Ji and fellow researchers investigated how visible conditions influence perceptions formed; extending their research to make it more applicable by designers will be useful. The investigators report that “The world can be represented by two layers of information: How it appears on the outside (outward appearance) and what it is on the inside (inner state). To what extent an outward appearance is assumed to reflect the inner state is fundamental to social inference and judgments. . . . We showed that Chinese were more likely than Euro-Canadians to make inference of inner state that deviated from outward appearance, whereas Euro-Canadians were more likely than Chinese to infer a convergence between outward appearance and inner state (Studies 1–5). We observed these cross-cultural patterns in various contexts involving people or physical structures.”
Li-Jun Ji, Albert Lee, Zhiyong Zhang, Ye Li, Xin-Qiang Wang, Debra Torok, Sam Rosenbaum. “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Cultural Differences in Inference of the Inner State Based on the Outward Appearance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000413