Social Engineering Blogs

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Universal Laughter and Deception

Is laughter recognized in the same way across cultures? And, if so, can we tell if people in different cultures are faking their laughter?

This is exactly what a team of researchers attempted to answer in a recent publication in Psychological Science. An astoundingly large group of 31 researchers sought to analyze reactions to laughter in 21 societies across six regions in the world. Because laughter is practiced in some form in all cultures, they wanted to know if the subtle cues that tell whether the laughter is real or fake also hold universally.

Fundamentally, they hoped to explore what such universality means for early evolutionary uses of laughter, which they see as basically signaling affiliation or a desire to cooperate. Listeners should be able to note whether the laughter was really an effort to signal this affiliation, or if it was false. This is the distinction between genuine spontaneous laughter and non-genuine volitional laughter.

This is not to say that volitional laughter must be deceptive. Instead, volitional laughs can be used to convey the recognition of a need for cooperation or other social cues. The study authors suggest that this is actually the more common usage of volitional or non-genuine laughter.

If laughter has this deep evolutionary grounding, then it should not matter what culture somebody is from for them to be able to make the distinction. Past research has found that spontaneous and volitional laughter are substantively different, after all.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers asked people as far flung as Los Angeles, Central Europe, Iran, India, and Japan to participate in the study, totaling up to 884 participants. These participants were then exposed to audio recordings that contained either spontaneous or volitional laughter and were asked to identify each as either fake or genuine.

Overall, people could reliably make the distinction, noting changes in intensity or higher pitch in the laugh. This all suggests that listeners pick up on subtle emotional variation in laughter. While past research has found that people are good at this within their culture, this is certainly a profound extension.

There is a lot to learn from this study in terms of how to better read people and detect deception. Initially, it is pretty amazing that people are able to note whether the laughter is a lie or not. As we have noted, deception detection relies closely on comparing people’s behavior to their baseline. Thus, the familiarity that assists lie detection is completely lost in those audio clips.

That said, it does fit with previous research finding that people can rank spoken voices accurately based on their intuition that the speaker is likely to commit infidelity.

Most importantly, perhaps, is the way this study helps tie laughter into a sense of universal emotional expression. While joy is a universal basic emotion, laughter need not be synonymous with joy. However, this research helps show us that laughter, like gestures of triumph, can be a universal expression.

Reading Hairstyles?

We focus a lot on reading people’s nonverbal behavior, but is there something to be read into about our hair also?

This is precisely what Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang argue in a recent paper. Essentially, while past research has argued that emotional expressions can reveal one’s culture, they argue that differing hairstyles, which are often culturally-linked, confounds these impressions and significantly shape our identifications of other people’s nationalities.

Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang are responding to past research (Marsh et al., 2003) which found a distinctive “accent” between Japanese national and Japanese-American expressions. Essentially, this research asked participants to identify the subject’s nationality (Japanese or American), based on their facial expression. When participants were able to do this, it was attributed to fundamental cultural differences in the form of expression.

However, this may have ignored striking confounders that are not linked just to the facial expression.

For context, when we see a person’s face, we process a host of information, such as their facial structure, expressions, and other artificial features, like piercings, glasses, or hairstyle. Each of these have important impacts on our assessment that are often hard for researchers to untangle.

It was these artificial features which Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang turned to in their study. Because hairstyles often differ between people in different nations, even if they have cultural ties, they developed an experiment to see if this accounted for past findings.

After collecting almost 200 students, they exposed them to a series of images displaying basic emotional expressions on Japanese faces, including the photographs used in the previous study to divide between Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans. However, half of the photographs were edited to switch hairstyles between the groups, giving Japanese nationals American hairstyles, for instance.

Once the participants were divided between “original” and “switched” groups, participants were shown a series of images and told that some were Japanese nationals and others were Japanese-Americans. Then, upon being shown each image again individually, they were asked to mark the nationality of each.

As hypothesized, hairstyles did impact evaluations for Japanese nationals and reduced the accuracy for Japanese-American neutral expressions. While it is interesting that Japanese-American emotional expressions were not impacted, it is clear that hairstyle plays a significant role.

This necessarily challenges the idea that emotional expressions have a certain “accent” or “cultural dialect.” Instead, many of those differences could be attributed to proclivities to artificial features, like jewelry or hairstyles.

Not only does this demonstrate the importance of universal emotions, as they really are universal, but it also serves as an important lesson for anyone trying to read emotions across cultures. Our brain immediately picks up on these artificial features as it holistically recognizes the face and emotion, so it might take some training to learn to disentangle them!

Embracing Nuances Across Cultures

It is very easy to fall into the trap of assuming that everyone from a given culture thinks similarly. Psychologists have been doing it for years!

Last month, we blogged about Drs. Takano and Osaka’s research challenging the “common sense” idea that Japanese are invariably and typically collectivist in their thinking, while Americans are individualists. But if this common view has been refuted, what is supposed to take its place? Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto has a few suggestions, elaborating on the problems with that view and offering an exciting path forward for cross-cultural communication.

To review, the common view of Japanese collectivism and American individualism refers to the alleged existence of culture-wide traits ascribing collectivism or individualism to all cultural members. However, these rely on national averages, aggregating people from diverse regions and incomes, including both the rural poor and affluent urbanites.

As Matsumoto points out, this sort of ecological inference has been challenged for years, but Takano and Osaka’s work acts as a final blow to the validity of this “common sense” approach. Instead, it is necessary to focus on the individual and their differences from others, not simply assuming their perspective based on the aggregated culture they live in.

Such stereotyping should be deeply troubling, especially among psychologists. For Matsumoto, “psychology is the very discipline that should celebrate the uniqueness of each individual in each culture.” Not only is this common view methodologically flawed, but it is also deeply problematic ethically.

The traditional reliance of this view does a disservice to our ability to rigorously study cultural norms. American culture may be individualistic on the whole, but many individuals can be seen as deviating from that norm. Still, determining cultural level effects cannot be done by aggregating individuals but instead ought to rely on appropriately group-level data, such as by studying mass media or institutional practices.

Dr. Matsumoto envisions an approach where researchers focus on individual-level effects as a separate but related phenomena as group-level effects. Not only does this help resolve the problems of the common view but, by disentangling the two, psychology can delve into a new wealth of questions about the relation between individual and group level psychologies in different cultures.

This is not just an abstract moral or methodological point, as these cultural stereotypes are widespread in everyday parlance. Dr. Matsumoto points out that “American individualism is an ideological concept that is used in everyday language and discourse among U.S. Americans to explain and justify behavior. Likewise, Japanese collectivism is an ideological concept that is used in everyday language and discourse among Japanese to explain and justify behavior.”

Thus, it seems necessary for researchers and laypeople alike to challenge this approach. Not only can this help us better pursue research, but it can also help you better understand and communicate with people from other cultures, including Japan. A great place to start is to see more of what Dr. Matsumoto has to say on developing great cross-cultural communication skills.