Who’s That Girl?

Research Suggests a Country’s Degree of Gender Equality Can Affect Men’s Ability To Recognize Famous Female Faces

Harvard Medical School / Ekaterina Pesheva / Dec. 6, 2019

Our ability to recognize faces is a complex interplay of neurobiology, environment and contextual cues.

Now a study from Harvard Medical School suggests that country-to-country variations in sociocultural dynamics . . .

Check out the number of particpants at the bottom of the article . . .

— notably the degree of gender equality — can yield marked differences in men’s and women’s ability to recognize famous faces.

Show me the “famous faces.” Who determines that baseline for the study?

The findings, published Nov. 29 in Scientific Reports, reveal that men living in countries with high gender equality — Scandinavian and certain Northern European nations — perform nearly as well as women in accurately identifying the faces of female celebrities. Men living in countries with lower gender equality, such as India or Pakistan for example, fare worse than both their Scandinavian peers and women in their own country in recognizing female celebrities.

. . . assuming, of course, that men from India and Pakistan are equally as familiar with these female celebrities as their cohorts in Scandinavia and certain Northern European nations . . .

U.S. males, the study found, fall somewhere in between, a finding that aligns closely with United States’ mid-range score on international metrics of gender equality.

The U.S. takes a back seat to no one on metrics of gender equality.

The results are based on scores from web-based facial recognition tests of nearly 3,000 participants from the United States and eight other countries

3,000 participants? Are you pulling my leg?

and suggest that sociocultural factors can shape the ability to discern individual characteristics over broad categories. They suggest that men living in countries with low gender equality are prone to cognitive “lumping” that obscures individual differences when it comes to recognizing female faces.

Lumping?

“Our study suggests that whom we pay attention to appears to be, at least in part, fueled by our culture, and how and whom we choose to categorize varies by the sociocultural context we live in.” said study senior investigator Joseph DeGutis, Harvard Medical School assistant professor of psychiatry and a researcher at VA Boston Healthcare System.

But can he speak English?

“Our findings underscore how important social and cultural factors are in shaping our cognition

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and in influencing whom we recognize and whom we do not,”

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said study first author Maruti Mishra, Harvard Medical School research fellow in psychiatry in DeGutis’s lab. “Culture and society have the power to shape how we see the world.”

Breakthrough!

The team’s findings showed that men living in the United States — a country that ranks midrange on the United Nations’ Gender Inequality Index — performed better when asked to identify famous male politicians, actors or athletes than when they were asked to identify famous female politicians, actors or athletes. And they fared worse than women in identifying famous female celebrities. Men from Scandinavian countries, such as Norway, Denmark and Finland — all places with a high level of gender equality — performed equally well in recognizing famous male faces and famous female faces. On the other hand, men living in countries with low gender equality — India, Brazil and Pakistan, among others — performed worse than U.S. men and worse still than Scandinavian men in identifying famous women.

…

For the study, the researchers asked nearly 2,773 adults, ages 18 to 50, to look at a series of famous faces online and identify them. Participants included 2,295 U.S. men and women; 203 men and women from Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland and Norway; and 275 men and women from India, Egypt, Brazil, Pakistan and Indonesia. The celebrity faces were almost exclusively those of U.S. politicians, actors, athletes and performers. The researchers point out that the faces shown were exclusively those of U.S. celebrities. To ensure that U.S. participants didn’t have unfair advantage in facial familiarity over their foreign peers, the researchers only analyzed results from international participants who had indicated they were familiar with or had seen the celebrities’ faces before.

Laughable study.

Laughable.