中国人的仁：基于面孔评价的证据

Benevolent Chinese: Evidence from Face Perception

摘要: “仁”是中国的传统核心价值，意味着对自己与他人的无差别的积极评价与爱。本研究采用面孔识别任务，首次对中国人的“仁”进行实证研究。实验1表明，中国人对自己和朋友的面孔照片识别中都存在积极偏差，并且偏差程度类似。实验2表明，中国人对陌生人面孔的识别中也存在与识别自我面孔时类似的积极偏差。两个实验共同表明了中国人对自己和他人都存在类似的普遍的积极评价和爱，为中国人的“仁”提供了佐证。

Abstract: Benevolence (“Ren”) has long been a core value of Chinese culture. Academically, benevolence is a hot topic in philosophy. Little research, however, has done from the perspective of psychology, which forms a sharp contrast with the booming of cultural psychology in the past decades. We aimed to test the core meaning of benevolence experimentally. Following the recent operationalization of benevolence (Kwan et al., 2009), that is, perceiving self and others in a positive way and to similar extent, we examined whether a positive bias existed in Chinese perception of self and others (friends in Study 1 and strangers in Study 2) and whether this positive bias is equally manifested across self and others (friends in Study 1 and strangers in Study 2). In line with recent findings that evaluation of one’s face picture reflects evaluation of him/herself (Epley & Whitchurch, 2008), we asked participants to assess their pictures morphed more or less attractive in comparison with their real pictures. Participants were more likely to recognize an attractively enhanced version of their own face out of a lineup as their own, and so were to friends’ face pictures (Study 1) and strangers’ face pictures (Study 2). They also thought an attractively enhanced version of faces was more similar to actual faces than that attractively reduced version for both their own and others (friends in Study 1 and strangers in Study 2). These findings provided solid evidence of Chinese benevolence in that Chinese exhibit positive view not only toward themselves but also toward others (friends and strangers) equally, suggesting that the tradition of benevolence is still alive in current China.