Generalizing from human facial sexual dimorphism to sex-differentiate macaques: Accuracy and cultural variation

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: ► We find humans can accurately sex-differentiate macaques based on the face alone. ► Humans use cues that are sexually dimorphic in human faces to accomplish this task. ► Asian observers perform better than Caucasian observers, due to their increased use of eye height. ► These findings suggest cultural differences in how sexually-dimorphic cues affect person perception. a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o Anthropomorphism in impressions of animals is commonplace, and this generalization from humans to animals is one example of a broader tendency to generalize from adaptively significant categories when judging specific exemplars. Although anthropomorphism may lead to unlikely or incorrect judgments, it fostered accurate sex-differentiation of macaque faces due to an appropriate generalization from the sexually dimorphic cues that distinguish human male and female faces to macaques. As predicted, Koreans performed better than Caucasians in sex-differentiating macaque faces, a difference mediated by Koreans' greater use of sexually dimorphic eye height cues. These results extend and disambiguate evidence of East Asian superiority in sex-differentiating human faces. Whereas an own-race advantage might explain the previous but not the present findings, both can be explained by East Asians' keener sensitivity to sexually dimorphic cues, perhaps owing to the greater subtlety of such cues in East Asian faces. Implications of this sensitivity for other cultural differences in person perception are discussed. Introduction Humans frequently anthropomorphize non-human entities, giving them human-like characteristics and interpreting their behavior in human-like ways (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007). As recently argued in a path-breaking special issue on anthropomorphism, this tendency is a unique example of social perception in which the target is a non-human entity (Kwan, Gosling, & John, 2008). The tendency to generalize from humans to other entities may be viewed as one example of a broader tendency to generalize from adaptively significant categories when judging specific exemplars. In particular, considerable research indicates that first impressions of human faces reflect the generalization of adaptive responses to other faces that they resemble, including baby anthropomorphism, often lead to incorrect judgments, the present study investigated a situation in which anthropomorphic generalization can foster accuracy. Specifically, …