City Slicker or Country Bumpkin?—Distinguishing Urban and Rural Residents From Subtle Facial Cues
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10903444 |
|---|---|
| Authors | McLean G Morgan (0009-0001-8667-8589, Department of Psychology University of Toronto Toronto Canada, corresponding author), Laura Tian (0000-0003-2686-263X, Department of Psychology University of Toronto Toronto Canada, corresponding author), Nicholas O Rule (0000-0002-2332-9058, Department of Psychology University of Toronto Toronto Canada) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 350-366 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of Social Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0046-2772 • E-ISSN: 1099-0992 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/ejsp.70042 |
| OpenAlex | W4417501921 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 102 |
Stereotypes characterize urban and rural residents as differing in traits, values and social outcomes. Here, we examined how people's stereotypes about urban and rural residents differ, testing their validity using a lens model. Results showed that participants detected whether people resided in urban or rural areas from photos across three nations: the United States, Canada and Japan. North American and Japanese participants shared similar stereotypes of urban residents, seeing them as more likely to appear competent, dominant and positive in affect than rural residents. Yet, whereas inferences of competence, dominance, attractiveness and perceived age explained accurate urban–rural judgements in North America, only perceived age explained accurate urban–rural judgements in Japan. Together, these findings illuminate how both diagnostic and misleading social trait expectations account for differences in social perception across cultures, contributing to an ecologically functional account of social perception
Affect (linguistics) · Attractiveness · Perception · Rural area · Social environment · Social perception · Trait · Color perception and design · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Social and Intergroup Psychology
Detection Theory
Multiple Regression in Practice
City living and urban upbringing affect neural social stress processing in humans
A unified theory of urban living
Facial attractiveness
Environmental Sustainability and Behavioral Science
Social inferences from faces
Identity Formation in Adolescence
An Approximate Distribution of Estimates of Variance Components
Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture
Facets of the Fundamental Content Dimensions
Accuracy in Categorizing Perceptually Ambiguous Groups
Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities
Understanding evaluation of faces on social dimensions
A systematic review of the relationship between objective measurements of the urban environment and psychological distress
Survey Questionnaire Translation and Assessment
The functional basis of face evaluation
Universal dimensions of social cognition
Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4
Cities and the Creative Class
One Hundred Years of Social Psychology Quantitatively Described
Geographical narcissism in psychotherapy
The lay of the land
Risky Business
Perceiving acculturation from neutral and emotional faces
Relationships among sense of coherence, resources, and mental health in urban and rural residents in Japan
How static facial cues relate to real-world leaders’ success
The Origins and Abiding Signature of the Ecological Theory of Social Perception in Social Psychology Research
When words become borders
Peripheralisation of small towns in Germany and Japan – Dealing with economic decline and population loss
Compact city, urban sprawl, and subjective well-being
The perennial dissatisfaction of urban upbringing
Personality and migration in Japan
Accuracy of United States regional personality stereotypes
Ecology stereotypes exist across societies and override race and family structure stereotypes
The visibility of social class from facial cues
Facial recognition technology and human raters can predict political orientation from images of expressionless faces even when controlling for demographics and self-presentation
Consistent Facial Cues to Social Class Across Two Different Western Contexts
Yuppies in Cross-National Perspective
The Urban–Rural Gulf in American Political Behavior
Divided we stand
Polling the face
The crowded life is a slow life
What is beautiful is good
Political Polarization along the Rural-Urban Continuum? The Geography of the Presidential Vote, 2000-2016
School Size, Social Capital, and Student Victimization
American-Japanese Cultural Differences in the Recognition of Universal Facial Expressions
Problems of Translation in Cross-Cultural Research
The Culture of Cities
Trait and State Authenticity Across Cultures
Rural Depopulation
Urbanism as a Way of Life
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |