Impact of Airbnb Host Profile Photos on Guest Star Ratings Based on Cultural Differences in China and the United States

Abstract

This research analyzed the profile photos and star ratings of 45,000 Airbnb hosts in China and the United States, investigating cultural differences in host and guest behavior. The results indicated the existence of cultural differences in the degree of facial disclosure and in facial expressions and their influence on guest ratings. More specifically, first, fewer hosts in China revealed their faces in profile photos than hosts in the United States. Second, in China, star ratings given by guests to hosts who did not disclose their faces were lower than to hosts who did disclose their faces, but in the United States, there was an even greater reduction in ratings for hosts who did not disclose their faces. Third, the facial expressions of hosts in China did not look as happy as those in the United States. Fourth, happy facial expressions of hosts had a more positive impact on guest ratings in China than in the United States. These findings highlight the importance of using profile photos showing happy facial expressions and this is especially important in China.

Keywords

Airbnb hosts guest ratings facial expressions happiness cultural differences China

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Allyn

(2020, April 28). For Airbnb, 2020 was supposed to be a banner year. Then the pandemic hit. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/04/28/846780052/for-airbnb-2020-was-supposed-to-be-a-banner-year-then-the-pandemic-hit

Barger

P. B.

Grandey

A. A.

(2006). Service with a smile and encounter satisfaction: Emotional contagion and appraisal mechanisms. Academy of Management Journal, 49(6), 1229–1238.

Barker

(2020, February 21). The Airbnb effect on housing and rent. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/garybarker/2020/02/21/the-airbnb-effect-on-housing-and-rent/#2b99e9bb2226

Barnlund

D. C.

(1989). Communicative styles of Japanese and Americans: Images and realities. Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.

Bencharit

L. Z.

Y. W.

Fung

H. H.

Yeung

D. Y.

Stephens

N. M.

Romero-Canyas

Tsai

J. L.

(2019). Should job applicants be excited or calm? The role of culture and ideal affect in employment settings. Emotion, 19(3), 377–401.

Biehl

Matsumoto

Ekman

Hearn

Heider

Kudoh

Ton

(1997). Matsumoto and Ekman’s Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion (JACFEE): Reliability data and cross-national differences. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 21, 3–21.

Brown

C. S.

Sulzer-Azaroff

(1994). An assessment of the relationship between customer satisfaction and service friendliness. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 14(2), 55–76.

Cardon

Shi

(2018). Displays of status and expressiveness in professional profile pictures on LinkedIn and corporate websites: A cross-cultural comparison of China and the United States. Global Advances in Business Communication, 7(1), Article 4.

Chan

Wan

L. C.

(2008). Consumer responses to service failures: A resource preference model of cultural influences. Journal of International Marketing, 16(1), 72–97.

10.

Chen

G.-M.

(1995). Differences in self-disclosure patterns among Americans versus Chinese: A comparative study. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 26(1), 84–91.

11.

Clifford

(2018, January 2). How Airbnb went from 1,400 guests on New Year’s Eve 2009, to more than 3 million. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/02/airbnb-from-1400-guests-on-new-years-eve-2009-to-over-3-million.html

12.

Doherty

R. W.

(1997). The emotional contagion scale: A measure of individual differences. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 21(2), 131–154.

13.

Eid

Diener

(2001). Norms for experiencing emotions in different cultures: Inter-and intranational differences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(5), 869–885.

14.

Ekman

Friesen

W. V.

(1986). A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion. Motivation and Emotion, 10(2), 159–168.

15.

Ekman

Friesen

W. V.

O’Sullivan

Chan

Diacoyanni-Tarlatzis

Heider

Krause

LeCompte

W. A.

Pitcairn

Ricci-Bitti

P. E.

(1987). Universals and cultural differences in the judgments of facial expressions of emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(4), 712–717.

16.

Ekman

Sorenson

E. R.

Friesen

W. V.

(1969). Pan-cultural elements in facial displays of emotion. Science, 164(3875), 86–88.

17.

Ert

Fleischer

Magen

(2016). Trust and reputation in the sharing economy: The role of personal photos in Airbnb. Tourism Management, 55, 62–73.

18.

Fagerstrøm

Pawar

Sigurdsson

Foxall

G. R.

Yani-de-Soriano

(2017). That personal profile image might jeopardize your rental opportunity! On the relative impact of the seller’s facial expressions upon buying behavior on Airbnb^TM. Computers in Human Behavior, 72, 123–131.

19.

Farrall

(2012). Online collectivism, individualism and anonymity in East Asia. Surveillance & Society, 9(4), 424–440.

20.

Goldenberg

Gross

J. J.

(2020). Digital emotion contagion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(4), 316–328.

21.

Gudykunst

W. B.

Nishida

(1984). Individual and cultural influences on uncertainty reduction. Communications Monographs, 51(1), 23–36.

22.

Hatfield

Bensman

Thornton

P. D.

Rapson

R. L.

(2014). New perspectives on emotional contagion: A review of classic and recent research on facial mimicry and contagion. Interpersona: An International Journal on Personal Relationships, 8, 159–179.

23.

Hatfield

Cacioppo

J. T.

Rapson

R. L.

(1992). Primitive emotional contagion. Review of Personality and Social Psychology, 14, 151–177.

24.

Hatfield

Cacioppo

J. T.

Rapson

R. L.

(1993). Emotional contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2(3), 96–100.

25.

Hennig-Thurau

Groth

Paul

Gremler

D. D.

(2006). Are all smiles created equal? How emotional contagion and emotional labor affect service relationships. Journal of Marketing, 70(3), 58–73.

26.

Hess

Blaison

Kafetsios

(2016). Judging facial emotion expressions in context: The influence of culture and self-construal orientation. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 40(1), 55–64.

27.

Hess

Fischer

(2014). Emotional mimicry: Why and when we mimic emotions. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 8(2), 45–57.

28.

Hofstede

(2011). Dimensionalizing cultures: The Hofstede model in context. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1), 2307–0919.

29.

Hofstede

(2015). Dimension data matrix. http://www.geerthofstede.nl/

30.

Huang

C.-M.

Park

(2013). Cultural influences on Facebook photographs. International Journal of Psychology, 48(3), 334–343.

31.

Hui

C. H.

(1988). Measurement of individualism-collectivism. Journal of Research in Personality, 22(1), 17–36.

32.

InterActiveCorp (IAC) and James Walter Thompson (JWT). (2007, November 22). China leads the U.S. in digital self-expression. https://www.theguardian.com/media/pda/2007/nov/26/thegrowingchineseloveaffai

33.

Ilies

Wagner

D. T.

Morgeson

F. P.

(2007). Explaining affective linkages in teams: Individual differences in susceptibility to contagion and individualism-collectivism. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(4), 1140–1148.

34.

Irwin

J. R.

McClelland

G. H.

(2001). Misleading heuristics and moderated multiple regression models. Journal of Marketing Research, 38(1), 100–109.

35.

Jaeger

Sleegers

W. W.

Evans

A. M.

Stel

van Beest

(2019). The effects of facial attractiveness and trustworthiness in online peer-to-peer markets. Journal of Economic Psychology, 75, 102125.

36.

Kamiloğlu

Cong

Sun

Sauter

(2023). Emotions across cultures. In Al-Shawaf

Shackelford

(Eds.), The Oxford handbook of evolution and the emotions. Oxford University Press. https://osf.io/9e3sn/

37.

Kim

H. S.

Sherman

D. K.

(2007). “Express yourself”: Culture and the effect of self-expression on choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(1), 1–11.

38.

Krizhevsky

Hinton

(2009). Learning multiple layers of features from tiny images. University of Toronto.

39.

Krys

Hansen

Xing

Szarota

Yang

(2014). Do only fools smile at strangers? Cultural differences in social perception of intelligence of smiling individuals. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 45(2), 314–321.

40.

Jang

H. J.

Kim

K. U.

Kim

J. H.

Park

S. H.

Lee

J. H.

Kim

J. J.

Kim

I. Y.

Kim

S. I.

(2005). Experimental results of affective valence and arousal to avatar’s facial expressions. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 8(5), 493–503.

41.

Levenson

R. W.

Soto

Pole

(2007). Emotion, biology, and culture. In Kitayama

Cohen

(Eds.), Handbook of cultural psychology (pp. 780–796). Guilford Press.

42.

Levi

Hassner

(2015, June 18–24). Age and gender classification using convolutional neural networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (pp. 34–42). IEEE.

43.

Deng

(2020). Deep facial expression recognition: A survey. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 13(3), 1195–1215.

44.

(2019, February 13). Chinese tourists make nearly 150 mln outbound trips in 2018. Xinhuanews. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-02/13/c_137818975.htm

45.

Liu

(2010). Culturally conditioned privacy in online photosharing: A comparison between American and Chinese users of social network sites [Doctoral thesis]. University of Missouri–Columbia.

46.

Lopes

A. T.

De Aguiar

De Souza

A. F.

Oliveira-Santos

(2017). Facial expression recognition with convolutional neural networks: Coping with few data and the training sample order. Pattern Recognition, 61, 610–628.

47.

Luong

(2005). Affective service display and customer mood. Journal of Service Research, 8(2), 117–130.

48.

Markus

H. R.

Kitayama

(1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98(2), 224–253.

49.

Masuda

Ellsworth

P. C.

Mesquita

Leu

Tanida

Van de Veerdonk

(2008). Placing the face in context: Cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(3), 365–381.

50.

Matsumoto

(1990). Cultural similarities and differences in display rules. Motivation and Emotion, 14(3), 195–214.

51.

Matsumoto

(1993). Ethnic differences in affect intensity, emotion judgments, display rule attitudes, and self-reported emotional expression in an American sample. Motivation and Emotion, 17(2), 107–123.

52.

Matsumoto

(2009). 15 culture and emotional expression. In Wyer

R. S.

Chiu

C.-y.

Hong

Y.-y.

(Eds.), Understanding culture: Theory, research, and application (pp. 271–288). Psychology Press.

53.

Matsumoto

Choi

Hirayama

Domae

Yamaguchi

(2018). Culture, display rules, and emotion judgments. Psychology: The Journal of the Hellenic Psychological Society, 23(1), 7–23.

54.

Matsumoto

Consolacion

Yamada

Suzuki

Franklin

Paul

Ray

Uchida

(2002). American-Japanese cultural differences in judgements of emotional expressions of different intensities. Cognition & Emotion, 16(6), 721–747.

55.

Matsumoto

Ekman

(1989). American-Japanese cultural differences in intensity ratings of facial expressions of emotion. Motivation and Emotion, 13, 143–157.

56.

Matsumoto

Kasri

Kooken

(1999). American-Japanese cultural differences in judgements of expression intensity and subjective experience. Cognition & Emotion, 13(2), 201–218.

57.

Matsumoto

Kupperbusch

(2001). Idiocentric and allocentric differences in emotional expression, experience, and the coherence between expression and experience. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 4(2), 113–131.

58.

Matsumoto

Yoo

S. H.

Hirayama

Petrova

(2005). Development and validation of a measure of display rule knowledge: The display rule assessment inventory. Emotion, 5(1), 23–40.

59.

Mauss

I. B.

Butler

E. A.

Roberts

N. A.

Chu

(2010). Emotion control values and responding to an anger provocation in Asian-American and European-American individuals. Cognition and Emotion, 24(6), 1026–1043.

60.

Morio

Buchholz

(2009). How anonymous are you online? Examining online social behaviors from a cross-cultural perspective. AI & Society, 23(2), 297–307.

61.

NYC & Company. (2018). Research & analysis. https://business.nycgo.com/research/

62.

Othmani

Taleb

A. R.

Abdelkawy

Hadid

(2020). Age estimation from faces using deep learning: A comparative analysis. Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 196, 102961.

63.

Park

Tsai

J. L.

Chim

Blevins

Knutson

(2016). Neural evidence for cultural differences in the valuation of positive facial expressions. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 11(2), 243–252.

64.

Prochazkova

Kret

M. E.

(2017). Connecting minds and sharing emotions through mimicry: A neurocognitive model of emotional contagion. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 80, 99–114.

65.

Pugh

S. D.

(2001). Service with a smile: Emotional contagion in the service encounter. Academy of Management Journal, 44(5), 1018–1027.

66.

Raji

I. D.

Buolamwini

(2019, March). Actionable auditing: Investigating the impact of publicly naming biased performance results of commercial AI products. In Proceedings of the 2019 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (pp. 429–435). Association for Computing Machinery.

67.

Reisenzein

(1994). Pleasure-arousal theory and the intensity of emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 525–539.

68.

Rodríguez

Cucurull

Gonfaus

J. M.

Roca

F. X.

Gonzalez

(2017). Age and gender recognition in the wild with deep attention. Pattern Recognition, 72, 563–571.

69.

Russakovsky

Deng

Krause

Satheesh

Huang

Karpathy

Khosla

Bernstein

(2015). Imagenet large scale visual recognition challenge. International Journal of Computer Vision, 115(3), 211–252.

70.

Sato

Yoshikawa

(2007). Enhanced experience of emotional arousal in response to dynamic facial expressions. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 31(2), 119–135.

71.

Schmidhuber

(2015). Deep learning in neural networks: An overview. Neural Networks, 61, 85–117.

72.

Small

D. A.

Verrochi

N. M.

(2009). The face of need: Facial emotion expression on charity advertisements. Journal of Marketing Research, 46(6), 777–787.

73.

Söderlund

Sagfossen

(2017). The depicted service employee in marketing communications: An empirical assessment of the impact of facial happiness. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 38, 186–193.

74.

Suh

E. M.

(2007). Downsides of an overly context-sensitive self: Implications from the culture and subjective well-being research. Journal of Personality, 75(6), 1321–1343.

75.

Tidd

K. L.

Lockard

J. S.

(1978). Monetary significance of the affiliative smile: A case for reciprocal altruism. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 11(6), 344–346.

76.

Travel China Guide. (2018). 2018 China tourism statistics: Facts and figures of inbound and outbound. https://www.travelchinaguide.com/tourism/2018statistics/

77.

Tsai

J. L.

(2007). Ideal affect: Cultural causes and behavioral consequences. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(3), 242–259.

78.

Tsai

J. L.

Ang

J. Y. Z.

Blevins

Goernandt

Fung

H. H.

Jiang

Elliott

Kölzer

Uchida

Lee

Y.-C.

(2016). Leaders’ smiles reflect cultural differences in ideal affect. Emotion, 16(2), 183–195.

79.

Tsai

J. L.

Knutson

Fung

H. H.

(2006). Cultural variation in affect valuation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(2), 288–307.

80.

Tsai

J. L.

Louie

J. Y.

Chen

E. E.

Uchida

(2007). Learning what feelings to desire: Socialization of ideal affect through children’s storybooks. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(1), 17–30.

81.

Tsai

W.-C.

(2001). Determinants and consequences of employee displayed positive emotions. Journal of Management, 27(4), 497–512.

82.

Tsai

W.-C.

Huang

Y.-M.

(2002). Mechanisms linking employee affective delivery and customer behavioral intentions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(5), 1001–1008.

83.

Wang

Deng

(2021). Deep face recognition: A survey. Neurocomputing, 429, 215–244.

84.

Wang

Deng

Tao

Huang

(2019, October 11–17). Racial faces in the wild: Reducing racial bias by information maximization adaptation network. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 692–702). IEEE.

85.

Wang

Norice

Cranor

L. F.

(2011). Who is concerned about what? A study of American, Chinese and Indian users’ privacy concerns on social network sites. In International Conference on Trust and Trustworthy Computing (pp. 146–153). Springer.

86.

Zhao

Jiang

(2011). Cultural differences on visual self-presentation through social networking site profile images. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1129–1132). Association for Computing Machinery.