own sense of emotional regulation, as they relate to evaluations of other people’s emotional states.

Their study sought to address the challenges in recognizing the often muted expressions of those from more subdued emotional cultures, but it also hoped to disentangle the perceiver’s own expectations and judgments from their evaluations.

In order to accomplish these aims, Dr. Matsumoto and his team conducted two studies. Both of these asking participants to identify the expression displayed in a series of images of faces, in addition to rating the intensity of the expression. Notably, the judges were split between English speakers raised in the United States and native-born Japanese participants, and the pictures included both American and Japanese faces.

In the first of these studies, judges were also asked to report their own emotional state’s intensity while judging images of faces, and they completed a measure intended to capture “cultural display rules” or the extent to which a culture encourages intense emotional expressions.

They found that cultural differences accounted for significant variations in how the judges evaluated the intensity of expressions, with Japanese judges tending to infer that an expression showcased more emotion than American judges.

The second study built on this work by replicating the same experiment only this time asking judges to evaluate their own emotional responsiveness. Dr. Matsumoto connects this to cultural display rules, because both have to do with the “management and modification of emotional expressions and reactions.”

After being shown expressive images, the judges would again make judgments as to the intensity of the emotion displayed, but this time they would also complete self-reported measures of emotional regulation. The results suggested that emotional regulation was at least as strong in mediating judgments as cultural norms.

The fact that cultural display norms and one’s own emotional regulation both mediate our perception of others’ emotions has profound implications for anyone attempting to better learn to read people. It is not enough for us to learn other people’s cultures, but we also have to critically reflect on our own norms, both personal and cultural.

This makes the process of emotional recognition just that much harder, which is why Humintell is trying to help by training you in the skill of reading people and understanding cultural differences.

Collective or Individual Culture?

It is almost a common sense view that people living in the United States are much more individualist than those in Japan, but this view may be deeply flawed.

In a recent article in the Asian Journal of Social Psychology, Drs. Yohtaro Takano and Eiko Osaka contend that there is no solid evidence to support this “common view”, urging future researchers to change their basic paradigms when trying to understand cultural differences.

Initially, Drs. Takano and Osaka contend that the “common view” assumes that cultural effects determine the psychology of the individual. Most notions of individualism vs. collectivism are estimated at the national/cultural level, finding the average of individual responses. This inevitably simplifies the measures and creates a one dimensional spectrum of individualist to collectivist.

This approach is flawed by then assuming that individuals operate based on these norms, and Dr. Takano demonstrates this by breaking down data in previous studies and finding that, if individuals are the basic units of analysis and not countries, research supporting the “common view” falls apart.

While they do not challenge the idea that some cultures tend to be collectivist, they argue that Japan is a poor exemplar of collectivist culture. It isn’t even really on either end of the one-dimensional spectrum! Perhaps unsurprisingly, the United States is listed as one the most individualistic, but Japan does not lean strongly either way.

Moreover, the authors continue to challenge the idea that such notions can even be simplified into one dimensional measures. The individual psyche is incredibly complex, as are cultural norms, so the dichotomy does not hold under academic scrutiny. For instance, the “common view” has often held that individualism and social interdependence are contradictory, but this is often not the case, with individualist cultures still involving significant social interdependence.

Instead, Drs. Takano and Osaka suggest that individuals differ within a broader culture based on the specific ecological context in which they live. In fact, if individuals move between contexts, they will often change their behaviors. There is no reason why these contexts should be based on national boundaries, as the reality is much more complex.

This can all be important at the empirical level, as they argue, because assuming a “common view” runs the risk of confirmation bias. We may assume that a Japanese subculture is collectivist and thus find significant evidence that it is. This is not only bad research but ends up wrongfully stereotyping individuals based on preconceptions about their culture.

Certainly, the implications for reading people across cultures are clear. Many of the common sense views of how different cultures see the world are invalid and contribute to stereotyping which can be both harmful and unscientific.

This underscores the need to contextualize how interactions to both the individual and their culture. Rather than relying on “common sense,” we can instead rely on Humintell’s judgment and expertise in communicating with those from other cultures.