2006 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Sociocultural shaping of attention strategy-Cultural psychological perspective on cognition
| Project/Area Number |
16530408
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Social psychology
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| Research Institution | Tokyo Woman's Christian UNIVERSITY |
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Principal Investigator |
KARASAWA Mayumi Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Dept of Communication, Professor, 現代文化学部, 教授 (60255940)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2004 – 2006
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| Keywords | Culture and self / Attention Strategy / Triangulation / within cultural differences / between cultural differences / socialization |
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| Research Abstract |
Culturally divergent cognitive characteristics have been examined with several different measures, such as attitude attribution (e.g.,Masuda ＆ Kitayama,2002), performance in a rod-and-frame task (RFT ; Ji, Peng, ＆ Nisbett,2000;Witkin ＆ Berry,1975). Especially, Kitayama et al., developed a new test called the framed-line test (FLT). The FLT is specifically designed to assess both the ability to incorporate and the ability to ignore contextual information within a single domain that is arguably nonsocial. In an effort to address these limitations inherent in the current evidence, we examined within cultural practice of these tendencies using triangulation methods. Despite their common cultural heritage that acknowledges the independence of self, West Europe and North America differ in one crucial respect. Unlike West Europe, North America has undergone a history of voluntary settlement in the frontier. We hypothesized that the settlement history gives rise to a cultural emphasis on strongly personal forms of success and achievement. In a tri-cultural comparison involving the United States (Michigan), Germany (Hamburg), and Japan (Kyoto and Tokyo), they predicted and found that Americans are higher than Germans in motivational independence (personal rather than communal goal orientation) and normative independence (societal reward contingency sanctioning independence), but not in epistemic independence (dispositional bias in social judgment). Across the three domains of independence, Japanese were consistently less independent (or more interdependent) than the two Western groups. In a cluster analysis a vast majority (90%) of Japanese was classified as "interdependent", but the corresponding numbers for Germans and Americans were 63% and 48%, respectively. Curiously, a commonly used attitudinal measure of independence and interdependence showed an anomalous pattern. Implications for theories and measurement of culture are discussed.
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