Cultural Differences 2 Flashcards
Collectivism and individualism:
- “Collectivism and individualism are ‘cultural syndromes’. They reflect shared attitudes, beliefs, categorizations, norms, roles, and values organized around a central theme, that are found among individuals who speak a particular language, and live in a specific geographic region, during a specific historical period.” (Triandis, Chan, Bhawuk, Iwao, & Sinha, 1995, p. 462)
Some key questions:
- How shared are elements of subjective culture?
- Schwartz values 6% to 26% country-level variance (Fischer & Schwartz, 2011)
- How strongly do they covary?
- Individual-level vs. ecological-level relationships
- What makes them covary?
- What is the “common theme”?
- Just a pattern or a cultural system?
A classic paper:
· Markus & Kitayama (1991)
- Review paper which defines area
- Over 33,000 citations in Google Scholar!
· Central idea
- ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ cultures differ in relative prevalence of independent and interdependent self-construals
Self-construal theory:
· “People in different cultures have strikingly different construals of the self, of others, and of the interdependence of the two.
· “These construals can influence, and in many cases determine, the very nature of individual experience, including cognition, emotion, and motivation.” (Markus & Kitayama, 1991, p. 224).
Ways of being independent - Markus and Kitayama, 1991:
· Separate from social context
· Structure - bounded, unitary, stable
· Important features - internal, private
· Tasks - be unique, express self, promote own goals
· Role of others - social comparison, reflected appraisal
· Basis of self-esteem - ability to express self, validate internal attributes
Ways of being interdependent - Markus and Kitayama, 1991:
· Connected with social context
· Structure - flexible, variable
· Important features - external, public
· Tasks - belong, fit-in, promote others’ goals
· Role of others - relationships with others in specific contexts define self
· Basis of self-esteem - ability to adjust, restrain self, maintain harmony
Implications for cognition:
· Compared to Americans, South-East Asian participants typically show:
- more interpersonal knowledge
- more context-specific knowledge of self and other
- more attention to interpersonal context in basic cognition
Implications for emotion:
· Ego-focused emotions
- anger, frustration, pride
- predicted to be more important in US
· Other-focused emotions
- sympathy, feelings of interpersonal communion, shame
- predicted to be more important in Japan
Implications for motivation:
· Cultural differences in self-construal predicted to foster:
- Self-expression or self-restraint
- Individual or collective bases of achievement
- Self-enhancement or modesty
Markus and Kitayama’s evidence:
· Country -> cognition
· Country -> emotion
· Country -> motivation
· Matsumoto (1999)
Markus and Kitayama’s theory:
· National culture -> self-construals -> cognition, emotion, and motivation
Early measurements of self construals:
· Twenty Statements Test (TST)
- “I am …” x 20
- Coding for ‘interdependence’, ‘sociality’, etc.
· Likert measures (e.g., Singelis, 1994)
- e.g., “I enjoy being unique and different from others in many respects” / “My happiness depends on the happiness of those around me”
- 2 orthogonal factors: independence, interdependence
- But no control for acquiescent responding
“unpackaging” studies:
· Group membership -> cultural orientation -> outcome variable
Self-construal and embarrassability:
· Study by Singelis and Sharkey (1995)
· Participants
- 86 Euro-American and 417 Asian-American (Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean) university students
· Questionnaire measures
- Self-construal scale (Singelis, 1994)
- Embarrassability scale (Modigliani, 1968)
Self-construal and embarrassability 2:
· Group differences in embarrassability
- (p < .001, R2 = 4.5%)
- Asian-Americans on average more susceptible to embarrassment than Euro-Americans
· Significant group differences in independent and interdependent self-construals
- (ind: p < .001, R2 = 6.7%) (int: p < .01, R2 = 3.4%)
- Asian-Americans on average reported less independent and more interdependent self-construals than did Euro-Americans
Self-construal and embarrassability 3:
· Independent and interdependent self-construals significantly predicted embarrassability
- (p < .001, R2 = 19%)
· After controlling for self-construals, group membership did not predict embarrassability
- (p > .05, partial R2 = 0.7%)
· Intepreted as evidence for mediation:
- Culture -> self-construal -> embarrassability
A problem:
· In most studies using self-report measures of independence and interdependence, “Western” and “Eastern” cultures do not differ as expected.
- (e.g., Kitayama et al., 2009; review by Cross et al., 2011; meta-analysis by Levine et al., 2003)
· Some possible explanations:
- Inadequate sampling?
- Inadequate measures?
- Need for implicit measures?
- The theory is wrong?
Sampling individuals:
· Can nation-level scores be used reliably to characterise particular samples?
- Many studies rely on student samples
- Unrepresentative of nations from which drawn
- Misrepresent some nations more than others
· Representative sampling unrealistic
- Need for “comparable” samples?
- Measure cultural orientation at individual level
- Problem of “reference-group effects”
Sampling cultural groups:
· Not representative or theory-driven
· Opportunistic national comparisons
- USA treated as prototypical “individualist” nation
- Japan treated as prototypical “collectivist” nation
· Hofstede rankings for individualism (out of 53)
- USA: 1st
- Japan: 22nd
- Guatemala: 53rd
USA vs Japan reconsidered:
· Takano and Osaka (1999) argued that Japanese culture is not collectivist
- Detailed review of empirical studies
- Explained by social psychological processes
- Threat (e.g., WW2) conformity and self-sacrifice
- Western observers make FAE stereotype
- Japanese commentators echo self-stereotype
· Still contentious question
- See update by Takano and Osaka (2018) with commentaries and response
Reconsidering measurement of self-construal (Vignoles and 72 co-authors, 2016):
· Study 1: Exploratory factor analysis
- 2924 high-school students in 16 nations
- 62 Likert-type items (existing scales, new)
- Ipsatisation to control for acquiescence
· Study 2: Confirmatory factor analysis
- 7279 adults from 55 cultural groups in 33 nations
- New scale: 38 items → 22 items
- Method factor to control for acquiescence
- Testing for measurement invariance
Ways of being independent (Vignoles, 2016):
· Defining the self - difference
· Experiencing the self - self-containment
· Making decisions - self-direction
· Looking after oneself - self-reliance
· Moving between contexts - consistency
· Communicating with others - self-expression
· Dealing with conflicting interests - self-interest
Ways of being interdependent (Vignoles, 2016):
· Defining the self - similarity
· Experiencing the self - connection to others
· Making decisions - receptiveness to influence
· Looking after oneself - dependence on others
· Moving between contexts - variability
· Communicating with others - harmony
· Dealing with conflicting interests - commitment to others
Why self-construals?:
· “People in different cultures have strikingly different construals of the self, of others, and of the interdependence of the two” (Markus & Kitayama, 1991, p. 224, italics added)
- But theoretical focus is largely on self
- Is self the key construct?
· One alternative: Thinking about others
Other construals:
· People in Western cultures attribute ambiguous behaviour to dispositions rather than situation
- Correspondence bias (fundamental attribution error)
- Assumed to be universal human nature (Ross, 1977)
· Bias reduced/absent in East Asian participants
- Attribution to situation/context, rather than individual dispositions (Miller, 1984; Morris & Peng, 1994)
- Not-so-fundamental attribution error!
Possible explanations:
· Little cultural difference in dispositionism
· Situationism (Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, 1999)
- Perhaps relates to Confucian culture – focus on social positions and cardinal relationships
· Implicit theories of group agency (Menon, Morris, Chiu, & Hong, 1999; also Kashima et al., 2004)
- Greater attribution to agency of group in Hong Kong newspaper articles and participants than in USA
Cognitive styles:
· East Asians: holistic thinking
- “attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on ‘dialectical’ reasoning”
· Westerners: analytic thinking
- “paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior” (Nisbett et al., 2001)
Frame switching studies:
· Research in bi-cultural Hong Kong context
- “Two unrelated studies” paradigm
1. Priming with Western or Chinese images
2. Measure attributions
- Western primes dispositional inferences
- Chinese primes situational inference (Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martinez, 2000)
· Many subsequent studies into “culture priming”
- Review by Oyserman and Lee (2008)
Culture as “situated cognition”:
· Culture more flexible than previously imagined
- Attributed to activation of implicit theories
- Differences in behaviour depend on accessibility rather than availability of cultural knowledge
- Brings culture under experimental control!
- What are the benefits and drawbacks?
- Can we all switch between meaning systems?
- Role of symbols in cultural maintenance?
