Experimental priming of independent and interdependent activity does not affect culturally variable psychological processes

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 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.

Keywords: cultural cognition; cultural evolution; cultural psychology; ecocultural hypothesis; priming; self-construal.

Figure 1.

Changes in each of the seven dependent measures in response to the different activity conditions in Experiment 1. Each plot shows the shift from pre-prime to post-prime in the measure specified on the vertical axis (where int = interdependent, ind = independent), separately for participants primed with a solitary activity (orange) and participants primed with a collective activity (grey). Thick solid lines connect mean values pre- and post-prime, with error bars showing 95% CIs. Transparent lines and dots show each participant separately, with lines connecting each participant's pre- and post-prime response. Our hypothesis was that participants primed with solitary activity should become more analytic or independent, and participants primed with collective activity should become more holistic or interdependent. In the figure, this would be indicated by an upwards-slanting grey collective-prime line and a downwards-slanting orange solitary-prime line (except for independent self-construal which should have an upwards-slanting orange collective-prime line and a downwards-slanting grey solitary-prime line).

Figure 2.

Changes in each of the seven dependent measures in response to the different activity conditions in Experiment 2. Each plot shows the shift from pre-prime to post-prime in the measure specified on the vertical axis (where int = interdependent, ind = independent), for participants primed with a solitary activity (orange) and participants primed with a collective activity (grey). Thick solid lines connect mean values pre- and post-prime, with error bars showing 95% CIs. Transparent lines and dots show each participant separately, with lines connecting each participant's pre- and post-prime response. Our hypothesis was that participants primed with solitary activity should become more analytic or independent, and participants primed with collective activity should become more holistic or interdependent. In the figure, this would be indicated by an upwards-slanting grey collective-prime line and a downwards-slanting orange solitary-prime line (except for independent self-construal which should have an upwards-slanting orange collective-prime line and a downwards-slanting grey solitary-prime line). See electronic supplementary material, figure S1 for visualization of the payoff condition from Experiment 2.