People from different cultures perceive furrowed brows and a sideways look as a desire to show their superiority.
Psychologists from the USA and Canada, whose article In the magazine Scientific Reports, conducted an experiment with the participation of 119 members of the Mayan tribe, a traditional community living far from civilization in the forests on the territory of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve (Nicaragua). Only a few of these people, who ranged in age from 18 to 75, spoke Spanish, most had never watched TV, had never used the Internet, and were completely out of the context of North American culture.
Each of the participants in the experiment was shown two pairs of computer-generated images of a male face.
The first pair was a fragment of the face in the area of the eyebrows, eyes and nose, and the second pair was the entire face. Both faces had a neutral expression, looked forward and were identical, except for one moment — one head was located completely vertically, and the other was tilted forward 10 degrees. Participants were asked to choose from a fragment and a full image one that belongs to a person striving for leadership and ready to use aggression and threats for this purpose.
When a similar experiment was carried out with the participation of Americans, they predominantly chose the image with the head tilted forward both in the case when they saw only a part of the face with eyes and eyebrows, and in the case when the face was visible in full. The Mayans showed exactly the same tendency. When they were shown only part of the face, they chose the head-tilted version as the aggressive leader 72% of the time, and when shown the full face, 84% of the time.
That is, tilting their heads forward was quite clearly associated with aggression and dominance.
When the head tilts slightly forward, and the direction of gaze does not change, it seems that the line of the eyebrows drops lower. Numerous studies show that low, furrowed eyebrows are perceived by others as a sign of anger, threat and superiority, the researchers explained. The results show for the first time that people from very different cultures interpret head tilt in exactly the same way. Such perception is perhaps a universal feature of human psychology, the researchers conclude.