As seen by the other...: Perspectives on the self in the memories and emotional perceptions of Easterners and Westerners

The experiment reported investigated the phenomenological consequences of Easterners' and Westerners' perspectives on the self. Two findings are consistent with the notion that Asians are more likely than Westerners to experience the self from the perspective of the generalized other. First, Eastern participants were more likely than Western participants to have third-person (as opposed to first-person) memories when they thought about situations in which they would be at the center of a scene. Second, Easterners and Westerners engaged in different sorts of projections when they read the emotional expressions of other people. Westerners were more biased than Easterners toward egocentric projection of their own emotions onto others, whereas Easterners were more biased than Westerners toward relational projection, in which they projected onto others the emotions that the generalized other would feel in relation to the participant. Implications for how phenomenological experiences could reinforce different Eastern and Western ideologies about the self and the group are discussed.     

The situated person: Effects of construct accessibility on situation construals and interpersonal perception

Three studies examined the interrelationship between primed constructs, situation construal, and person perception. Previous research on priming and person perception has generally neglected the situational context. We predicted that when rich situational information is included, primed constructs can lead to assimilation effects on situation construals, which can in turn lead to contrast effects in person perceptions. Study 1 demonstrated that when situation information is included in the experimental context, primes lead to contrast in person perceptions. Study 2, employing a subliminal methodology, demonstrated that these effects could not be accounted for via previous explanations of contrast effects, such as correction-based mechanisms, that require overt recognition of the priming stimuli by the participants. Study 3 demonstrated that the contrastive effects of the priming stimuli on person perception obtained in Studies 1 and 2 are in fact due to the intervening assimilative effects of the priming stimuli on situation construal—that is, the primed constructs led to contrast effects on perceptions of the actor via their assimilative effects on perceptions of the situation in which that actor was embedded. Additionally, moderator variables demonstrated that this effect is most pronounced when the target actor’s behavior is described as relatively unambiguous or situation focus is increased.     

中国大学生的自我建构、利己归因偏好与自我增强

本研究验证了我国大学生的自我建构的个体间差异对利己归因偏好与自我增强的影响。我国大学生被试首先完成一个虚拟的能力测验,然后对其自我建构等进行测量,最后被试得到成绩反馈并进行归因与课题评价。结果表明被试表现出显著的利己归因偏好,独立型比依存型自我建构者表现出更显著的自我增强,同时独立性对自我增强起着极重要作用。本研究结果支持自我增强的文化普遍论的观点。     

The effects of priming legal concepts on perceived trust and competitiveness, self-interested attitudes, and competitive behavior

Socio-legal scholars have suggested that, as a ubiquitous social system, law shapes social reality and provides interpretive frameworks for social relations. Across five studies, we tested the idea that the law shapes social reality by fostering the assumptions that people are self-interested, untrustworthy, and competitive. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that people implicitly associated legal concepts with competitiveness. Studies 3-5 showed that these associations had implications for social perceptions, self-interested attitudes, and competitive behavior. After being primed with constructs related to the law, participants perceived social actors as less trustworthy and the situation as more competitive (Study 3), became more against a political issue when it conflicted with their normative self-interest (Study 4), and made more competitive choices during a prisoner’s dilemma game when they believed that social relations were basically zero-sum in nature (Study 5). The implications and applications of these results are discussed.     

Placing the face in context: cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion

Two studies tested the hypothesis that in judging people's emotions from their facial expressions, Japanese, more than Westerners, incorporate information from the social context. In Study 1, participants viewed cartoons depicting a happy, sad, angry, or neutral person surrounded by other people expressing the same emotion as the central person or a different one. The surrounding people's emotions influenced Japanese but not Westerners' perceptions of the central person. These differences reflect differences in attention, as indicated by eye-tracking data (Study 2): Japanese looked at the surrounding people more than did Westerners. Previous findings on East-West differences in contextual sensitivity generalize to social contexts, suggesting that Westerners see emotions as individual feelings, whereas Japanese see them as inseparable from the feelings of the group.     

有关自我增强跨文化普遍性的争论

文化自我观点质疑自我增强（self-enhancement）的跨文化普遍性,认为东亚人并非像西方人一样拥有对自我保持积极评价的需要,而是自我提升（self-improvement）。然而,另外一些学者则认为东亚人同样会表现出自我增强,其中“对自我的重要性”被看作是一个重要的中介变量。至此,笔者针对有关自我增强跨文化普遍性的争论做了回顾,并在此基础之上提出从面子角度研究东亚人自尊的建议,以期为澄清此争论提供新的思路与证据     

Loss is a loss,why categorize it? Mental accounting across cultures

Consumers regularly track their expenses and assign them to categories like food, entertainment, and clothing, which is popularly known as mental accounting. In this paper, we show that consumption biases that result from mental accounting—underconsumption or overconsumption—are not prevalent in Easterners due to their holistic thinking style, whereas Westerners exhibit such biases due to their analytic thinking style. In Study 1, we collected data with Easterners (students from the eastern part of India) and show that they do not exhibit mental accounting biases as is seen in Westerners. In Study 2, we show that such differences in mental accounting across cultures result from their thinking styles by manipulating thinking styles within a Western population (American students from the Midwest). We also show that the differences in styles of thinking across cultures motivate two different types of accounting processes—a piecemeal accounting process in the Westerners and a comprehensive accounting process in the Easterners—which in turn influence the differences in mental accounting biases across cultures. This finding adds to the growing literature in cross‐cultural differences in consumer decision making and explores how and why a well‐documented robust effect, mental accounting, varies with the cultural background of the consumers.     

过度自信的跨文化差异

过度自信是指个体过高地估计自身判断的精确度,其经典的研究范式是常识问题及常识问题的变式现实情境问题。使用常识问题的研究一致发现,东方人显著比西方人更过度自信;使用现实情景问题的研究则发现,西方人比东方人更过度自信或两者无显著性差异。对“东方人比西方人过度自信”的解释包括认知习惯和教育系统两种主流观点。最后对出现不同研究结果的原因进行讨论,并进一步探讨解释的有效性和“西方人比东方人过度自信”的原因。     

Explanations for cultural differences in thinking: Easterners’ dialectical thinking and Westerners’ linear thinking

ABSTRACT

Since Easterners’ naïve dialectical thinking, which is contrasted with Westerners’ linear thinking, was introduced, many cross-cultural studies on human thinking have been conducted, and explanations for the cultural differences have been proposed. First, after examining the robustness of these cultural differences, two existing explanations are discussed in this paper. The first is based on the discinction between Westerners' analytic cognition and Easterners' holistic cogntion. This is related to the distinction between Westerners’ independent self and Easterners’ interdependent self. The second is based on the philosophical tradition of China’s Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, which is contrasted with that of Ancient Greece. Second, we propose a new explanation based on the distinction between Westerners’ low-context culture and Easterners’ high-context culture (Beyond culture. Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books/Doubleday.). Finally, we show that this distinction can be based on socioecological approaches, and it is expected to explain the cultural differences between the Chinese and Japanese.     

Cultural variations on optimistic and pessimistic bias for self versus a sibling: is there evidence for self-enhancement in the west and for self-criticism in the east when the referent group is specified?

A culturally relevant framework was used to examine variations on optimistic and pessimistic bias in Westerners and Easterners. Study 1 showed that 136 European Americans compared with 159 Japanese were more likely to predict typical positive events to occur to self than to a sibling. The opposite pattern emerged in the prediction of typical negative events. Study 2 replicated these findings on the basis of predictions for atypical events in 175 European Americans and 130 Japanese. Across both studies, within-groups analyses indicated that European Americans held an optimistic bias in the prediction of positive and negative events, whereas Japanese held a pessimistic bias for negative events. These findings are taken to offer support for presumed cultural differences in self-enhancement and self-criticism between Westerners and Easterners, respectively.     

The effects of psychological security and insecurity on political attitudes and leadership preferences

Recent research from different perspectives suggests that uncertainty, mortality salience (MS), and other fundamental threats that cause feelings of insecurity motivate people to adhere to specific kinds of anxiety‐reducing political attitudes and values. In the current studies, we examined a complementary prediction that providing people with an alternative source of security would reduce their need to defend against insecurity, resulting in lower endorsement of the anxiety‐reducing political attitudes. Results supported this prediction, showing that security primes buffered or reversed the effects of insecurity and threats on political attitudes and leadership preferences. Participants primed with attachment security showed reduced liking of a strong, charismatic political candidate (Study 1), and lower support for the Iraq war, even in the face of mortality reminders (Study 2). We discuss these findings in the context of research on motivated social cognition, political psychology, and the effects of security and insecurity on attitudes and behaviors. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Contemporary Studies on the Concept of Creativity: the East and the West

This article reviews contemporary studies on the concept of creativity across two cultures—Eastern (Asian) cultures and Western (American and European) cultures — by examining two bodies of literature. One is on people's implicit theories of creativity across different cultures and the other is on cross‐cultural studies of creativity. Studies on implicit theories of creativity in the East suggest that many Asians have similar but not identical conceptions of creativity to many people in the West. Cross‐cultural studies of creativity reveal that Easterners and Westerners differ, on average, in their divergent‐thinking performance and creative expressions. A view of creativity as relatively culture‐specific is presented and the appropriateness of using divergent‐thinking tests to measure creativity is discussed.     

Inclusion of theory-relevant moderators yield the same conclusions as Sedikides, Gaertner, and Vevea (2005): A meta-analytical reply to Heine, Kitayama, and Hamamura (2007)

Heine, Kitayama and Hamamura (2007) attributed the Sedikides, Gaertner and Vevea (2005) findings to the exclusion of six papers. We report a meta-analysis that includes those six papers. The Heine et al . conclusions are faulty, because of a misspecified meta-analysis that failed to consider two moderators central to the theory. First, some of their effect sizes originated from studies that did not empirically validate comparison dimensions. Inclusion of this moderator evidences pancultural self-enhancement: Westerners enhance more strongly on individualistic dimensions, Easterners on collectivistic dimensions. Second, some of their effect sizes were irrelevant to whether enhancement is correlated with dimension importance. Inclusion of this moderator evidences pancultural self-enhancement: Both Westerners and Easterners enhance on personally important dimensions. The Sedikides et al . conclusions are valid: Tactical self-enhancement is pancultural.     

再探汉字加工中语音、语义激活的相对时间进程

在Zhou和Marslen-Wilson（2000）基础之上,进一步探讨汉字加工中语音和语义信息激活的相对时间进程及其对汉字加工理论的含义。采用启动范式,用同一目标字与语义相关启动字、同音启动字以及无关控制启动字配对,变化同音启动字读音与其声旁的规则性,变化启动字与目标字呈现之间的时间间隔（SOA,57ms或200ms）,使用两种实验任务（真假字判断和命名）,考察语义、语音效应发生的时间先后与效应量的大小。真假字判断实验发现,不管SOA如何,语义启动效应都非常显著,而同音启动效应则随SOA的增长而逐渐加大,从不显著到显著;同音启动字读音规则性对启动效应没有明显影响。命名实验发现,语义启动、同音启动效应同时存在于长、短SOA条件中。长SOA时,两者在数值上没有显著差异;短SOA时,同音不规则字产生的启动效应等同于语义启动效应,而同音规则字产生的启动效应则大于语义启动效应。结合其它实验发现,这些结果说明,在熟练的汉字加工中,语音信息的激活并不比语义信息早,语音激活也不是语义激活的先决条件;但汉字各种信息激活的相对激活量和时间进程会随任务性质和材料性质而在一定范围内有所改变。     

Inclusion of additional studies yields different conclusions: Comment on Sedikides, Gaertner, & Vevea (2005), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

In a Journal of Personality and Social Psychology article, Sedikides, Gaertner and Vevea (2005) presented two meta-analyses that included eight papers to investigate the question of whether people from Eastern cultures self-enhance more for traits that they view to be important compared to those that they view as unimportant. The results supported their hypothesis: Self-enhancement appears to be pancultural. However, this conclusion is severely compromised by six relevant papers that are not included in their meta-analyses. Importantly, all of these six studies contradicted their hypothesis. When complete meta-analyses are conducted which include all of the relevant papers, a very different pattern of results emerges. Eastern and Western cultures do not differ from each other in the pattern of their self-enhancement of independent and interdependent traits. Furthermore, whereas Westerners self-enhanced significantly more for traits that they viewed to be especially important, East Asians did not. Contrary to the Sedikides et al. (2005) suggestion, the existing evidence suggests substantial cross-cultural variation in self-enhancement, with Westerners being far more self-enhancing than Easterners. Reasons for the conflicting pattern of findings across methods and meta-analyses are discussed.     

Identity salience and the influence of differential activation of the social self-schema on advertising response

The authors examined how identity primes and social distinctiveness influence identity salience (i.e., the activation of a social identity within an individual's social self-schema) and subsequent responses to targeted advertising. Across 2 studies, individuals who were exposed to an identity prime (an ad element that directs attention to the individual's social identity) and who were socially distinctive (minorities in the immediate social context) expressed systematically different evaluations of spokespersons and the advertisements that featured them. Specifically, Asian (Caucasian) participants responded most positively (negatively) to Asian spokespeople and Asian-targeted advertising when the participants were both primed and socially distinctive. No main effects of identity primes or social distinctiveness were found. The implications of these findings for identity theory, advertising practice, and intervention communications are discussed.     

Pancultural self-enhancement

The culture movement challenged the universality of the self-enhancement motive by proposing that the motive is pervasive in individualistic cultures (the West) but absent in collectivistic cultures (the East). The present research posited that Westerners and Easterners use different tactics to achieve the same goal: positive self-regard. Study 1 tested participants from differing cultural backgrounds (the United States vs. Japan), and Study 2 tested participants of differing self-construals (independent vs. interdependent). Americans and independents self-enhanced on individualistic attributes, whereas Japanese and interdependents self-enhanced on collectivistic attributes. Independents regarded individualistic attributes, whereas interdependents regarded collectivistic attributes, as personally important. Attribute importance mediated self-enhancement. Regardless of cultural background or self-construal, people self-enhance on personally important dimensions. Self-enhancement is a universal human motive.     

Priming a new identity: self-monitoring moderates the effects of nonself primes on self-judgments and behavior

When a construct is primed, people often act in construct-consistent ways. Several accounts for this effect have been offered, including ideomotor theory and a social functional perspective. The authors tested an additional perspective, the Active-Self account, whereby primes can temporarily alter self-perceptions. In Study 1, non-African American participants reported feeling more aggressive on an implicit measure following an African American prime. In Study 2, participants reported feeling luckier on an implicit measure following a number 7 (vs. 13) prime. In both studies, these effects were obtained only for low self-monitors, who are more likely to change self-conceptions in response to diagnostic self-information and to use their internal states in guiding behavior. Study 3 showed that low self-monitors also show larger behavioral effects of primes.     

Pancultural self-enhancement reloaded: a meta-analytic reply to Heine (2005)

C. Sedikides, L. Gaertner, and Y. Toguchi (2003) reported findings favoring the universality of self-enhancement. S. J. Heine (2005) challenged the authors' research on evidential and logical grounds. In response, the authors carried out 2 meta-analytic investigations. The results backed the C. Sedikides et al. (2003) theory and findings. Both Westerners and Easterners self-enhanced tactically. Westerners self-enhanced on attributes relevant to the cultural ideal of individualism, whereas Easterners self-enhanced on attributes relevant to the cultural ideal of collectivism (in both cases, because of the personal importance of the ideal). Self-enhancement motivation is universal, although its manifestations are strategically sensitive to cultural context. The authors respond to other aspects of Heine's critique by discussing why researchers should empirically validate the comparison dimension (individualistic vs. collectivistic) and defending why the better-than-average effect is a valid measure of self-enhancement.