Culture and Person Perception

Social psychology, absorbed in analyzing individual reactions to staged lab situations in search of universal laws, was criticized as a “nonsocial social science” — and in response, awareness spread that humans are bound to their culture.

Critics have pointed out that many psychological principles thought to be universal are actually culture-specific, based on the highly individual-centered view of people held by Westerners, especially white Americans.

Not a new data study: a literature review of existing research on culture and understanding others.

No separate participants (a review of Korean and international studies).
It first sets out the basic difference between individualist and collectivist cultures, then presents findings on how the two differ in person evaluation and attribution, and finally suggests directions for future research.

Of the five personality dimensions found among Americans, agreeableness and conscientiousness merged among Chinese people into a single “social morality” dimension, which was the most central.

Asked to describe a close friend, Chinese students named kindness, consideration, gentleness, modesty, altruism, honesty, hard work, and generosity; American students named cheerfulness, enthusiasm, popularity, sociability, leadership, and the like.

In conflicts, people in collectivist societies prefer to settle things through yielding and mediation or to avoid confrontation, while those in individualist societies prefer to face it through competition and negotiation.

When dividing resources, collectivist societies prefer equal shares or shares by need, while individualist societies prefer shares in proportion to contribution (equity).

In a replication study with Koreans, Koreans did not show a bias toward attributing behavior to the actor but showed a bias toward the target (situation).

Japanese university students credited their success to an easy task and blamed failure on their own lack of ability — the opposite of the typical “self-enhancement bias” found among American students.

Korean students’ modest attributions appeared not only when results were made public but also in anonymous conditions.

In collectivist societies, both students and parents see academic achievement as the product of effort — success from hard work, failure from too little — while individualist societies attribute it to innate ability.

Attributing achievement to effort is adaptive: effort can change, so failure spurs people to try harder, whereas blaming ability leads to giving up easily.

Modesty is not a self-promotion tactic but reflects genuine self-perception; for collectivists, keeping harmony in relationships is the basis of self-esteem, so modest behavior comes naturally.

The author explains these differences with a “superiority hypothesis”: each culture looks for different key traits (superior traits) when evaluating people.

The collectivism–individualism dimension reveals cultural differences well, but it cannot capture all of them.

One must beware of labeling a whole culture as collectivist or individualist, and not neglect individual differences within a culture.

Modesty bias Crediting one’s success to an easy task or luck, and blaming one’s failure on a lack of effort or ability.

Depth dimension The degree to which one sees behavior as depending on situation and time (the “descriptiveness dimension,” by contrast, is the degree to which one sees specific behavior as reflecting a person’s general disposition).

Elaboration hypothesis The hypothesis that people with the traits a culture values (superior traits) receive more extreme and finely detailed impressions.