Communication

User Generated

rzvyl2147

Humanities

Description

“The feelings, associations, connotations, and nuances of language both influence and are influenced by the culture” (Matsumoto & Juang, 2008, p. 227). Cultural differences exist in how people communicate with each other. You may be familiar with lexicons (what people call themselves and others), pragmatics (how language is used and understood), verbal and non-verbal communication styles; encoding; and decoding. Understanding how cultures communicate is important to effectively communicate within a multicultural environment. For example, imagine if you moved to a state or territory of the Middle East. You knew the language, but you were not aware of the cultural influence on nonverbal behaviors, such as hand gestures and interpersonal space. Would you be able to fit in?

For this Discussion, review this resources attached and consider cross-cultural communication.

With these thoughts in mind:

Post a brief explanation of the influence of culture on communication. Then explain two ways misunderstandings might occur among cultures with different communication styles. Finally, propose two solutions to enhance cross-cultural communication. Provide specific examples and justify your responses with references to current literature.

3-4 Paragraphs. APA Format. In-Text Citations to Support Writing.

Unformatted Attachment Preview

17 Culture and Social Cognition Toward a Social Psychology of Cultural Dynamics Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. YOSHIHISA KASHIMA Social cognition, broadly defined as human thought about social behavior, has received considerable attention in the literature since the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and, indeed, has become one of the most important areas of study in mainstream psychology. Within this large area, cross-cultural research on social cognition has come to play an extremely important role in defining issues and in influencing research and theory. In this chapter, Kashima presents a comprehensive overview of the area of culture and social cognition. He first begins with an excellent discussion of the concept of culture in psychology, distinguishing the concept of culture as meaning from cultural dynamics. As Kashima suggests, cultural dynamics has to do with the paradoxical phenomenon of cultural stability and change, which arises from two contemporary views of culture: system oriented and practice oriented. These definitions and discussions about the concept of culture are essential to Kashima’s later points about the necessity for the development and creation of theories and research on cultural dynamics, which represent a further evolution of research and thinking about social cognition, and an integration of approaches and knowledge from various disciplines. The bulk of Kashima’s chapter is devoted to a state-of-the-art review of research on culture and social cognition. This review promises to be one of the most comprehensive reviews on this topic. He begins with a treatment of the historical context of early social cognition research and with a presentation of background studies in the area. His detailed review spans such topics as availability of concepts, causal attributions, self-concepts, social and personal explanation, self-evaluation, and others. He delineates many of the issues that are highlighted through his thorough evaluation of the research literature, pointing out both what we know and what we do not in each area. The reader is sure to view this area of his chapter as an important resource for this line of inquiry. Using his review of the literature as a platform, Kashima delineates his ideas concerning future research and theoretical work in the area. With regard to future empirical work, he suggests that two topics in the area of culture and social cognition—the explanation of social action and the maintenance of self-regard—deserve closer scrutiny and further research in the future. In particular, while much is known about what North Americans tend to do with regard to these topics, relatively much less 325 Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. 326 CULTURE AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. is known about other people around the world, leaving this area ripe for investigation. In particular, the holistic approach and worldview perspective of East Asians may bring insights into this area of psychological functioning that heretofore were unconsidered. Clearly, however, the major thrust of Kashima’s argument for future work concerns the creation of what he terms the social cognition of cultural dynamics. As he explains at the beginning of his chapter and throughout his literature review, much of the early social cognition research and theories were characterized by an individualistic conception of meaning, according to which meaning is constructed solely within an individual person’s mind. There are many reasons for these biases in the literature, including the fact that most research was done in the United States by American researchers. Even research that was conducted outside the United States was often conducted by researchers who were trained in the United States (and thus influenced by Western educational dogma) or influenced by these factors. In the future, however, greater emphasis will need to be placed on the development of a theoretical framework that incorporates both cognitive and communicative processes in understanding cultural dynamics—that is, the processes by which cultural meanings are constructed in ongoing social activities among multiple individuals, as well as within an individual’s mind. This view of social cognition is inherently more complex, involving relational, collective, and individual issues, including the incorporation of context and history, as well as future and present time orientations. For these reasons, the development of such a theoretical viewpoint will necessitate fundamental changes in the ways in which we do research, which will ultimately lead to ways in which we understand human behavior in potentially profoundly different ways than now. This development of new theories and methodologies to ensure the continued evolution of knowledge in this area of psychology is commensurate with a message given by all authors throughout this volume. Until recently, culture has been a neglected concept in social cognition. Most theories, at worst, have ignored culture entirely or, at best, assumed that culture is connected unproblematically to the traditional social psychological concepts such as attributions and attitudes. To wit, the first edition of the Handbook of Social Cognition (Wyer & Srull, 1984) has no entries of culture, and this marginal status of the culture concept continued until the 1990s, as seen in the absence of culture in the second edition of the Handbook (Wyer & Srull, 1994). However, culture emerged recently as a major theme in social cognition. There is an increase in publication on culture and social cognition according to my recent search of the literature from 1989 to 1997 of the computer database PSYCINFO (Y. Kashima, 1998b). The main aim of this chapter is to make a case for a perspective that I call a social psychology of cultural dynamics. It attempts to understand global dynamics of culture as generated from cognitive and communicative processes of individuals in interaction with each other in social contexts. The chapter is divided into four sections. In the first section, the concept of culture is examined, and major meta- theoretical tenets of a social psychology of cultural dynamics are derived. In the second section, traditional metatheoretical and theoretical characteristics of social cognition are reviewed. The third section reviews the recent explosion of research on culture and social cognition that past reviews (e.g., Fletcher & Ward, 1988; J. G. Miller, 1988; Semin & Zwier, 1997; Zebrowitz-McArthur, 1988) did not cover. In the last section, empirical and theoretical directions of future research are suggested. Culture Concept in Psychology To clarify the perspective of a social psychology of cultural dynamics, it is necessary to clarify the concept of culture. The culture concept, despite its popularity and long history in social sciences, is multifaceted, and often ambiguous. Culture as Meaning Culture is analytically separable from concepts such as society and social system (e.g., Giddens, 1979; Parsons, 1951; Rohner, 1984; for a more recent discussion, see Y. Kashima, 2000a). On Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. CULTURE AND SOCIAL COGNITION one hand, society is an organized collection of individuals and groups, and social system refers to an enduring pattern of interpersonal, intergroup, and person-group relationships within a society. On the other hand, culture is a set of meanings shared, or at least sharable, among individuals in a society. Therefore, questions regarding power, resources, and friends have to do with social systems. In contrast, culture has to do with questions about what it means to have power and resources and what it means for a person to be a friend of another. The concept of meaning, however, is complex. At this stage, let us approximate meaning to the use of symbols, that is, material objects (including sound, light, and other chemical characteristics that are discernible by human senses) that are used to stand for something else. Obviously, words have meanings in this sense. Nevertheless, this sense of meaning goes beyond linguistic meaning. When a nonverbal gesture stands for other ideas (e.g., vertically stretched index and middle fingers standing for victory), this involves a meaning. When a toddler uses a round object as a steering wheel of a car, the child is engaged in a meaningful activity. Nonetheless, what it stands for does not exhaust the meaning of a symbol. The denotative (extensional) meaning is that to which a symbol refers (i.e., its referent). However, there is more to meaning than reference. As Frege (1984) noted long ago, if the referent of a phrase such as morning star or evening star is all there is to meaning, then a statement like “The morning star is the evening star” is a meaningless tautology. Yet, this statement can have a rich meaning given that humans had not known for a long time that the morning star and the evening star referred to the same object, Venus. Frege called this extra component of meaning sense. Meaning thus has at least two aspects, reference and sense. It is important to note that referential meaning should include not only literal meaning, but also figurative meaning. For instance, Lakoff and Johnson (1979) noted that a number of abstract concepts in English were based on metaphors. English sentences such as, “That meeting was a waste of time,” can be understood in terms of a metaphor that likens time to money. Just as money is wasted, time can be wasted, too. In 1994, Y. Kashima (also see Y. Kashima & Callan, 1994; Shore, 1996) argued that cultural metaphors provide rich meanings 327 for the experience of mental and social activities. In addition, narratives may also play an important role in the production and maintenance of cultural meanings (Bruner, 1990; Y. Kashima, 1998a). Cultural Dynamics Cultural dynamics has to do with the paradoxical phenomenon of cultural stability and change, that is, how some aspects of a culture are maintained in the midst of constant change, and cultural change continues despite strong forces of cultural maintenance. This question arose from a tension between two contemporary views of culture, system oriented and practice oriented (Y. Kashima, 2000a; also see Matsumoto, Kudoh, & Takeuchi, 1996). A systemoriented view treats culture as a relatively enduring system of meaning. Culture is conceptualized as a repository of symbolically coded meanings shared by a group of people, which provides structure to their experience. In contrast, a practice-oriented view regards culture as signification process in which meanings are constantly produced and reproduced by concrete individuals’ particular activities in particular situations. The system-oriented view highlights the stability of culture, whereas the practice-oriented view focuses on the fluid nature of culture in flux. The culture-as-meaning-system view was expressed by a number of cross-cultural psychologists and anthropologists. Most notably, when Triandis (1972) defined subjective culture as a “cultural group’s characteristic way of perceiving the man-made part of its environment” (p. 4), he was highlighting the enduring and systemic aspect of culture. A well-known anthropologist, Geertz (1973), characterized culture as “interworked systems of construable signs . . . something within which [social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes] can be intelligibly . . . described” (p. 14). Geertz’s formulation, called symbolic anthropology, likens culture to a text, which is publicly accessible and in need of reading and interpretation. Despite a difference between the views of culture of Triandis and Geertz, there is an underlying similarity. They both treat culture as a system of meanings that is shared within a group of people. For example, theorists who take this perspective often characterize a culture by using a global concept such as individualism or collectivism (Hofstede, 1980; Triandis, 1995), implying that a relatively stable system of beliefs Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 328 CULTURE AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR and values is shared in a society. Similarly, when Geertz (1984, p. 126) characterized the Western conception of the person as “a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe,” he implied that this conception was shared by people in the West. The culture-as-signification-process view was put forward by a variety of psychologists influenced by Vygotsky (1978; for an explication of Vygotsky, see Wertsch, 1985) and other thinkers of the Russian cultural-historical school. These include Cole (1996), Greenfield (1997), Lave and Wenger (1991), Rogoff (1990), Valsiner (1989), and Wertsch (1991). Although their theory of culture has progressed beyond Vygotsky’s original formulation, they view culture as a collection of concrete everyday practices that occur in everyday life (e.g., basket weaving, estimating amounts of rice). Boesch’s (1991) symbolic action theory and Poortinga’s (1992) context-specific cross-cultural psychology are similarly concerned with concrete activities as they occur within symbolic, physical, and social contexts. In anthropology, researchers influenced by Bourdieu (1977; habitus) and Giddens (1979; structuration) or by contemporary Marxist thoughts often take a similar view. Ortner (1984), a neo-Geertzian, also approaches culture from a similar viewpoint. An example of this approach is provided by a conceptualization of schooling (for a recent review, see Rogoff & Chavajay, 1995). For instance, Cole (1996) views schooling as a collection of context-specific and domain-specific cognitive and motor activities (e.g., reading and writing, remembering a list of words) that influence children’s cognitive task performance, such as recall and syllogistic reasoning. In other words, instead of explaining cultural differences in syllogistic reasoning performance in terms of differences in cognitive style (e.g., logical versus prelogical reasoning), this approach suggests that people from Western cultures tend to perform syllogistic reasoning tasks better than illiterate people because the reasoning tasks resemble activities that the former are used to at school. The two conceptions of culture differ on a number of metatheoretical dimensions. First, they differ in time perspective. The systemoriented view tends to see culture from a longterm perspective and attempts to capture stable aspects of a culture within a historical period (decades or centuries). In contrast, the practiceoriented view tends to construe culture from a short-term perspective and tries to identify activities (that is, people doing things together with tools) that recur in specific contexts. In other words, a unit of time is longer for a system-oriented investigation than for a practiceoriented analysis. Second, they differ in context specificity and domain specificity. The system-oriented view is generally concerned with culture viewed as a whole, as a context-general and domain-general meaning system that is carried and realized by a group of individuals. Culture, then, is abstracted from specific contexts of social action. Culture is often regarded as present, although it may lay dormant, in all contexts of social activities and all domains of life. The practiceoriented view, on the other hand, is interested in culture as particular activities that use particular artifacts (i.e., tools and other material objects) in particular contexts. This is a view of culture as a collection of context-specific signification activities. To the extent that a domain of meaning is often associated with a particular context (e.g., things to do at school or at home), this view tends toward a view that cultural meanings are domain specific. Third, they differ in unit of analysis. The system-oriented view takes a group of individuals as a unit of analysis, and culture is a phenomenon closely associated with the collectivity. In a way, culture is regarded as a property of the group. In contrast, the practice-oriented view takes a practice (a pattern of activities carried out by people) as a unit of analysis. In this perspective, culture is a property of situated activities, that is, people acting in context. It should be noted that this notion of practice and situated activities includes not only individuals, but also routine activities that take place in space and time. Neither view alone can provide a complete picture about cultural dynamics. One view’s strength is the other’s weakness. On one hand, the system-oriented view takes culture as given for a collective in a historical period. Culture in this sense becomes a “cause” or an independent variable in a quasi-experimental design of typical cross-cultural studies. In fact, comparative investigations must by necessity treat culture as stable systems and compare the slices of cultural traditions. However, this view often looks for factors external to culture as engines of cultural change (e.g., technology, material wealth, and ecology). Creative activities within a culture as a basis for cultural change tend to fall outside the scope of this perspective. Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. CULTURE AND SOCIAL COGNITION On the other hand, the practice-oriented view takes culture as constantly produced and reproduced. As such, both stability and change are part and parcel of culture. Developmental psychologists, who are concerned with how children are enculturated to become fullfledged participants of a culture, are necessarily interested in context-specific activities. After all, children must learn culture not by osmosis, but from concrete everyday activities. However, it is unclear in this view how one can determine theoretically which aspects of situated activities are to persist and which are to change. Furthermore, while this view provides detailed analyses of particular activities, it fails to shed light on a general pattern, a cultural theme, or something like a context-general meaning system that seems to cut across a number of domains of activities (e.g., see Jahoda’s 1980 criticism of Cole’s 1996 approach). Thus, the system-oriented and practice-oriented views of culture provide complementary perspectives on cultural dynamics. The culture-as-system view highlights the persistence of culture over time, whereas the culture-aspractice view focuses on the fluctuation of cultural meaning across contexts and over time. Nonetheless, both local fluctuations and global stability characterize culture. My contention is that we must investigate how both can be true. From the present perspective, the central question of cultural dynamics is how individuals’ context-specific signification activities can generate, under some circumstances, something stable that may be called a context-general meaning system and, under other circumstances, a rapid and even chaotic change. Culture and Social Cognition: Historical Context of Early Social Cognition Research Despite some early attempts at incorporating culture into human psychology (e.g., Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie), culture, broadly defined as shared meanings, has been outside the scope of academic psychology for much of the first half of the 20th century under the dogmatic and restrictive reign of logical positivism as a philosophy of science and behaviorism as its psychological counterpart. Behaviorism, in particular, banished any talk of human thought from the academic discourse of psychology. The cognitive revolution of the 1960s, in which human thought was reclaimed as a central con- 329 cern of psychology, failed to bring meaning, and therefore culture, back into the mainstream of academic psychology (Bruner, 1990). Social cognition emerged as an attempt at bringing cognition into social psychology. The 1960s saw publications of classic texts in attribution theories (e.g., Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967), and social psychology was flooded with research on attribution processes in the 1970s. A more self-conscious effort to draw on cognitive psychology began as well, making use of prototypically cognitive psychological methods such as recall and recognition memory, reaction time, and the like (e.g., Hastie et al., 1980, on person memory). The significance of social cognition in social psychology is undeniable. Some have gone as far as to claiming that social psychology is largely represented by social cognition (H. Markus & Zajonc, 1985). All the while, however, social cognition research emulated the cognitive psychology, pursuing a universal model of human cognitive processes at the expense of culture. It is intriguing to note that social cognition of the 1970s and 1980s was characterized by its dual emphasis on the individual person as a central focus. On one hand, much of the work was largely concerned about the process by which people form cognitive representations about themselves and other individuals. One enduring question has been how one comes to construe a person (either another individual or oneself) in terms of his or her dispositional characteristics, such as personality traits (e.g., as described by adjectives such as introverted and extraverted) or attitudes (e.g., stances with regard to social issues such as Castro’s Cuba or abortion; for a review, see S. T. Fiske & Taylor, 1991). On the other hand, theories of social cognition paid exclusive attention to the individual person’s cognitive processes, that is, the encoding of incoming information into cognitive representations, and the storage and retrieval of them for further use. These theories were social only to the extent that they dealt with social stimuli (i.e., other people). In other words, social cognition then exemplified the individualist conception of the person in terms of its subject matter and theoretical assumption. What underlay the early social cognition research was an individualist conception of meaning. According to this view, the individual constructs meaning by operating on cognitive representations stored in his or her own mind. To be sure, an individual person equipped Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 330 CULTURE AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR with the capacity to encode perceptual information into cognitive representations can also decode such individual representations into symbolic codes that are understandable to other individuals. Nonetheless, this individualist model of cognition makes for a model of communication that regards interpersonal communication as mere transmission of information (Clark, 1985). At an extreme, social cognitive minds can be likened to computers that send signals back and forth through rules of syntax and semantics. In this case, culture can be reduced to a “codebook” in which rules can be found to translate between cognitive codes and symbolic codes. During the Great Leap Forward of social cognition, however, metatheoretical, theoretical, and empirical challenges to the mainstream social psychology began to cumulate. Metatheoretically, Gergen (1973) argued that social psychology cannot hope to “discover” natural laws of social behavior, but only acquire historically contingent knowledge. Although social psychology may develop a theory of social behavior at one point in time, once it is disseminated to the general public, people can try to develop patterns of behaviors that differ from, or even contradict, it. In other words, humans are selfconstituting in that our collective attempt at characterizing ourselves can end up influencing ourselves. Gergen’s argument that humans are self-constitutive and the products of history that we ourselves have created echoes the point made by the counter-Enlightenment thinkers, such as Vico and Herder, who opposed the Enlightenment thought that regarded human nature as largely fixed and governed by universal natural laws (for a more detailed discussion, see Y. Kashima, 2000a). Theoretically, some of the central concepts in social psychology began to be scrutinized. For instance, social psychologists began to examine concepts such as personality traits and social attitudes, which were presumed to describe the underlying dispositions of people or consistency in their behavior. Most fundamentally, the capacity of the dispositional characteristics to predict specific behavior was questioned (see Mischel, 1968, for personality traits and Wicker, 1969, for attitudes). Based on these challenges, cognitively oriented researchers such as Shweder and D’Andrade (1979) and Cantor and Michel (1979) began to formulate theories of personality traits that treated them as indicating perceived, as opposed to actual, consistency in behavior. In other words, an in- dividual does not necessarily possess a disposition, but merely appear to do so. This trend reached its peak when Ross (1977) used the term fundamental attribution error to refer to North American participants’ tendency to attribute personality dispositions to an actor despite contextual information suggesting otherwise. When attribution of a disposition is regarded as an error, social psychology can hardly take its dispositional concepts seriously. Empirically, drawing on the past literature on culture and social behavior (e.g., for a review, see Triandis & Brislin, 1980), cross-cultural psychology began to mount empirical challenges to social psychology by presenting evidence that there is some significant cultural variability in social behavior (Bond, 1988). Amir and Sharon’s (1987) was among the most memorable contributions. They sampled several North American studies published in major journals of social psychology and systematically replicated the experimental procedures in Israel. They reported that, although main effects could be replicated, some of the finegrain interaction effects could not be, despite their importance for the main theoretical claims of the original papers. Within the context of the globalization of economy and the rapid change in the world order, such as the political and economic collapse of the Communist bloc and the emergence of newly industrializing nations (e.g., Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore), these cross-cultural challenges began to attract the attention of mainstream researchers. Cross-Cultural Research in Social Cognition Background The current popularity of culture and social cognition research owes much to Hofstede (1980) and Shweder and Bourne (1984). Hofstede’s research was based on his work value surveys around the world. In this massive, empirically driven work, he extracted dimensions on which cultures can be placed. The individualism dimension attracted the greatest attention partly because of the importance of the individualism concept in social sciences in general. A number of social scientists (e.g., Tönnies’ (1955), Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft; Durkheim’s (1964) mechanical and organic solidarity) used related concepts to characterize the transformation of Continental Europe from its Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. CULTURE AND SOCIAL COGNITION medieval past to the modern era. Close-knit communities in which everyone had known everyone else broke down, and there emerged modern nation states in which a central government controls the trade, police, and military might. The emphasis shifted from the community to the individual, with the gradual strengthening of individual rights. Collectivism characterizes the traditional sociality, whereas the modern social relationship is individualistic. An empirical finding that fueled the interest was probably its correlation with 1970 per capita gross national product. Country-level individualism positively correlated with per capita gross national product at .82. Richer countries in North America and western Europe are individualist, whereas poorer countries in Asia and South America tend to be collectivist. Hofstede’s (1980) finding clearly showed that there was a significant relationship between cultural values and economic activities, which is generally consistent with the accepted view of modernization, that is, from traditional communities to modern societies. His work provided a conceptual framework in which to interpret and understand myriad cross-cultural studies on beliefs, attitudes, and values. The concepts of collectivism and individualism also refocused theoretical attention on a central issue of social sciences, that is, the relationship between the collective and the individual. Shweder and Bourne’s study (1982), in contrast, was an ambitious, theoretically driven project. They posited three major theoretical orientations in interpreting cross-cultural diversity. Universalism looks for human universals in diversity by attempting to identify a higher order generality or by concentrating on a clearly defined band of data. Evolutionism rank orders cultural patterns relative to a normative model (e.g., the cannon of propositional calculus, Bayes’ rule of probabilistic reasoning) in terms of their deviation from the norm. It typically treats cultures as progressing toward the normative ideal. Relativism seeks to interpret each cultural pattern as an inherently meaningful pattern by itself and to maintain the equality among them. Against the background of the literature arguing for western Europeans’ abstractness relative to other cultures, such as Bali and Gahuku-Gama of New Guinea, Shweder and Bourne (1984) conducted interviews and showed that middle-class Euro-American participants, compared to Oriyan participants from a traditional city of Bhubaneswar in India, tended to use 331 abstract dispositional characterizations (e.g., “He is a leader” as opposed to “He lends people money”), and that their descriptions tended not to be put into context (e.g., “He is verbally abusive” as opposed to “He is verbally abusive to his father-in-law whenever they meet at his home”). Oriyas’s contextualized person description, they argued, is a sign of their holistic, sociocentric conception of the relationship of the individual to society. In adopting this relativist view, Shweder and Bourne (1984) argued against evolutionist interpretations. They showed that Oriyas adopted a contextual person description regardless of formal education, literacy, or socioeconomic status. According to them, this provides evidence against evolutionist explanations. Evolutionists would explain relative concreteness in Oriyas’s person description in terms of some cognitive deficit associated with a lack of education, literacy, or socioeconomic background. Oriyas do have abstract traitlike words in their language and are capable of generating those abstract concepts in an interview. This argues against the possibility that Oriyas lack abstract categories with which to describe people abstractly or lack a general capacity to do so. It is unlikely that North Americans encounter their target persons in more diverse settings and therefore are more likely to be able to abstract their dispositional characteristics. There is no evidence to suggest that North Americans live in a more heterogeneous social environment to prompt more abstract patterns of thinking. These two lines of work were drawn together into a single focus around 1990 by two major papers on culture and self, which triggered the avalanche of cross-cultural research in social cognition. Triandis (1989) theorized about cultural antecedents of the prevalence and access of self-concepts. He postulated that there are three types of self-concepts: private, public, and collective. The private self-concept is concerned with people’s conceptions about their own personal goals; the public self-concept has to do with people’s concerns about how others view them; and the collective self-concept is about people’s involvement in their in-groups. Every culture contains these different selfconcepts, but characteristics such as individualism, cultural complexity, and affluence determine the prevalence of the three types of self-concepts. Private self-concepts may be prevalent in individualist cultures, whereas public and collective self-conceptions may be prevalent in collectivist cultures. Cultural com- Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 332 CULTURE AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR plexity and affluence may promote the prevalence of private self-conceptions as well. Furthermore, different self-concepts may be more accessible in different social situations in different cultures according to Triandis. In 1991, H. R. Markus and Kitayama proposed a theory about psychological consequences when different self-concepts are accessed. In this influential formulation, they postulated that there is the universal aspect of the self, which is the self as a physically distinct body in time and space. However, the self can be construed in two different ways, independent and interdependent. Independent self-construals are characterized by their emphasis on the uniqueness and separateness of the individual self in contrast to others. In contrast, interdependent self-construals are characterized by their interpenetrations with significant others. That is, selves are conceived to be in interdependent social relationships with other people. They suggested that these self-construals, when accessed, would influence cognitive, affective, and motivational processes. Although Hofstede’s (1980) and Shweder and Bourne’s (1984) studies were not without their critics (for instance, see Y. Kashima, 1987, on Hofstede and see Spiro, 1993, on Shweder and Bourne), their contributions suggested that there are significant cultural differences, which may be examined empirically in terms of the contrast between worldviews that emphasize sociality (e.g., collectivist, sociocentric, interpersonal, and interdependent) and those that emphasize individuality (e.g., individualist, egocentric, personal, and independent). Triandis (1989) and H. R. Markus and Kitayama (1991) focused research attention on the self. Generally drawing on the then-current literature on social cognition of self-processes and cross-cultural psychology, they launched a theory that suggested that self-concepts mediate the effect of culture on psychological processes. Nonetheless, there were important differences. First, they differed in the unit of analysis. Hofstede (1980) used countries or cultures as the unit of analysis, computing cultural averages on surveys, whereas Shweder and Bourne (1984), as well as H. R. Markus and Kitayama (1991), treated individuals as the unit of analysis. Triandis (1989) attempted to connect the two using the self-concept as a central mediator. They also differed in their focus on self or person in general. Triandis’s and Markus and Kitayama’s contributions were concerned with self-concepts. However, Shweder and Bourne’s contribution was about conceptions of the person observed from people’s verbal descriptions of their acquaintances. Finally, they differed in operationalization of the constructs. Hofstede made individualism and collectivism operational in terms of importance of personal independence from the organizational context, while Shweder and Bourne made egocentric and sociocentric views of the person operational in terms of abstractness of person descriptions. Triandis and Markus and Kitayama treated them as reflecting the same underlying self-conceptions. In the current literature of culture and social cognition, these differences are generally glossed over or even ignored. But, is it warranted? Conceptual Advances Some theoretical advances since the early 1990s have significant implications for culture and social cognition. Availability, Accessibility, and Applicabilty of Concepts Higgins (1996) defined availability, accessibility, and applicability of concepts and provided a comprehensive review and discussion of the literature on knowledge activation. The availability of a concept refers to whether the concept is stored in an individual’s memory, whereas the accessibility of a concept means the “activation potential” of the available concept or the ease with which the concept already available in the mind is activated for use. The accessibility of a concept may vary chronically or temporarily due to factors such as motivation and frequency and recency of activation. Bargh, Bond, Lombardi, and Tota (1986) showed that chronic and temporary sources of accessibility are additively combined to produce effects. When accessible concepts are applicable to a given stimulus, the concepts are applied to the stimulus to interpret it. Much of recent research shows that concepts may be activated automatically and used without conscious awareness (Bargh, 1996). Hong, Chiu, and Kung (1997) provided an example of priming cultural concepts, in which the accessibility of concepts was increased temporarily. Hong et al. showed Hong Kong Chinese students pictures of objects that symbolized either Chinese or American culture and had the participants answer short questions such as, “What does this picture symbolize?” A short while later, in an allegedly unrelated Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. CULTURE AND SOCIAL COGNITION study, the participants rated the importance of traditional Chinese values. The participants endorsed the traditional Chinese values more in the Chinese picture condition than in the American picture condition. Pictures that symbolized a culture may have activated concepts and knowledge structures associated with the culture, which influenced subsequent cognitive processes in the experiments. The availability and accessibility of concepts may be associated closely with the language people use. This is one way of interpreting what is known as the Whorfian hypothesis, the idea that language determines thought (Chiu, Krauss, & Lee, 1999; for a recent review on the Whorfian hypothesis, see Hunt & Agnoli, 1991). Hoffman, Lau, and Johnson (1986) provided an example consistent with this thinking. They identified English and Chinese terms for which there were no equivalent economical words or phrases in the other language. Behavioral descriptions were developed for each term. English monolingual and ChineseEnglish bilingual individuals were given these person descriptions with the aim of forming distinct impressions. The bilingual individuals read them either in English or in Chinese. The bilingual individuals’ impressions of the target individuals and recognition memory were influenced by the concepts available in the language used in the experiment, although recall was not. In examining cultural differences in social cognition, it is important to consider the availability, accessibility, and applicability of a relevant concept in cultures concerned. If a culture does not provide a concept of importance, people from that culture could not use it (unless they invent it on the spot); if a concept is available in the cultures concerned, they may differ in accessibility and therefore may result in differences in cognitive processes; even if a concept is equally available and accessible in the cultures concerned, it may not be equally applicable in both. What is an intriguing possibility is that cultural concepts that are not consciously available, accessible, or applicable may still exert influences on social cognitive processes without awareness of the members of the culture. When a culture is going through a major change and its members are actively attempting to forget or discredit its past cultural practices, there may emerge a discrepancy between conscious awareness about concepts (explicit cognition) and automatically activated concepts (implicit cognition; see also Hetts, Sa- 333 kuma, & Pelham, 1999). A good example of this is perhaps once-prevalent stereotypes in the contemporary culture of political correctness (e.g., Devine, 1989). A Variety of Causal Attributions Another class of theoretical advances in social cognition has to do with the meaning of causal attribution. In the classical attribution theories, it has commonly been assumed that personal and situational attributions perfectly correlate negatively. That is, attributing a behavior to a person means that the context of the behavior is not causally implicated. Alternatively, saying that a behavior is situationally caused means that the person is not causally responsible. This hydraulic assumption of personal and situational causation (Heider, 1958) has been called into question by some empirical studies (F. D. Miller, Smith, & Uleman, 1981). At least North American participants may regard personal and situational causation as two independent forces. In line with this, current theories of attribution (e.g., Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Krull, 1993; Trope, 1986) draw a distinction between the attribution of a disposition and the adjustment of a dispositional inference on the basis of the contextual factors that may constrain the action. To put it differently, the cognitive process responsible for a dispositional inference is distinguished from the contextualization of the dispositional inference. These theories developed in North America suggest that, when faced with information about a behavioral episode, people first categorize the action into a dispositional category (e.g., personality trait, attitudes), and the implication of this categorization is then adjusted in light of the information about the contextual constraints. If the context is likely to hinder the enactment of the action, the dispositional inference is curtailed, albeit insufficiently, by some normative standards. Obviously, whether the same processes apply around the world needs to be examined by cross-cultural investigations. Nonetheless, the conceptual distinction between disposition and contextualization is highly pertinent to the discussion of cross-cultural research on social cognition, as discussed below. Two types of personal attribution, dispositional attributions (using personality traits to describe and explain a behavior) and agentic attributions (saying that a person is responsible for the behavior), have been assumed to be Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. 334 CULTURE AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR equivalent conceptually in the classical attribution literature. However, recent research has shown that a distinction needs to be made between them. Semin and Marsman (1994) and D. J. Hilton, Smith, and Kin (1995) showed that attributing to a person abstract dispositional characteristics is psychologically different from attributing agency to the person. To put it differently, to describe a person by a certain personality trait on the basis of an observed behavior is not the same as saying that this person is responsible for the behavior. that they are indeed conceptually separable. Brewer and Gardner (1996) also theorized about the conceptual separation among individual, relational, and collective aspects of the self. In line with the tripartite distinction among individual, relational, and collective aspects of the self, cross-cultural research on social cognition is reviewed according to whether the individual, relationship, or group is the target of conception. Individual as Target Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Individual, Relational, and Collective Selves Although the pioneering work in culture and social psychology contrasted the individualcentered and sociocentered worldviews (individualist, egocentric, personal, independent vs. collectivist, sociocentric, interpersonal, interdependent), Y. Kashima’s (1987) and Oyserman’s (1993) exploratory factor analyses (also see Trafimow, Triandis, & Goto, 1991), as well as Singelis’s (1994) confirmatory factor analysis, suggested that the individual-centered and sociocentered conceptions of the self are two independent concepts. More recently, Y. Kashima et al. (1995) further differentiated the sociocentered self into relational and collective facets, making distinctions among individual, relational, and collective self-conceptions. The existing theories of culture and self often conflate two types of sociality: one primarily concerned with the selfother relationship and the other about the relationship of the self with the in-group. Whereas the interpersonal relationship between the self and other individuals may provide a significant basis of sociality, the relationship between the self and its in-group constitutes another social aspect of the self, which requires separate treatment. They showed that measures of these three aspects of the self had relatively small correlations among themselves, and that, more importantly, individual and collective self-conceptions differentiated East Asian (Japanese and Korean) and English-speaking (Australian, American) cultures with Hawaiians in between, but relational self-conceptions differentiated men and women regardless of their cultural background. The finding that collective and relational self-conceptions had different relationships with culture and gender suggests Social cognition researchers have traditionally maintained a clear distinction between cognitions about the self (e.g., H. Markus, 1977) and those about others. This conceptual separation was to some extent based on the preconception that the self is a special psychological phenomenon that is uniquely different from any other psychological phenomena, as seen, for instance, in the assertion of Descartes about one’s privileged access to one’s self-knowledge (i.e., “Cogito ergo sum”). This assumption has been reinforced further by empirical findings that emphasize a difference between self-perception and perception of others. For instance, the classical research on actor-observer bias in attribution suggests that at least North Americans explain the behaviors of others in terms of dispositional characteristics more than their own behaviors (e.g., Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, & Maracek, 1973). Watson’s (1982) review showed its robustness, but interestingly, also revealed that North Americans tend to explain both themselves and others more in terms of personality dispositions than their circumstances. In other words, the literature on the actor-observer bias showed a significant similarity between selfcognition and cognition of others. In discussing a cultural difference in selfcognition and cognition of others, the oft-cited passage of Geertz (1984) provides a useful starting point: The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures. (p. 126) Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. CULTURE AND SOCIAL COGNITION The anthropological insight of Geertz can be abstracted into two component ideas. First, a person is attributed psychological agency, which is a “more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action.” Second, the individual is a figure against the background of the social and natural context, that is, the individual is “set contrastively both against other wholes and against its social and natural background.” This last idea needs further explication. Geertz is not saying that the Western conception ignores the social and natural context, but is asserting that the most prominent part of the phenomenal field is the individual person, and that the social and natural context in which the person is embedded lies in the background. This is often assumed to mean that the Western conception of the person is abstract or dispositional (e.g., John is friendly), and that nonWestern conceptions are concrete and contain action descriptions (e.g., John plays with children even if he doesn’t know them well). Furthermore, dispositional descriptions of a person mean that the person is decontextualized. Taken together, it is commonly believed that past cross-cultural studies of self-cognition and cognition of others showed that Western conceptions of the self and other are more agentic, dispositional, and decontextualized than their East Asian counterparts. However, in light of the recent theoretical developments in social cognition, the crosscultural studies require a more nuanced interpretation. As pointed out before, social cognition research suggests that the attribution of agency should be distinguished conceptually from the attribution of disposition, and the cognitive process for attributing a dispositional characteristic (e.g., a personality trait) to a person is distinguished from the cognitive process for contextualizing the dispositional attribution. In other words, agency attribution, dispositional attribution, and contextualization are all separable psychological processes in North America and probably in European cultures. However, there is no reason to expect a priori prevalence of these psychological processes should covary with culture. Explaining and Describing Others How Shall a Person Be Described? In 1984 and in 1987, J. G. Miller examined descriptions of acquaintances’ positive and negative behav- 335 iors given by North Americans and Hindu Indians of four age groups (8, 11, and 15 years old and adults).The study found that, in general, North American participants gave more dispositional and fewer contextual explanations than Hindu Indians. However, the tendency to give dispositional explanations increased with age for North Americans, but not for Hindu Indians. In contrast, the tendency to give contextual explanations increased with age for Hindu Indians, but not for North Americans. In addition, J. G. Miller reported that, of the four Indian adult groups examined, an Anglo-Indian group showed a preference for dispositional explanations relative to three Hindu Indian groups, although some of the Hindu Indian groups had more exposure to the Western-type education and way of life. Also, J. G. Miller gave a different group of North American participants English translations of behavioral narratives given by the Hindu Indian participants. The North American explanations again were oriented more toward disposition and less oriented toward context, although the behaviors to be explained originated from the Hindu Indian narratives. This last finding clearly showed that it was not the nature of the narratives that caused the cultural difference in explanatory style. All in all, J. G. Miller’s study showed clearly that North Americans generated explanations different from those generated by Hindu Indians. Her finding that a cultural explanation style became more pronounced for older participants provides strong evidence for the cultural explanation of the difference in explanatory style. Morris and Peng’s (1994) Study 2 provided additional support for a cultural difference in the type of explanations generated for individual behaviors. They coded newspaper articles about mass murderers (one American and one Chinese) in the United States; the articles appeared in English-language (New York Times) and Chinese-language (World Journal) newspapers published in New York and circulated worldwide. The proportion of segments that signified dispositional or contextual explanation was computed for each article. They found that English-language newspaper articles tended to explain the behaviors in dispositional terms more than Chinese-language newspaper articles for both cases (F. Lee, Hallahan, & Herzog showed a similar trend in their 1996 study). A reliable difference in contextual explanation was not found at the .05 level for either case. Using a different method, Morris and Peng’s (1994) Study 3 asked American and Chinese Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 336 CULTURE AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR (including Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China, and Republic of China) physics graduate students to rate the importance of a variety of dispositional and contextual explanations of the two murder cases (instead of generating explanations). On average, American participants rated the importance of dispositional causes as greater than Chinese participants for the Chinese murderer, although they did not show a reliable difference for the American murderer. In contrast, American participants rated the importance of contextual causes lower than Chinese participants for both cases. Taken together, Morris and Peng found some evidence that Americans may generate dispositional explanations more than Chinese, although there may not be differences in generation of contextual explanations. In contrast, Chinese may evaluate contextual explanations as more important than Americans, although there may not be a strong difference in evaluating the importance of dispositional causes (Morris and Peng made a similar point). It is interesting to note that Morris and Peng (1994) reported a pattern of findings consistent with this interpretation in their Study 1. They showed computer-generated movements of a black circle in reaction to a square (inanimate objects) and those of fish in reaction to a school of fish (animate objects) to American and Chinese high school and graduate students. Participants were asked to rate the extent to which these movements were due to dispositional or contextual forces. As expected, there was no cultural difference in the evaluation of causality for inanimate objects. For animate objects, high school students exhibited an expected pattern, although graduate students did not show any cultural difference. Chinese high school students rated contextual forces as more important than their American counterparts for all types of movements. However, Chinese students rated dispositional forces as less important than Americans only for one of three. Why People Describe Others the Way They Do Why do Asians and North Americans describe others the way they do? A popular answer is that it is due to a cultural difference in individualism or collectivism or due to independent or interdependent self-construal. Nonetheless, there is a surprising paucity of supportive evidence for this explanation. If we were to attribute a causal role to independent and interdependent self-construal, that is, if the prevalence and activation of self-schemata in an Asian or Western individual are to explain the cultural differences in person descriptions and explanations, we should be able to measure self-construals and show that the cultural differences disappear if we statistically control for the selfconstruals (self-concept mediation hypothesis). However, as Matsumoto (1999) noted, studies that took this approach did not find empirical support for a mediation effect of selfconstruals. Clearly, the self-concept mediation hypothesis needs to be examined more fully with more sophisticated measures. An alternative hypothesis is that there may be a cultural theory that affects the psychological process involved in both self-cognition and cognition of others (cultural theory hypothesis). Although it is not easy to separate these two viewpoints empirically, a cultural theory approach has received some attention in the past. In 1992, Y. Kashima, Siegal, Tanaka, and Kashima examined the role played in Australia and Japan by people’s implicit theory about attitude-behavior relationship. They reasoned that, in English-speaking countries, the values of sincerity and authenticity (Trilling, 1972) encourage people to make their feelings and avowals consistent with each other, whereas the Japanese notions of omote and ura (front and back, respectively) suggest that people should express their feelings appropriately in suitable contexts (Doi, 1986). Accordingly, Australians would have a stronger belief in attitude-behavior consistency than Japanese. Japanese and Australian students’ attitude attributions were examined in a paradigm used by Jones and Harris (1967), in which participants were asked to read a hypothetical actor’s essay about environmental issues. It was found by Y. Kashima et al. that Australians attributed corresponding attitudes more than Japanese overall. Nonetheless, this cultural difference was mediated by the extent to which Australians and Japanese differed in beliefs in attitude-behavior relationship. When the effect of attitude-behavior relationship beliefs was statistically controlled, the cultural effect on attitude attribution became nonsignificant. It is interesting to note that subsequent studies on attitude attributions comparing Americans with Koreans (Choi & Nisbett, 1998) or with Taiwanese (Krull et al., 1999) showed that there was no cultural difference in the extent to which participants attributed attitudes corresponding to the actor’s behavior. In a recent study, Chiu, Hong, and Dweck (1997) showed that people’s implicit theory of Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. CULTURE AND SOCIAL COGNITION Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. personality is related to the tendency to make dispositional attributions. According to Dweck (1999), people hold an implicit theory about the nature of personality. Some believe personality consists of fixed and unchangeable traits (entity theory), whereas others believe personality is a dynamic quality that can be developed and changed. In four studies, Chiu et al. showed that, when compared to incremental theorists, entity theorists are more likely to generalize an individual’s behavior from one specific situation to another (Study 1), to predict an individual’s behavior from his or her personality trait (Study 2), and to attribute trait dispositions from a single behavior (Study 3). In Study 5, a manipulation of people’s implicit theory also produced a similar result. In their Study 4, the relationship between implicit theory and tendency to make trait dispositional judgments was examined in Hong Kong and the United States. In both cultures, implicit theory predicted dispositional attributions, and Americans showed a stronger tendency to make dispositional attributions than Hong Kong Chinese; however, this cultural difference was not related to implicit theory of personality. Both samples showed a similar level of entity theory. Taking Situational Constraints into Account Even if cultures differ in dispositional attribution, this does not always mean that they differ in the extent to which situational constraints are taken into consideration. The participants in Study 2 of Y. Kashima et al. were told, in one condition, that the writer wrote the essay freely, but in the other condition, they were told that the writer wrote the essay because he was instructed to do so by his teacher. Jones and Harris (1967) argued that, when the essay writer’s behavior was constrained by an authority’s instruction, the behavior should not be diagnostic of the writer’s underlying attitudes, and therefore a rational observer should not attribute an attitude in correspondence to the behavior. However, their study (and others; see Jones, 1979) found that people tended to attribute attitudes despite the situational constraints. This tendency to give insufficient weight to situational constraints has been called a correspondence bias (Gilbert & Malone, 1995). Replicating the work of Jones and Harris (1967), Y. Kashima et al. (1992) found that both Japanese and Australians failed to take into account the situational constraint on the essay writer. Consistent with this, Choi and Nisbett (1998; Study 337 1) in the United States and Korea, and Krull et al. (1999; Study 1) in the United States and Taiwan found little difference in correspondence bias using the attitude attribution paradigm; the last researchers found no cultural difference in their replication of the work of Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977) in the United States and Hong Kong (Study 2). Nevertheless, Choi and Nisbett (1998) showed that, when situational constraints of behavior are made salient, Koreans take into account the information about situational constraints more than Americans. In their Study 2, they used the attitude attribution paradigm of Jones and Harris (1967). That is, participants were told that a student wrote an essay under choice and no choice conditions, and the salience of situational constraints was manipulated at two levels. In one condition, the participants experienced the same situational constraints as the essay writer (i.e., they were given no choice in writing an essay), and in the other condition, the participants experienced the constraints and were given a set of arguments for them to use in writing their essays. Choi and Nisbett combined the data from the no choice condition in their Study 1 with the Study 2 data and found that the salience manipulation decreased the amount of correspondence bias for Koreans, but had no effect for Americans. This may mean that Koreans (and possibly East Asians in general) are more sensitive to situational constraints under some circumstances than Americans. Alternatively, Koreans may be more empathetic than Americans. Note that, in their experiment, the participants were required to experience situational constraints and transpose this experience onto the essay writer. Some evidence corroborates this interpretation. In the work of Choi and Nisbett, as well as that of Y. Kashima et al. (1992), the participants’ own attitudes predicted the attitudes attributed to the essay writer more strongly in the Korean or Japanese sample than in the U.S. or Australian sample. Conceptualizing the Self Open-Ended Self-Descriptions The results of cross-cultural studies of open-ended self-descriptions largely mirror those of descriptions of others. When asked to describe themselves, North Americans tend to use more abstract, decontextualized words and phrases. Studies reviewed typically made use of the Twenty Statements Test (TST; Kuhn & McPartland, 1954) or its variants, in which people are asked to an- Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 338 CULTURE AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR swer the question, “Who am I?” by completing 20 sentences that start with “I am . . . ” Bond and Cheung (1983), in their pioneering study, examined Hong Kong Chinese, Japanese, and American students’ self-descriptions on the TST and found that Japanese self-descriptions included fewer general psychological attributes (typically personality trait words) than American ones, though they failed to find a difference between Japanese and Chinese participants in this regard. Subsequent studies using a similar technique showed that in both Malaysia (Bochner, 1984) and India (Dhawan, Roseman, Naidu, Thapa, & Rettek, 1995), self-descriptions tended to have lower percentages of personality traitlike descriptions than in English-speaking countries (Australia and Britain for Bochner; United States for Dhawan et al.). However, English-speaking Indian participants could show a level of personality trait use similar to British and Bulgarian participants (Lalljee & Angelova, 1995). Cousins (1989) used a variant of this method. He first used the TST and examined all the selfdescriptions, as well as five self-descriptions that the participants selected as most important. He reported the results of the five most important self-descriptions as there was only a small difference. They found that U.S. students’ self-descriptions included a greater proportion of personality traitlike descriptions (58%) than their Japanese counterparts (19%); however, Japanese students used a greater proportion (27%) of social descriptions, such as social roles, institutional memberships, and the like than American students (9%). Immediately after the typical TST, Cousins (1989) asked his participants to “Describe yourself in the following situations:” followed by the phrases “at home,” “at school,” and “with close friends” (p. 126). The exact format of this “contextualized” version of the self-description task is unclear from his writing, however. For instance, it is unclear how many times the participants were to write their self-descriptions, whether they were told to describe themselves a set number of times for each of the three settings listed (i.e., at home, at school, and with close friends), or if none of these things were explicitly stated. Nonetheless, the findings are intriguing. Cousins reported the reversal of the TST finding: That is, the Japanese participants mentioned pure attributes more (41%) than the Americans (26%). In this contextualized version, the Americans qualified their traitlike self-descriptions more (35%; e.g., “I am usually open with my brother,” p. 129) than the Japanese (22%). Leuers and Sonoda (1996; Sonoda & Leuers, 1996) largely replicated Cousins’s findings using data from Japanese and Irish subjects. Following Cousins (1989; also see Shweder & Bourne, 1984), these findings can be interpreted as showing that culturally constituted conceptions of the person are different between the United States and Japan. The Japanese tendency to describe themselves using abstract traitlike terms in the contextualized format indicates that they are as capable of abstract self-descriptions as their American or Irish counterparts. Cousins argued that the Japanese conception of the self is more situated and contextualized. Rhee, Uleman, Lee, and Roman (1995) examined self-descriptions of Koreans, Asian Americans, and European Americans on the TST. They also divided the Asian American group into three groups: those who mentioned both ethnicity (e.g., Asian American) and nationality (e.g., Chinese, Indian; doubly identified), those who mentioned either ethnicity or nationality (singly identified), and those who mentioned neither (unidentified). The percentage of trait self-descriptions increased from Koreans (17%), to doubly identified Asian Americans (24%), to singly identified Asian Americans (31%), and to European Americans (35%), as expected. Surprisingly, unidentified Asian Americans had the greatest percentage of trait self-descriptions (45%). The authors then computed the percentage of autonomous, social, abstract, and specific self-descriptions. The percentage of abstract descriptions was greatest for unidentified Asian Americans, followed by Euro-Americans, singly identified and doubly identified Asian Americans, and Koreans (the percentage of specific descriptions was opposite to this trend). Likewise, the percentage of autonomous self-descriptions followed the exact pattern as that of abstract ones (the percentage of social descriptions showed a reverse pattern). As Triandis, Kashima, Shimada, and Villareal (1986) suggested, those who are extremely acculturated into the host culture (unidentified Asian Americans) may have become even more Americanized than the majority of the host culture. Intriguingly, the correlation between abstract and autonomous self-descriptions was highest among Euro-Americans and unidentified and singly identified Asian Americans (.77 to .74), but was lower among the other groups (.58 to .34). The cross-cultural variation in the correla- Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. CULTURE AND SOCIAL COGNITION Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. tions implies a conceptual distinction between abstract self and agentic self. Structured Measures of Self-Conceptions There is less direct evidence for cultural difference in self-conceptions when structured measures are used (Takano, 1999). Singelis (1994) was probably the first to provide this type of evidence. He showed that Asian Americans scored higher on the interdependent and lower on the independent self-construal than European Americans in Hawaii, and that a difference between the tendency of Asian and European Americans to make situational explanations can be explained by the interdependent selfconstrual. Nonetheless, the data came from American participants from different cultural backgrounds. Kashima et al. (1995) provided further evidence for cultural differences in self-conception by examining two East Asian countries (Japan and Korea), two Western countries (Australia and the United States), and Hawaii. They devised measures of four different aspects of self-conception. Two of the four pertained to agency and assertiveness, that is, the extent to which the self is perceived to be a goal-oriented agent or an assertive individual (individualist); one had to do with the extent to which the self is conceptualized in relation to another individual (relational); and the last aspect was concerned with the self as a member of one’s ingroup (collective). The four self-aspects were shown to have only moderate correlations in Australia, the United States, Hawaii, Japan, and Korea. A major cultural difference was found for the two individualist aspects of the self. Australian and American students rated higher on these measures than Japanese and Korean students, with the Hawaiian sample in between. Although there was a small cultural difference for the collective aspect of the self, cultural differences in relational self showed an unexpected pattern, with the Korean and Japanese samples marking the highest and lowest scores, respectively. Instead, there was a stronger gender difference on relational self: Women were more relational than men in most samples. Self in Context Theorists have suggested that individualist or collectivist tendencies (e.g., Triandis, 1995), and indeed accessible self-conceptions (e.g., Triandis, 1989), are context dependent. Although the context sensitivity of individualism and collectivism has been shown 339 (e.g., Fijneman, Willemsen, & Poortinga, 1996; Matsumoto, Takeuchi, Andayani, Kouznetsova, & Krupp, 1998; Rhee, Uleman, & Lee, 1996) and the context-sensitive measures of these constructs have been developed (e.g., Matsumoto, Weissman, Preston, Brown, & Kupperbusch, 1997), it is unclear how context-sensitive cultural differences in the self-concepts are. One possibility is that collective selves are more accessible and individualistic selves are less accessible across all contexts in collectivist cultures such as East Asia than in individualist cultures such as North America (generality hypothesis). Another possibility is that individualistic and collective selves can be accessible in different contexts in different cultures (Culture × Context Interaction Hypothesis). In the domain of resource exchange behavior, Poortinga and colleagues (Fijneman et al., 1996; Poortinga, 1992; van den Heuvel & Poortinga, 1999) postulated a universalist interaction hypothesis. According to these researchers, there is a universal pattern of resource exchange so that certain types of resources are more likely to be exchanged with certain types of others; however, there are some cultural variations in specific contexts (also see Kroonenberg & Kashima, 1997). Uleman, Rhee, Bardoliwalla, Semin, and Toyama’s (1999) study extended this line of reasoning to the domain of self. They constructed a new measure of relational self in which a respondent is asked to indicate how close the self is to specific others such as immediate family, relatives, and close friend in terms of global closeness, emotional closeness, mutual support, identity, reputation, similarity, and harmony. The degree of closeness was indicated by the amount of overlap between two circles, as in a Venn diagram. The data were collected from Euro-Americans, Asian Americans, Dutch, Turkish, and Japanese university students. Their Culture × Gender × Target × Closeness type analysis of variance (ANOVA) suggested that, of all the two-way interaction effects, Target × Closeness type effect was the largest, which suggests the importance of context specificity of relational self. To explore a significant Culture × Target × Closeness type interaction, they computed the deviation scores of each culture’s Target × Closeness type means from the averages across all cultural groups and conducted a cluster analysis on these deviation scores. This showed that the European American and Dutch groups formed a tight individualist cluster, and the Turkish and Japanese Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. 340 CULTURE AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. groups formed another looser collectivist cluster, with the Asian Americans joining the latter. Cognitive Representations of the Self Crosscultural research has been conducted not only on self-descriptions, but also on cognitive representations of the self. Trafimow et al. (1991) postulated that different types of self-cognitions may be stored in different storage places. In particular, they tested between two models, one suggesting that individualist and collective self-cognitions are stored in one location (onebasket model) and the other model suggesting they are stored in two separate locations (twobasket model). The two-basket theory predicts that priming one type of self-conceptions would increase the accessibility of only the same type of self-conceptions. However, one-basket theory predicts that both individual and collective selves would be more accessed when either individualist or collectivist concepts are primed. According to Trafimow et al., the one-basket theory predicts that the retrieval of one type of self-cognition is equally likely to be followed by any other type of self-cognition. However, the two-basket theory predicts that the retrieval of one type of self-cognition is more likely to be followed by the same type of self-cognition. To put it differently, if the two-basket theory is true, the conditional probability of retrieving an individual self-cognition given that an individual self-cognition has been retrieved immediately before is greater than the conditional probability of retrieving a collective self-cognition in the same condition or vice versa, that is, p(I*I) > p(I*C) and p(C*C) > p(C*I). In Study 1, Trafimow et al. (1991) primed both European American students and students who had Chinese family names and whose native language was not English by having them think what made them different from their families and friends (individual prime) and what they had in common with their families and friends (collective prime) for 2 minutes and then had the participants respond to the TST for 5 minutes. The experiment was conducted in English. Although all participants reported more individual self-cognitions than collective ones, this tendency was greater for North American students than for Chinese students. Consistent with the two-basket theory, the priming manipulation had differential effects on individual and collective self-cognitions. In addition, the conditional probabilities computed from the TST showed the pattern that the authors argued was consistent with the two- basket theory. In Study 2, they primed individualist and collectivist concepts by a different method (having participants read a story that emphasized either personal characteristics or family relationships) using American students and replicated the Study 1 findings. Trafimow, Silverman, Fan, and Law (1997) conducted a comparable experiment using English and Chinese in Hong Kong with bilingual Chinese students. The two priming methods in Trafimow et al. (1991) were both used in this experiment, including an additional no priming control condition. In the English language condition, the results were largely consistent with those of Trafimow et al. (1991). However, in the Chinese language condition, the priming manipulation had no effect, although the conditional probabilities showed the pattern consistent with the two-basket model. Gardner, Gabriel, and Lee (1999) extended the work of Trafimow and colleagues (1991) by examining the effects of priming individual and collective selves not only on self-descriptions, but also on value and morality judgments. In Experiment 1, they showed that two methods of priming individual and collective selves (Trafimow et al., 1991, and Brewer & Gardner, 1996) affected in expected ways North American students’ TST responses, as well as endorsement of individualist and collectivist values and the extent to which the responsibility to help needy others was seen to be a universal obligation, and that the effect of priming on value endorsement was mediated by selfdescriptions. Experiment 2 was conducted with American and Hong Kong students using English. Trafimow et al.’s (1991) priming manipulation was followed by a value questionnaire. In the no prime control condition, Americans endorsed individualist values more strongly than collectivist values, but this was reversed in Hong Kong. However, when Americans’ collective selves were primed, Americans endorsed collectivist values more than individualist values; the priming of individual selves did not affect value endorsement. In contrast, when Hong Kong Chinese students’ individual selves were primed, they endorsed individualist values more than collectivist values; the priming of collective selves did not change the value endorsement pattern. It is yet to be seen whether this is replicated using Chinese (see Trafimow et al., 1997). Issues Associated with the Research on SelfRepresentation There are both methodological and theoretical problems about self-repre- Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. CULTURE AND SOCIAL COGNITION sentations. Methodologically, the TST has many problems despite its popularity. Wylie (1974) expressed some doubts about the construct validity of its coding schemes. In the contemporary uses of TST, a variety of coding schemes has been suggested. Triandis (1995) suggested the percentage of social items S% as a measure of allocentrism (individual-level construct of collectivism). Trafimow et al. (1991) classified TST responses into two categories, individual and collective. Bochner (1984) used a tripartite scheme of individual, relational, and collective responses. Watkins, Yau, Dahlin, and Wondimu (1997) suggested a four-part scheme: idiocentric (individual-level construct for individualism), large group (e.g., gender, occupation), small group (e.g., family), and allocentric (e.g., I am sociable). Other researchers (e.g., Cousins, 1989; Dhawan et al., 1995) used more complex coding schemes. Rhee et al. (1995; also see Parkes, Schneider, & Bochner, 1999) devised a scheme in which many categories are used to code self-descriptions, but they are then aggregated to construct two indices, abstractness (as opposed to specific) and autonomy (as opposed to social). This coding scheme is consistent with the current theory of attributions that distinguishes attributions of trait dispositions and those of agency (as discussed above). Some researchers used only a subset of 20 statements (e.g., Bochner, 1984; Cousins, 1989), whereas others used all 20. These methodological differences may not affect conclusions about cultural differences according to Watkins et al. (1997), however. The TST has other problems as well. Not only its context-free nature (e.g., Cousins, 1989), but also its use of the word “I” as a cue may be problematic. As E. S. Kashima and Kashima (1997, 1998) noted, different languages have different sets of first-person pronouns, with some languages having multiple first-person pronouns (e.g., Japanese). This raises a difficult question of which personal pronoun to use in cross-cultural comparisons (also see Leuers & Sonoda, 1999). No systematic investigation has been conducted on this issue. Finally, Triandis, Chan, Bhawuk, Iwao, and Sinha (1995) reported that, within a U.S. sample, a measure of allocentrism (individual-level collectivism) based on TST (S%) did not correlate with structured measures of allocentrism. This last finding suggests that psychological processes that lead to the use of socially relevant descriptors in self-descriptions may not be related to the 341 attitudes and values measured by structured questionnaires. Theoretical issues have been raised about self-representations. From the perspective of Deaux’s model of social identity (1993; Deaux, Reid, Mizrahi, & Ethier, 1995), Reid and Deaux (1996) challenged the two-basket theory of selfrepresentation. According to Deaux, self-cognitions are organized in a more integrated manner than the two-basket theory suggests. A woman may represent herself in terms of her role as a sister/daughter in her family, her occupation as a lawyer, or as the partner of her significant other. Associated with each social identity (collective self) may be a set of psychological attributes (individual selves), such as relaxed and smart for the sister/daughter identity and hardworking, active, and smart for the lawyer identity. The integrated model suggests, then, that collective selves are associated with each other and individual selves are associated with each other, just as the two-basket theory implies. In addition, the former postulates that some individual selves are associated with collective selves as well. Reid and Deaux (1996) examined Deaux’s model in an elaborate recall experiment in three sessions that spanned several weeks. In the first session, each of the 57 participants in the interview listed self-defining characteristics that are social categories or groups to which they belong (see S. Rosenberg & Gara, 1985). One week later, in the second session, each participant rated the importance of the individualized list of collective and individual self-descriptions. After a 5-minute distracter task, each participant recalled items from the list. Several weeks after the second session, 29 of the original 57 rated the extent to which the individual selves (psychological attributes) were associated with each collective self (social identities). Reid and Deaux showed that the conditional probability measures followed a pattern similar to that of Trafimow et al. (1991) and examined the adjusted ratio of clustering (ARC) scores, which measure the extent to which recalled items are clustered around a theme (Roenker, Thompson, & Brown, 1971). The ARC score for clustering around individual versus collective themes (consistent with the two-basket theory) was .23, and the ARC score for social identities (consistent with the integrated model) was .34. Both scores were significantly greater than zero. Although the latter score is numerically greater than the former, no statistical test was reported. The conditional probabilities of recalling an Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. 342 CULTURE AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR individual self given that a collective self has been recalled previously and the conditional probabilities of recalling a collective self given that an individual self has been retrieved previously closely matched what was expected from the degree of association between collective and individual selves as examined by a cluster analysis (DeBoeck & Rosenberg, 1988). The authors concluded that the results are generally more consistent with the integrated model than with the two-basket model. Nonetheless, the data of Trafimow and colleagues (1991, 1997) and Reid and Deaux may need to be interpreted with caution. Recall that both teams used conditional probabilities as measures of memory association between individual and collective self-cognitions. Skowronski and colleagues (Skowronski, Betz, Sedikides, & Crawford, 1998; Skowronski & Welbourne, 1997), however, showed that conditional probabilities may provide biased estimates of memory associations. This is because expected conditional probabilities depend on the total number of individual and collective self-cognitions. The concerns of Skowronski and colleagues’ should be addressed in future studies. Although the ARC results obtained in the Reid and Deaux study may not be affected by this concern, a critical statistical test was not reported in their study, as noted above. It is too early to conclude definitively the validity of these models. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Self-Evaluation Positive Self-Regard Despite the centrality of the self-esteem concept in North America, it may not occupy as central a place for people from East Asian cultures. Heine, Lehman, Markus, and Kitayama (1999) argued that East Asians and Japanese in particular do not have a strong need for positive self-regard as it is usually conceived within contemporary social psychology. According to them, North Americans are self-enhancing, whereas Japanese are self-improving. North Americans seek to identify positive attributes of the self (positive abilities in particular) and attempt to maintain and enhance self-esteem by affirmation when their self-esteem is under threat (e.g., failing in a task). In contrast, Japanese seek to identify discrepancies between what is ideally required of them and what they perceive themselves to be and attempt to improve those failings. In other words, both North Americans and Japanese try to reach the ideal, but the former focus on positives and try to move toward the ideal, whereas the latter focus on negatives and try not to fall behind. Heine et al. (1999) suggest that self-enhancement and self-improvement are functional in independent and interdependent cultures, respectively. In cultures in which people view themselves as independent agents and seek to distinguish themselves from others, it is functional to emphasize one’s uniqueness by insisting that one is above average. In contrast, in cultures in which people view themselves as interdependent with others and seek belongingness with their in-groups, one gains a sense of belongingness by trying to attain the ideal that is shared by the members of one’s significant in-group. It is adaptive in this type of culture to try not to fall behind others rather than to try to go beyond them. In line with this argument, samples of Japanese individuals have consistently revealed lower levels of selfesteem than their North American counterparts, as gauged by M. Rosenberg’s (1965) self-esteem measure. Corroborating this is the finding that the self-esteem of Japanese visiting North America tends to increase, while the self-esteem of North Americans visiting Japan tends to decline. Indeed, a number of studies suggest that Japanese students do not exhibit the tendency to maintain their self-esteem that their North American counterparts do. One such instance is the so-called unrealistic optimism bias (for reviews, see Greenwald, 1980; Taylor & Brown, 1988). Heine and Lehman (1995) showed that European Canadian students exhibited a greater degree of optimism relative to Japanese students. In their Study 1, they used two methods for examining optimism bias. One (within-group) method was to have participants rate the likelihood of positive and negative life events (e.g., enjoying one’s career, becoming an alcoholic) happening to them relative to average students of the same sex in their university. In the other (between-group) method, one group of participants estimated the percentage chance of the events happening to themselves without any reference to average students, and the other group estimated the percentage chance of the same events happening to the average same-sex student from their university. On both measures, the Canadian students showed an optimism bias by estimating the likelihood of their enjoying positive events to be greater and that of their suffering from negative events to be smaller than the average student. The Japanese students, however, did not exhibit this pattern. In Study 2, Heine and Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. CULTURE AND SOCIAL COGNITION Lehman examined the extent to which Canadian and Japanese students are optimistic about negative life events relevant to independent (e.g., becoming alcoholic) and interdependent (e.g., making your family ashamed of you) aspects of the self. Again, Canadians showed optimism regardless, but Japanese displayed less optimism on the within-group measure or even pessimism on the between-group measure. That East Asians show a lower level of optimism than North Americans has been corroborated by other studies. In Y. T. Lee and Seligman’s (1997) study, European Americans showed the highest level of optimism, followed by Chinese Americans, with mainland Chinese exhibiting the lowest level of optimism. In a related vein, Y. Kashima and Triandis (1986) also showed that Japanese students exhibited less self-serving attributions following success and failure experiences than their American counterparts. The Japanese students studying in the United States attributed their failures in a task purportedly related to intelligence to their lack of ability more than American students. Nevertheless, it is important to note that less optimism among East Asians does not necessarily generalize to all collectivist cultures. Chandler, Shama, Wolf, and Planchard (1981) examined attribution styles in five cultures (India, Japan, South Africa, the United States, and Yugoslavia) and found that self-serving attribution patterns were present in all cultures, including collectivist cultures such as India. One possible interpretation of the Japanese self-improving tendency is a modesty bias. That is, Japanese would be privately self-enhancing as much as Americans, but they publicly present themselves as modest by being self-effacing. Existing evidence does not seem to support this argument, however. For example, Kashima and Triandis (1986) examined Japanese and American students’ attributions of success and failure in both public and private conditions and detected no difference between them. Japanese were self-deprecating in both conditions. This study, nonetheless, is a weak test of this hypothesis due to its small sample size. More recently, Heine, Takata, and Lehman (2000) showed that the Japanese tendency to focus on their negative performance seems to be present even in an experimental setting in which selfpresentation appears to be difficult. It is interesting that even Japanese people appear to have some implicit positive selfregard. Kitayama and Karasawa (1997) showed that Japanese students exhibited a name-letter 343 effect, in which a letter used in their own names was regarded more positively than those letters not used in their names, suggesting that they have some positive regard for things associated with themselves. Hetts et al. (1999) also reported a series of experiments in which selfregard was measured implicitly. In Study 1, they measured the regard of Asian Americans, European Americans, and recent Asian immigrants for their individual self and collective self. The task was to decide whether a word followed by a prime word such as “me” or “us” is “good” or “bad.” The faster a good response is relative to a bad response, the more positively regarded is the prime word. There was a large difference among the three groups on the positivity of “me,” with the positivity of the Asian American group being the greatest, followed by that of the European Americans. The regard of the recent Asian immigrants regard for “me” was even negative. In contrast, the order of the groups was reversed for the positivity of “us” (see Rhee et al., 1995, for a similar finding about strongly acculturated Asian Americans). In Study 2 of Hetts et al. (1999), Asian Americans, European Americans, and recent Asian immigrants did a word completion task. Word fragments were to be completed while the participants responded to another task designed to prime either individual or collective self. The number of completed word fragments that implied positive meanings relative to that which implied negative meanings was used to measure implicit self regard. The results replicated those of Study 1. In Study 3 of Hetts et al. (1999), the selfregard of Japanese students was measured using the method used in Study 1. The Japanese words “watashi” (I), “watashitachi” (we), and “jibun” (self), were used as a prime. The results showed that the Japanese students who had never lived outside Japan showed a positive response to “watashitachi” and “jibun,” but a neutral response to “watashi.” In contrast, this was reversed for the students who had lived for at least 5 consecutive years in the United States or Canada. They showed a positive regard for “watashi,” but had negative responses to “watashitachi” and “jibun.” Throughout the studies, however, explicit measures of selfregard (e.g., M. Rosenberg’s 1965 self-esteem measure) did not vary across groups or covary with implicit measures, suggesting a dissociation between implicit and explicit cognition. Implicit measures of self-regard, however, cor- Matsumoto, D. (2001). The handbook of culture and psychology. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from waldenu on 2018-04-17 14:27:43. Copyright © 2001. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. 344 CULTURE AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR related strongly with the duration of residence in the United States in Studies 1 and 2. Two types of explanations have been offered for the cultural difference in self-regard. One proximal explanation was provided by Higgins’ (1987; Higgins, Klein, & Strauman, 1985) selfdiscrepancy theory. One regards oneself well to the extent that one’s perceptions of oneself (actual self) are close to one’s ideal (ideal self). A large discrepancy between the actual self and ideal self causes depression and dejection. Consistent with this, Heine and Lehman (1999) showed that Japanese students had a greater actual-ideal discrepancy than European and Asian Canadian students. Nevertheless, this explanation may need to be examined more fully as they found that the correlation between actual-ideal discrepancies and Zung’s (1965) SelfReport Depression Inventory differed across cultures, with the correlation highest for European Canadians, followed by Asian Canadians and Japanese. This may imply that measures have different reliability across cultures, that other aspects of the theory can explain this cultural difference, or that the applicability of selfdiscrepancy theory differs across cultures. A more distal explanation was provided by Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto, and Norasakkunkit (1997). They argued that each culture provides situations that afford people to behave in a way that is typical of their culture. It is the situations available in given cultures that perpetuate psychological differences between them. To support this, they adopted a novel situation-sampling method. This method involved two steps. First, Japanese and Americans described situations in which they felt their self-esteem increased or decreased. There were 50 descriptions randomly selected from the descriptions generated by a (male or female) sample from each culture (Japan or North America) under each of the two instruction conditions (self-esteem increasing or decreasing), for a total of 400 situation descriptions. Note that these situations embedded a Gender × Culture × Condition factorial design with 50 situations in each cell. Bilingual individuals translated Japanese situation descriptions into English and American ones into Japanese and edited them for cross-cultural intelligibility. In the second step, these 400 situation descriptions served as stimuli for different samples of Japanese (Japanese in Japan and Japanese studying in the United States) and European American students. Participants were asked (a) whether their self-esteem would be affected, (b) if so, whether it would increase or decrease, and (c) by how much did it increase or decrease. First, the extent to which situations were perceived to influence self-esteem was examined by two methods. In the across-participant analysis, the proportion of situations selected out of 50 was computed for each participant, and an analysis was conducted using participants as a unit of analysis. In the across-situation analysis, the proportion of participants who selected a given situation as affecting their selfesteem was computed for each situation, and an analysis was conducted using situations as a uni...
Purchase answer to see full attachment
User generated content is uploaded by users for the purposes of learning and should be used following Studypool's honor code & terms of service.

Explanation & Answer

Hello, please find...


Anonymous
Just what I needed…Fantastic!

Studypool
4.7
Trustpilot
4.5
Sitejabber
4.4

Similar Content

Related Tags