Culture shapes our understanding of others’ thoughts and emotions: An investigation across 12 countries

Humans have developed specific abilities to interact efficiently with their conspecifics (social cognition). Despite abundant behavioral and neuroscientific research, the influence of cultural factors on these skills remains poorly understood. This issue is of particular importance as most cognitive tasks are developed in highly specific contexts, not representative of what is encountered by the world’s population. Through a large international and multi-site study, we assessed core social cognition aspects using current gold-standard tasks in 587 participants from 12 countries. Age, gender, and education were found to impact emotion recognition as well as the ability to infer mental states. After controlling for these factors, differences between countries accounted for more than 20% of the variance on both abilities. Importantly, it was possible to isolate cultural from linguistic impacts, which classically constitute a major limitation. We suggest important methodological shifts to better represent social cognition at the fundamental and the clinical levels.