Experimental priming of independent and interdependent activity does not affect culturally variable psychological processes.
Experimental priming of independent and interdependent activity does not affect culturally variable psychological processes.
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DOI：
10.1098/rsos.161025
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发表时间：
2017-05
影响因子：
3.5
通讯作者：
Mesoudi A
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Magid K;Sarkol V;Mesoudi A
文化心理学家已经证明，来自西方国家的人比来自东亚的人表现出更多的独立自我协调和分析（基于规则的）认知，而东亚人表现出更多的相互依赖的自我协调和整体（基于关系的）认知。对这种跨文化差异的一种解释是生态文化假说，它将当代的心理差异与祖先在生存和社会凝聚力方面的差异联系起来：西方的思维是为了应对孤独的放牧，这促进了独立，而东亚的思维是为了应对共同的水稻种植，这促进了相互依存。在这里，我们报告了两个实验，在实验室测试的生态文化假说。在这两种情况下，参与者都要完成两项任务中的一项，这两项任务旨在重现单独工作和共同工作的关键因素。在每个任务之前和之后，参与者完成了独立-相互依赖自我联想和分析-整体认知的心理测量。我们没有发现令人信服的证据表明，无论是单独或集体的任务影响任何措施的预测方向。这并不支持生态文化假说。然而，这也可能是我们的启动任务是不适当的或不足以模拟生存相关的行为实践，或者这些措施是固定的早期发展，因此不实验启动，尽管许多以前的研究已经声称要找到这样的启动效应。
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.