Perceivers’ impressions of others are largely dictated by their individual characteristics and local environment, rather than their cultural background... it's mostly not them, nor your culture, it's mostly just you

Hester, Neil, Sally Y. Xie, and Eric Hehman. 2021. “Little Between-region and Between-country Variance When Forming Impressions of Others.” PsyArXiv. September 28. doi:10.31234/osf.io/ynhwz

Abstract: To what extent are perceivers’ first impressions of others dictated by cultural background versus personal idiosyncrasies? To address this question, we analyzed a globally diverse dataset containing 11,481 adult participants’ ratings of 120 targets across 45 countries (2,597,624 total ratings). Across ratings of 13 traits, we find that perceivers’ idiosyncratic differences accounted for ~29% of variance and impressions on their own and ~16% in conjunction with target characteristics. However, country- and region-level differences, here a proxy for culture, accounted for on average 3.2% (i.e., both alone and in conjunction with target characteristics). We replicated this pattern of effects in a pre-registered analysis on an entirely novel dataset containing 7,007 participants’ ratings of 100 targets across 41 countries (24,886 total ratings). Together, this work suggests that perceivers’ impressions of others are largely dictated by their individual characteristics and local environment, rather than their cultural background.

Supplemental Materials osf.io/gry69