| Abstract: | Anglo‐Americans and Mexican‐Americans were asked to list five of their traits and five of their group memberships. They were also asked to rank (relative to each other) and rate (on an absolute scale) the importance of these traits and groups. Consistent with the distinction between individualist and collectivist cultures, Mexican‐Americans ranked and rated their groups as being more important than did Anglo‐Americans. In addition, although participants from both cultural groups gave greatly decreased ratings for less important groups, this decrease was more pronounced for Anglo‐Americans than for Mexican‐Americans. Finally, the data indicated that the perceived importance of group memberships is only weakly related to their cognitive accessibility. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
