Grad School Blog

Social Projection for Us/Them

cho — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:13:50 +0000

I’m not sure if I’m looking in the wrong places or just a poor researcher, but it seems that social psych literatures aren’t very concerned with the theory of mind problem. I’m still trying to find more studies/theoretical constructs/research methods that tries to settle the score between theory and simulation (other than the false belief tasks, which a-doesn’t really differentiate between theory/simulation and b-fools no one but young children), but so far the best one I’ve got is projection and stereotype. Social projection is the tendency to expect trait similarities between oneself and others. It’s a theoretical construct more relevant to social judgment than ToM and a bridge might need to be built later–but it’ll do for now.

Well now thanks to these two studies (Clement & Krueger 2002, Robbins & Krueger 2005), there are now some good reasons for me to expect that a cultural difference in mind-reading strategies might exist!

Krueger and Clement used experimental methods while Krueger and Robbins used meta analysis (combining data from previous researches to statistically test new hypothesis), but in both studies they tried to examine the differences when we use social projection on ingroups and outgroups.

It seems reasonable that we might project more to ingroups–people judged to be similar–than to outgroups–people whom we judge to be different. However, it is equally plausible that we might project negatively (project traits opposite to the ones we possess) to the outgroup to bolster our sense of individuality and group identity. The results are as expected, people do project more to ingroups than to outgroups. However, people still projection to outgroups, albeit not as much as they project to ingroups. I suppose that, in the grandest scheme of things, we are all a big happy family right?

The boundary between ingroup and outgroup is also an issue. Would we project different if the groups were familiar ones in the real world (e.g. sophomores vs freshman) or arbitrarily groups randomly assigned in a laboratory setting? As it turned out, we project more in laboratory settings, when we don’t have any good information on what the categories are. When we have prior, real world knowledge of those groups, projection is actually weaker. This seems counterintuitive: we rely more on group membership as a metric for social judgment when we know less about the nature of these group memberships.

The order of the judgments made could be important. Since projection is typically measured as some sort of correlation between self-judgments and group-judgments, projection could be stronger or weaker depending on the order which the judgments are made. The order effects can be controlled by random assignment, but it is nevertheless an interesting question to ask. Oh, you asked? Well meta-analysis showed that it doesn’t matter.

(there was another caveat, that projection might be different if you aggregate your data nomothetically or idiographically…but I don’t really understand it and as it turned out–it doesn’t matter either)

It seems that to social projection (adding stereotype and it becomes Ames’ SIMCON) is moderated by the categorization and perceived group membership of the projectee. Makes sense: I would more likely use myself as a model to judge another person (or attribute mental states to them), if I perceive that person to be more similar to me. And as ingroup/outgroup mean different things in different cultures, it’s probably likely that projection would also take on different shapes in different cultures as well.

Good stuff!

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Clement, R.W. & Krueger, J. (2002) Social categorization moderates social projection. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 219-131

Robbins, J.M. & Krueger, J.I. (2005) Social projection to ingroups and outgroups: a review and meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9, 32-47

Reading List

cho — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 03:28:32 +0000

For self-reference only. I might not get to all 18 of them in the next month, or I might even get sidetracked by some other papers. But these should serve to be a good road map for my next month in Taiwan/Tibet.

Theory vs Simulation

Keysers, C., Gazzola, V.(2007) Integrating simulation and theory of mind: From self to social cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(5), 194-196
Kuhberger, A., Kogler, C., Hug, A., Mosl, E. (2006) The role of the position effect in theory and simulation. Mind & Language, 21(5), 610-625
Galinsky, A.D., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2000) Perspective-taking: Decreasing stereotype expression, stereotype accessibility, and in-group favoritism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 708-724
Kozak, M.N., Marsh, A.A., Wegner, D.M. (2006) What do I think you’re doing? Action identification and mind attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 543-555
Kammrath, L., Mendoza-Denton, R., & Mischel, W. (2005) Incorporating If…Then… Personality signatures in person perception: Beyond the person-situation dichotomy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 605-618
Mitchell, J.P. (2005) The false dichotomy between simulation and theory-theory: the argument’s error. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 363-364

Self-Construal

Kuhnen, U., & Oyserman, D. (2002). Thinking about the self influences thinking in general: Cognitive consequences of salient self-concept. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 492-499
Levine, T.R., Bresnahan, M.J., Park, H.S., Lapinski, M.K., Wittenbaum, G.M., Shearman, S.M., Lee, S.Y., Chung, D., & Ohashi, R. (2003) Self-construal scales lack validity. Human Communication Research, 29, 210-252.

Projection

Krueger, J.I. (2007) From social projection to social behavior. European Review of Social Psychology, 18, 1-35

In/Outgroup

Heine, S.J., Lehman, D.R., Peng, K., & Greenholtz, J. (2002) What’s wrong with cross-cultural comparisons of subjective Likert scales? The reference-group problem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 903-918

Other

Baron, R.M., & Kenny, D.A. (1986) The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(6), 1173-1182
Kitayama, S., Snibbe, A.C., Markus, H.R., & Suzuki, T. (2004) Is there any “free” choice? Self and dissonance in tow cultures. Psychological Science, 15, 527-533
Chua, H.F., Boland, J.E. & Nisbett, R.E. (2005) Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 102, 12629-12633
Medin, D.L., & Atran, S. (2004) The native mind: Biological categorization, reasoning and decision making in development and across cultures. Psychological Review, 111, 960-983
Mesquita, B. , & Karasawa, M. (2002) Different emotional lives. Cognition & Emotion, 16, 127-141
Boroditsky, L. (2001) Does language shape thought:Mandarin and English speakers’ conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology, 43, 1-22

Books (do I HAVE TO go to the library?)

Chen, S. (2001) The role of theories in mental representations and their use in social perception: A theory-based approach to significant-other representations and transference. In G.B. Moskowitz (Ed.), Cognitive social psychology: The Princeton Symposium on the Legacy and Future of Social Cognition (pp. 125-142). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Malle, B.F. & Hodges, S.D. (2005) Other minds: how humans bridge the divide between self and others. New York, NY: Guiford press
Krueger, J. (2000) The projective perception of the social world: A building block of social comparison processes. In J. Suls & L. Wheeler (Eds.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (vol. 30, pp. 163-240). Sand Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Triandis, H.C. (2001) Individualism and collectivism: Past, present, and future. In D. Matsumoto (Ed.), Handbook of culture and psychology (pp.30-50). New York: Oxford University Press.
Cohen, D., & Hoshino-Browne, E. (2005) Insider and outsider perspectives on the self and social world. In R.M. Sorrentino, D. Cohen, J.M., Olsen, & M.P. Zanna (Eds.), Culture and social behavior (The Ontario Symposium Vol. 10, pp.49-76). Hillsdale, JJ: Erlbaum.

Culture Priming

cho — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:57:08 +0000

Feeling American yet?

Most of the cross-cultural studies in psychology focus on uncovering differences between culture groups, which is usually defined by nationality: conceive of a psychological test, test it on Americans, test it on Japanese, find the difference, publish the results, rinse, and repeat. These efforts to identify the psychological constructs that vary between cultural groups but not within them, belies the assumption that cultural differences outweigh individual differences. Cultural knowledge is conceptualized to be this monolithic, domain-general construct that applies to all aspects of an individual’s psychology.

But surely an individual can have more than one internalized culture? What happens in the minds of bicultural individuals?

A commonly reported experience among bicultural individuals is frame-switching. While frame-switching, an individual shifts between cultural “frames” in response to cues in the social environment. These “frames” can often be brought about by cues such as context (e.g. think “Chinese” at home, think “American” in school) or symbols (e.g. language) that are psychologically associated with one culture or another.

Hong, Morris, Chiu, and Benet-Martinez summarized some studies (2000) in which they used priming cues to “tease out” frame-switching in bicultural individuals. They showed either Chinese or American cultural symbols such as the ones depicted to the right to Hong-Kong (a Chinese society with extensive Westernization) Chinese undergraduates and asked them to answer short questions about the pictures (subjects in the control group were not shown pictures of physical landscapes). Then, in an apparently unrelated task, the subjects were asked to interpret the behaviors of fish (shown in a picture) or an overweight school boy (shown in a story).

When primed with American pictures, the participants tend to describe behaviors in terms of internal causes for both the fish (i.e. the fish swam in front of the pack because it is a leader) and the school boy (i.e. the boy broke his diet because he lacks self-control). But when primed with Chinese pictures, the participants tend to describe behaviors in terms of contextual/relational causes for both (i.e. the fish is being chased by the pack/the boy broke his diet because he is under peer pressure). The responses of subjects in the cultural-neutral conditions were intermediate between the American and the Chinese primes.

Priming experiments using biculturals such as these are good tools to isolate and confirm the effects and salience of culture on cognition. I could say more about this but I’m hot and tired and sleepy in the afternoon so I’ll stop now.
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Hong, Y., Morris, M.W., Chiu, C., Benet-Martinez, V. (2000) Multicultural minds: a dynamic constructivist approach to culture and cognition. American Psychologist, 55, 7, 709-720

Different cultures, same Theory of Mind

cho — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:26:07 +0000

(me: Never!)

For nearly 3 decades since Wimmer and Perner (1983), psychologists have used the canonical false-belief task to detect children’s development of their theory of mind ability.

Could you repeat that?

Theory of Mind: the specific cognitive ability to attribute mental states–beliefs, desires, motives, knowledge, intent, etc–to oneself, and to agents other than oneself, in order to explain or predict behavior, i.e. Henry beat me up because he was angry.

(the original) False-belief task: the children were shown two dolls, Sally and Ann, playing with a marble. Ann puts the marble in box A and then leaves the room. Then Sally took the marble out of box A, plays with it, and returns the marble into a different box B. The children were then asked, “Where would Ann look for the marble when she returns? Box A or B?” A = pass, B = fail.

Typically, a majority of children 5 years or older pass the test, and all 3-year-olds fail. A biological mechanism was thought to underly this 3rd-5th year window, since autistic children fail false-belief tasks even when their mental age is over 6 years old. However, the fact that deaf children without any brain impairments also have delayed false-belief understanding suggests that the nature of ToM development may be experiential, and therefore prone to social/cultural influences.

Although the bulk of the ToM research in children involving false-belief tasks were done with Western/European children, very few cross-cultural studies have been conducted and they produced mixed and unreliable results for comparison.

In a study by Callaghan et al (2005), a single, standardized procedure was used to measure false-belief understanding in children in 5 cultures–Canada, India, Peru, Samoa, and Thailand–and found that there was a shift from pass to fail between the ages of 3 and 5 years in all 5 cultures.

Whether the synchrony is the result of biological human development or from experiences universal in all cultures remains an open question. But do these results mean that ToM is culture-neutral? I hope not.

What this study suggests is that in all cultures, there is evidence for a common “starting point” for ToM understanding. However, as children matures into adults, they may nevertheless develop different expressions of same theories of mind, or different articulations of more complex theories, in different cultures. After all, if different cultures have different explanations for the same behavior, might this not suggest different theories of mind despite the synchrony of onset?

Stay tuned.

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Callaghan T., Rochat, P., Lillard, A., Claux M.L., Odden, H., Itakura, S., Tapanya, S., & Singh S. (2005) Synchrony in the onset of mental-state reasoning: Evidence from five cultures. Psychological Science, 16, 5, 378-384

Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983) Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 13, 103-128

The joy of humility?

cho — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 03:43:12 +0000

Although traditionally viewed as a universal human trait, the need to view oneself in a positive light varies across cultures. The Japanese self seems to have a stronger need to be viewed positively by others rather than by oneself. To serve this need, a self-critical attitude (focus on one’s shortcomings in order to improve oneself in the view of others) is more readily adopted than self-enhancing view towards oneself. To avoid the artifacts of self-evaluation and self-presentation in questionnaire studies, this study provides a covert laboratory measurement of self-criticism/enhancement without the subjects’ awareness that they are being tested.

Subjects (Canadian students from UBC and Japanese students from Nara Univ.) are told to take a new kind of intelligence test with 20 questions, where speed and accuracy matters. After the test, the subject is asked to make a judgment on whether they or the average student did better on the same test. The subject is shown each question of the test, and told to make their judgment as soon as they feel comfortable, viewing a minimum of 5 questions and maximum of 20. Each question is shown with 2 columns of scores, one from the student’s own, the other from the score of the average student. Subjects are randomly given a score that’s either above (success condition) or below (failure) average without their knowledge. After the judgment, a survey is given, assessing the subject’s confidence in the accuracy of her judgment, confidence in the accuracy of the test, the subject estimate of the percentage of the general population who would outperform her on the test., plus a Rosenberg’s Global Self-Esteem Scale.

The results are as the researchers predicted. The Canadian subjects show more confidence in their judgment and in the validity of the test when they perform above average, and the Japanese subjects behaved just the opposite. The Japanese subjects viewed more questions, and spend more time viewing them, when they were told that they performed above average. The Canadian subjects estimated a much lower percentage of the general population who would perform better than themselves than the Japanese subjects, regardless of their performance on the test.

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Heine, S.J., Takata T., Lehman, D.R. (2000) Beyond Self-Presentation: Evidence for Self-Criticism Among Japanese. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26(1), 71-78

Inter- vs. Independent Self-Construal

cho — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 03:36:00 +0000

One remarkable difference between hospitality in Japan and in America, as noticed by myself (shamelessly) and Takeo Doi:

As a host in America, it’s common courtesy to ask your guest what they would like, “Would you like something to drink? Tea or coffee?” and so forth. Being a good host means respecting your guest’s wishes by asking their preferences.

As a host in Japan, your guests expect you to treat them without asking. If it’s hot you offer juice or iced tea, if it’s cold you offer ocha or coffee. Being a good host means being considerate of your guests wishes and offering your best so that your guests would never have to ask for more (conversely, being a good guest means gobbling everything up even if it’s not your cup of tea, followed by profuse expression of gratitude/apology).

It’s easy to just chalk it all up to cultural differences and leave it as an afterthought. It takes a bit more to describe them as what would be expected behaviors in collectivistic or individualistic cultures. However, there is still a quite large causal gap between culture and behavior, even if you do specify and label them as collectivism/individualism. After all, collectivism and individualism are really only dimensions of culture that emerges as statistical tendencies of the cultural group…and of course tendency = correlation != causation. In order to study culture as a psychological phenomenon, one needs to grant it causal power by linking collectivism/individualism on the cultural level down to some psychological difference, at least in theory, on the individual level, i.e. Nisbett’s holistic/analytic difference in cognition and perception. A decade prior to Nisbett’s successful research paradigm, Markus and Kitayama (1991) proposed to addressed the problem by linking cultural differences to individual differences in self-construal.

It should be obvious that Asians and Westerners have different concepts of the self, the other, and the relationship between them. In many Western cultures, there is a faith in the inherent separateness of distinct persons, and the normative imperative is to become independent from others and to discover/express/assert one’s unique inner attributes. Markus and Kitayama calls this independent self-construal.

In contrast, many non-Western cultures insist on the fundamental connectedness of human beings. The normative imperative of these cultures is to maintain this interdependence among individuals. The internal attributes are understood as situation/relationship specific, and unreliable representation of the personal character. A perfect example of this, I thought, is the word jibun, the Japanese equivalent of “self” in English. Jibun is composed of two kanji characters 自(ji) 分(bun), which separately means “self’ and “share.” The Japanese concept of the self is necessarily defined as one’s share in the larger social context. Markus and Kitayama demonstrates this difference in self-construal graphically in their figure 1:

Some further clarifications on interdependent self are needed. An interdependent construal of self does not mean a merge of self and other, or the loss of self, or selflessness. In fact, for an interdependent self, while the focus is on the relationship between self and others, the exercise of control is primarily focused on the inner self–controlling the inner attributes, emotions, desires, goals–so that harmony and equilibrium of interpersonal relationships can be maintained. This is contrasted with the Western notion of agentic control, which implies an assertion of inner attributes in order to change the outer aspects such as one’s public behaviors; in fact such straightforward self-assertion is actually viewed as immature and unauthentic in the eyes of the interdepent East Asian societies.

Another point of clarification. Although an appreciation and focus on the needs and goals of others is more important for those with an interdependent self than for those with an independent self, this does not necessarily mean that interdepent selves will attend to the needs of all others. One’s social environment is not boundless, and attention to others is therefore highly selective. For those of interdependent selves, the in-group/out-group distinction is therefore of vital importance. This may explain why Japan, a culture/society teeming with individuals with interdependent selves, actually exhibit higher levels of racism/classicism/xenophobia than America in some ways (from personal experience).

Differences in self-construal interpreted in this way can have enormous explanatory power over cognitive, emotional and motivational differences between individuals from different cultures. While so far in this blog and my readings I have mainly focused on recent literatures about cognitive differences, the emotional and motivational differences that I read about here were interesting old news to me.

Those with interdepent selves tend to express, and perhaps experience, ego-focused emotions to a much lesser degree. Ukta Eskimos use a word that means “childish” to label angry behavior. Various anthropologists claim that there is NO expression of anger in Tahiti culture!
In contrast, those with interdependent selves would feel other-focused emotions to a greater degree. Some claimed that Japanese mothers teach their children to fear the pain of loneliness, whereas Westerners teach children how to be alone. It’s perhaps difficult for Westerners to distinguish the concept of face apart from pride or shame, and I bet most of us have never even heard of the emotion amae (which is labeled, dubiously to be sure, as an “indigenous Japanese emotion” defined as “the sense of, or the accompanying hope for, being lovingly cared for and involves depending on and presuming another’s indulgence.”)
What was assumed to be universal sources of motivation, such as self-esteem, self-actualization, self-affirmation, etc etc., becomes divergent with different self-construals; Westerners, particularly those with high self-esteem, try to enhance themselves whenever possible (self-serving bias); for those with interdependent self-construals, other-enhancement, self-restraint and self-control could be a stronger sources of motivation as these are instrumental to the ability to flexibly adjust to social situations; some studies in fact found just the opposite in Japanese–a strong bias in the self-effacing direction (Heine et al. 2000, post forthcoming)

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Heine, S.J., Takata T., Lehman, D.R. (2000) Beyond Self-Presentation: Evidence for Self-Criticism Among Japanese. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26(1), 71-78

Markus, H.R., & Kitayama, S. (1991) Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224-253

State Of (the) School (address)

cho — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 03:52:04 +0000

I added another new category “SOS” to cover all things school-related. Insert your own joke here.

My two earliest posts are now subsumed under the SOS category. Those posts were written back when I was still neck deep and uncertain in the application process. Now?

Gilbert Arenas has Duke’s Krzyzewski, Blazer’s McMillan, and the Sun’s Jerry Colangelo who cut him from USA basketball in 06.

Paul Pierce has the 10 teams that passed on him on the 1998 draft.

I have an official adviser assignment from UCI, plus UW, NW, UIUC, UMich, UVA, and Cal.

School starts September 27th.

State Of (the) Blog (address) 2.0

cho — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 03:28:46 +0000

There hasn’t been any posts in the past week because most of the papers I’ve been reading have been review articles, which are basically Op/Ed in nature and not as interesting unless you are into hardcore theories or reference overload.

Speaking of using this blog to talk about this blog, I’ve added a new category “SOB” to cover all things (this) blog related. I supposed I could’ve used SOBA too but I thought the 3-letter version has a better ring to it.

Street Fighters: JPN vs USA

cho — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 01:16:49 +0000

I always struggle to start a post with either a random title, an off-the-wall picture or some non sequitur opening (although technically the opening line does not follow anything anyway), but this post has proven to be particularly hard on my limited cleverness. Hopefully these references to Street Fighter or J-street fashion will become clear after I delve into this clever study by Miyamoto, Nibett, and Masuda (2006; disclaimer: read and written about with only a superficial, wikipedia-mediated background knowledge of psychological affordance).

The dominant cross-cultural psychological research paradigm treats cultural differences as the aggregate of individual differences (e.g. reducing collectivism/individualism down to differences in self-construal), which were assumed to be caused by differences in socialization. Going in a different direction, this study explores in more depth the hypothesis that the cultural differences in attentional patterns might be directly afforded by cultural differences in the physical environment, which was alluded to in my last post and incompletely addressed by Masuda and Nisbett (2006).

Miyamoto et al. took a series of street photos (in front of schools, hotels, and post offices) in both Japanese and American small (Chelsea/Torahime), medium (Ann Arbor/Hikone), and large (Tokyo/New York) cities . In total there were 61 locations per country and 976 pictures (2 points of view per location + 4 directions per point of view). Some examples of these photos are displayed on figure 1 to the right.

Their goal are twofold: 1) to compare the perceptual environments of Japan and US, and to determine whether or not there is a difference in levels of visual complexity; 2) to examine the effect of exposures of these environments.

The researchers hypothesized that Japanese street scenes are visually more complex than American street scenes. To measure the visual complexity subjectively, they employed both American and East Asian international students to evaluate the pictures for complexity (using 4 survey questions evaluating the distinctness/ambiguity of boundaries, number of objects, invisible parts of the scene, and chaotic/organized on a 1 to 5 scale). Results show that Japanese scenes were judged to be more complex and ambiguous than American scenes, and that larger cities more so than medium and smaller cities. Interestingly, scenes from both Hikone and Torahime (medium and small Japanese city) was judged to be more complex than those from New York.

To measure the visual complexity objectively, the researchers used a computer imaging program (NIH Image) to count the number of objects (by scanning and outlining object boundaries) in all 976 images. Again, Japanese scenes were found to contain more objects than American scenes, and that scenes of larger cities were found to have larger number of objects than medium and small cities.

Now that we have indirect evidence of visual environments being more complex in Japan than in America, one might wonder what would immersion in these different environments do to a person’s perceptual/attentional tendencies?

The researchers then primed students from both UMich and Kyoto University with these images–they were shown 95 Japanese or American scenes and were asked to imagine being in that environment and to judge how much they liked the scenery. The participants were then given the change blindness task (Masuda & Nisbett 2006) and were told to detect and write down the changes in two flickering scenes. Both Japanese and American students detected more contextual/background changes when primed with Japanese street scenes than when primed with American street scenes.

The results are provocative: the previously found cultural differences in perception/attention–East Asians more sensitive to context/background/relationships of objections and Westerners more sensitive to focal objects/foreground/properties of objects–may after all have less to do with the sociocultural environment, and more to do with the physical environment. What makes Japanese(n,) Japanese(adj.)? Not Japanese(n. language), or other Japanese(n. people), but Japan (ese streets)!

It’s easy to get carried away here, but one has to be careful of not inferring too much from these results. First of all, while the photo imagining analysis is pretty ingenious, it is by no means the definitive evidence for the complexity of Japanese (or East Asian for that matter) visual environments. Even suppose that’s true, it still boils down to a chicken-or-egg dilemma–do visual complexity promote contextual perception/attention, or are people who tend to perceive/attend contextually organize their environments accordingly? Finally, if one takes the broadest interpretation of these results, it suggests that New Yorkers have a perceptual/attentional pattern that’s closer to people from Tokyo than people from western Michigan–a stretch in cultural psychology, but probably not in real life. Still, explaining the cause of perceptual differences with differences in the environment is probably a safer bet than resorting to some vague cultural divide like collectivism/individualism.

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Masuda T., & Nisbett, R.E. (2006) Culture and Change Blindness. Cognitive Science 30, 381-399

Miyamoto, Y., Nisbett, R.E., Masuda, T. (2006) Culture and the physical environment: holistic versus analytic perceptual affordances. Psychological Science 17(2), 113-119

Culture and Change blindness

cho — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:51:00 +0000

Change blindness is a phenomena in visual perception, where a person viewing a visual scene fails to detect changes in the scene. These change can be quite minor, like the presence or absence of objects in a still picture, or they can be surprisingly big, like the study done by Simons and Levin (1998). Change blindness seems like yet another perceptual/attentional dimension where East Asians and Westerners might be expected to behave differently.

Following the analytic/holistic paradigm, Masuda and Nisbett (2006) hypothesized that East Asians, being more sensitive to contextual cues, might be more sensitive (i.e. less blind) to changes in the background, while Americans might be more sensitive to changes in the objects in the foreground.

And this was indeed what they found. When shown flickering still pictures (like the one linked to above and figure 1 to the left), Americans took significantly less time to notice changes in the focal objects than changes in the background, but was not true of Japanese participants, who were slightly faster at recognizing background changes. This pattern of change blindness was replicated with moving images as well. All things considered, these are rather pedestrian results, just another point for the Hol/Anal paradigm.

The researchers then repeated the still image experiment, replacing some of the images with scenes of what might be seen in Japan (figure 6 to the right) In addition to the cultural origins of the vignettes, there are different in one specific physical characteristic: the American scenes were object-oriented: there were relatively few objects with salient features and the background was relatively simple; whereas the Japanese scenes were more context-oriented: there were many objects that were difficult to distinguish from the background. Masuda and Nisbett hypothesized that environmental characteristics of different cultures serve to direct and focus people’s attention differently. The results replicated previous studies: Americans still detected more focal object changes and that Japanese still detected more background changes. However, both Americans and Japanese detected more focal object changes in American scenes, and more background changes in Japanese scenes.

As I was reading the paper, I thought that this part sounded suspiciously like just a plug for yet another study by Miyamoto, Nisbett, and Masuda (2006). The scenes were photo-shopped to be object/context-oriented and were not organic scenes from different cultures. It should not be surprising that both American and Japanese participants detected more focal object changes in object-oriented scenes, and background changes in context-oriented scenes–this is the strongest conclusion this study could made.

Unsatisfied? Read the Miyamoto-Nisbett-Masuda follow up paper! It’s a gem.

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Masuda T., & Nisbett, R.E. (2006) Culture and Change Blindness. Cognitive Science 30, 381-399

Miyamoto, Y., Nisbett, R.E., & Masuda, T. (2006) Culture and the Physical Environment: Holistic versus Analytic perceptual affordances Psychological Science, 17(2), 113-119

Simons, D.J., & Levin, D.T. (1998). Failure to detect changes to people in a real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5, 644-649.