Humans are social animals, but we have a diversity of societies, each with their own customs, behaviors, and expectations. It’s obvious that those can affect how we respond to someone—favoring the comfort of familiar behaviors, for example—and people often try to account for that in themselves and in others. But sometimes the effect is more subtle. New research on Japanese bowing, published in the journal Japanese Psychological Research, has shown how cultural behaviors can affect how attractive we perceive a person to be.

Jun Kawahara of Hokkaido University conducted the study with Takayuki Osugi of Yamagata University using three-dimensional computer models to test whether someone bowing was perceived as more attractive than someone standing upright. In earlier experiments, they found that Japanese people rated portraits more attractive when they were tilted to simulate bowing. But it wasn’t clear if this response was culturally specific or if the attraction might be because of a universal social signal. “A downward head tilt increases perceived submissiveness, which could enhance perceived attractiveness across diverse cultures,” the authors wrote in the new study, setting out the idea they aimed to test.

When the researchers used three-dimensional models of people standing upright or performing bows, they saw a substantial increase in perceived attractiveness due to bowing among Japanese raters, but there was little to no effect found among the raters from other countries. In these experiments, participants were recruited from Japan, the United States, Brazil, India, China, and Taiwan. However, all the three-dimensional models used were East Asian in appearance. “The observed effect may have been driven by the culturally familiar combination within an East Asian group,” they wrote. In other words, people might have been responding differently to the bows because of the perceived racial appearance of the model.

To address this, the team repeated the experiments with models that represented four different racial appearances: East Asian, European, South Asian, and African. There were two groups of participants this time, who rated the models, one Japanese and the other from the United States. The findings clearly showed that the Japanese group found bowing more attractive regardless of the racial appearance of the model, while the United States group showed little to no bowing effect. In separate experiments using East Asian models, the researchers also varied the physical attractiveness of the models to test whether that affected the bowing response. Both Japanese and United States participants responded to differences in physical attractiveness, but bowing increased attractiveness ratings substantially more among Japanese participants.

“These results suggest that bowing motions are interpreted consistently within each cultural population, regardless of racial and physical appearance,” wrote the researchers. With more and more foreigners visiting and living in Japan, these findings highlight how responses to the same social gesture may differ depending on the observer’s cultural background.