Processes of Social Influence on Sampling Behavior: The Effect of Other's Positive Attitude and Receiver's Prior Experience

Studies about attitude formation have pointed out the importance of sampling behavior. When thinking about actual social interaction scenes, it may be better to consider them as attitude-updating processes between those who have already formed attitudes based on some experience. Sixty-five participants took part in the experiment, in which the other's positive attitude and the participant's own prior experience were manipulated. After participants had been presented five types of puzzles (experience: direct vs. indirect), which had been made to improve analytic ability, their attitudes towards the puzzles were measured (“pre attitude”). They were shown the other's positive attitude (inconsistent vs. consistent), and they were given 10 min of free time before “testing on their analytic ability.” The amount of time spent on each puzzle was recorded to index sampling behavior and the attitudes towards the puzzles were measured after the free time (“post attitude”). The results of analyses showed that the other's positive attitude increased sampling behavior when the participant's attitude was positive (first-ranked) and negative (fifth-ranked), and that prior experience and sampling contributed to attitude change for the first-ranked puzzle. Those who had had direct experience and those who had spent more time sampling this puzzle tended to maintain their previous positive attitude. The potential boundary conditions of social influence on sampling behavior are discussed.     

The rise and rise of social psychology in Asia: A bibliometric analysis

The growth of social psychology in Asia from 1970 to 2008 was examined through a bibliometric analysis of articles in the ISI Web of Science database that listed Asian‐based authors. The 1866 articles have appeared at an accelerating rate, and represent a rapidly‐growing share of global publications in the field. Publication trajectories of different Asian nations show the Indian first wave, Hong Kong and Japan's second wave, and China and Taiwan's third wave of growth. Trends in the rates of Asian first authorship, single‐nation authorship, and cross‐cultural research suggest that Asian social psychology is increasingly more autonomous and distinctive.     

Communicating stereotype‐relevant information: How readily can people individuate?

It is often suggested that people automatically form an impression of a target by using stereotypes. However, people can flexibly deploy different types of individuating processes, depending on the communicative context. We showed that people can individuate targets from their social category by communicating stereotype‐inconsistent information (person–group individuation) when they are required to reproduce information about the targets and people can individuate targets from other individuals by communicating information that is distinctive about the targets (person–person individuation) when required to identify the targets. The participants' performance is unrelated to information memorability (Experiment 1) and is not affected by time pressure (Experiment 2). Humans' adaptive capacity for individuation is discussed.     

Height Psychology and challenges of the 21st century

The present article comments on Liu's target article while exploring the points of convergence and divergence of his Height Psychology with trends in non‐Asian psychology, and points to an area of further expansion demanded by the challenges of the 21st century, namely, climate change and intergroup conflict.     

Social identity and worldview validation: the effects of ingroup identity primes and mortality salience on value endorsement

In this article, the authors report an investigation of the relationship between terror management and social identity processes by testing for the effects of social identity salience on worldview validation. Two studies, with distinct populations, were conducted to test the hypothesis that mortality salience would lead to worldview validation of values related to a salient social identity. In Study 1, reasonable support for this hypothesis was found with bicultural Aboriginal Australian participants (N = 97). It was found that thoughts of death led participants to validate ingroup and reject outgroup values depending on the social identity that had been made salient. In Study 2, when their student and Australian identities were primed, respectively, Anglo-Australian students (N = 119) validated values related to those identities, exclusively. The implications of the findings for identity-based worldview validation are discussed.     

Culture and Terror Management: What is “Culture” in Cultural Psychology and Terror Management Theory?

Cultural psychology underscores the importance of culture in understanding human psychology. More recently, Terror Management Theory (TMT) also advanced the importance of culture from a perspective that regards culture as a tool for coping with existential concerns. This paper compares these two perspectives with respect to the focus of their theoretical inquiries and the conceptualizations of culture. A brief review of relevant TMT research is provided to familiarize readers to this literature. Theoretical implications and directions for future research are presented.     

Emotional and self‐esteem consequences of perceiving discrimination against a new identity group

With a sample of Asian international students, the consequences of perceiving pervasive discrimination against one's in‐group were examined by experimentally manipulating perceived discrimination (pervasive vs rare) and group identification (low vs high). We report evidence that supports and integrates aspects of two contrasted models; namely, the discounting model and the rejection–identification model. Consistent with both models, the effects of perceiving discrimination on one's psychological well‐being depended on the level of group identification. Nevertheless, after reading about pervasive discrimination, low (vs high) identifiers reported less depressed affect, consistent with the discounting model. However, they also reported lower self‐esteem, consistent with the rejection–identification model.