Experimental priming of independent and interdependent activity does not affect culturally variable psychological processes
Magid, K; Sarkol, V; Mesoudi, A
Date: 1 May 2017
Article
Journal
Royal Society Open Science
Publisher
Royal Society
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Cultural psychologists have shown that people from Western
countries exhibit more independent self-construal and analytic
(rule-based) cognition than people from East Asia, who
exhibit more interdependent self-construal and holistic
(relationship-based) cognition. One explanation for this
cross-cultural variation is the ecocultural ...
Cultural psychologists have shown that people from Western
countries exhibit more independent self-construal and analytic
(rule-based) cognition than people from East Asia, who
exhibit more interdependent self-construal and holistic
(relationship-based) cognition. One explanation for this
cross-cultural variation is the ecocultural hypothesis, which
links contemporary psychological differences to ancestral
differences in subsistence and societal cohesion: Western
thinking formed in response to solitary herding, which
fostered independence, while East Asian thinking emerged
in response to communal rice farming, which fostered
interdependence. Here, we report two experiments that
tested the ecocultural hypothesis in the laboratory. In both,
participants played one of two tasks designed to recreate the
key factors of working alone and working together. Before and
after each task, participants completed psychological measures
of independent–interdependent self-construal and analytic–
holistic cognition. We found no convincing evidence that either
solitary or collective tasks affected any of the measures in
the predicted directions. This fails to support the ecocultural
hypothesis. However, it may also be that our priming tasks are
inappropriate or inadequate for simulating subsistence-related
behavioural practices, or that these measures are fixed early
in development and therefore not experimentally primable,
despite many previous studies that have purported to find
such priming effects
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