Kategorien der Personwahrnehmung und ihre kulturelle Bedingtheit

Summary This research was undertaken in order to find out (1) whether the socio-cultural background of S has any influence on how he perceives and judges other people, (2) whether the thematic emphasis of his judgments mirrors the culturally determined aspects of his personality. Specifically, it was intended, by analyzing the social judgments of a group of Thai Ss, to gain information on the nearly unexplored characteristics of their personality as compared with a German group of Ss which served as a match.40 students of the College of Education in Bangkok were presented a list of 32 pairs of words (a noun and an adjective). Ss were instructed to take these word-pairs as metaphors serving to characterize people and to reinterpret them in concrete, non-metaphorical terms of personality characteristics. The same procedure was administered with a comparable group of 42 German students.The responses of the Ss were classified and the frequency of occurence of each category of response determined for each S. A comparison of the frequency of occurence of the responses between the Thai and German group yielded significant differences in a great number of response categories. The first hypothesis was thus confirmed.The categories of responses in which significant differences were obtained were grouped into clusters in order to reduce the multiplicity of differences to a limited number of underlying trends. These trends were found to reflect basic differences of the cultural values between the Thai and German, and, more generally, between the Asian and Western people.