Self-reported social media use does not affect cross-cultural consensus in first impressions

Research focusing on first impression formation based on facial stimuli lacks a conclusion on whether there is a cross-cultural agreement and how deeply it has proliferated across distant populations. Social media may play an important role in the level of cross-cultural agreement as they provide us with overwhelming numbers of visual stimuli, including faces. Sharing social media aesthetics, their users may utilise facial cues congruently. We asked participants from seven distant, ethnically variable countries from five continents to rate facial attractiveness, trustworthiness and dominance of a single ethnically invariant facial sample (N = 195, 106 women, M_Age = 23.23), also accounting for their self-reported social media use intensity and socioeconomic background. We expected the agreement between cultures to be better for participants who reported a higher intensity of social media use. Instead, we observed substantial cross-cultural agreement, especially for attractiveness and trustworthiness, regardless of the self-reported social media use intensity. However, the samples of participants from similar cultural backgrounds (same countries) agreed more. We also see substantial agreement in facial cue utilisation. In line with previous research, the distinctiveness of facial shape affects perceived attractiveness congruently across cultures. Despite the relatively small age range, age positively affects ascribed dominance.