Fear Goliath or David? Inferring Competence From Demeanor Across Cultures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examined cultural differences in people's lay theories of demeanor-how demeanor may be perceived as a straightforward and reliable reflection of reality (convergence theory) or as a deviating reflection of reality (divergence theory). Across different domains of competition, Euro-Canadians perceived greater competence in an opponent with a competent demeanor, whereas Chinese paradoxically perceived greater competence in an opponent with no signs of competence (Studies 1-4b). The results, unexplained by attributional styles (Study 1), likability (Study 3), or modesty (Study 3), suggest that Euro-Canadians endorse a stronger convergence theory than Chinese in their inferences of competence. Corroborated with qualitative data (Study 4a), such cultural differences were explained by the beliefs that demeanor can be a misleading reflection of reality, verified in college and community (Study 4b) samples. We discuss the implications for social perception, intergroup dynamics, and self-presentation in competitions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".