Let’s conduct a little thought experiment here: Imagine people from different countries, are settlers who just landed on a new continent. They do not share the same language or any norms. How would people adjust to achieve coordination and cooperation? How do they form a new community?

Recent work on cultures of facial expressions suggests that people from historically heterogeneous countries exhibit greater, and more recognizable facial expressivity than people from historically homogeneous countries. We propose that these cultural norms originate from ecological pressure to cooperate and establish rapport with people with little common ground (in the form of shared cultural norms) and little shared language.

To study that, I extend the models and procedures that I created in nonverbal synchrony research to people from different nations.