East vs West in Judging Character
Jul/19/2011 10:53 Filed in: Judging Character
The minds of most Americans are ready and willing to engage in a phenomenon psychologists term spontaneous trait inference -- the readiness to bind a single personality descriptor or action to a target in memory. Put differently, if we see someone cheat once, that label is automatically bound to our memories of that person. When we imagine his face, it's as if the label "cheater" spontaneously appears across it. New research, however, is suggesting that this phenomenon might not be as universal as first thought.
A new paper by Jinkyung Na and Shinobu Kitayama suggests that the mind's of East Asian individuals do not engage in this behavior as readily. Their experiment followed the usual design in this area. Research participants were asked to look at faces of unknown individuals while also memorizing personality trait words that were presented next to them for a few seconds on a computer screen. Next, the participants completed a lexical decision task. This measure flashes the faces on the screen for a second or so, followed either by a personality trait word or a pseudo-word (e.g., blocot). The participants' task was simply to say whether the "word" that appeared was a real word or a fake word.
Among European-American participants, the usual effect emerged. When a face was flashed before a word that had been previously paired with it in Phase 1, participants were quicker to recognize the word. This is a commonly-used tactic to measure whether items are associated in memory. For example, if you were to see the word "bread" on a computer screen, you would be a few milliseconds faster to recognize the word "butter" if it were flashed next. Here, if a face facilitates recognition for a personality trait word, it means that the two have been associated in the mind. Among East Asian participants, however, this pattern didn't occur, meaning that they were less likely to associate trait words that had appeared next to faces as belonging to those faces. Or, put differently, their minds were less willing to automatically bind these traits to their memories of people.
The upshot, then, is that the seeming readiness to judge a person's character based on witnessing a simple, single action by them or a label applied to them by someone else may be a particularly European-American phenomenon. Other cultures appear more ready and willing to utilize increased flexibility or complexity in forming their views of other people.
Among European-American participants, the usual effect emerged. When a face was flashed before a word that had been previously paired with it in Phase 1, participants were quicker to recognize the word. This is a commonly-used tactic to measure whether items are associated in memory. For example, if you were to see the word "bread" on a computer screen, you would be a few milliseconds faster to recognize the word "butter" if it were flashed next. Here, if a face facilitates recognition for a personality trait word, it means that the two have been associated in the mind. Among East Asian participants, however, this pattern didn't occur, meaning that they were less likely to associate trait words that had appeared next to faces as belonging to those faces. Or, put differently, their minds were less willing to automatically bind these traits to their memories of people.
The upshot, then, is that the seeming readiness to judge a person's character based on witnessing a simple, single action by them or a label applied to them by someone else may be a particularly European-American phenomenon. Other cultures appear more ready and willing to utilize increased flexibility or complexity in forming their views of other people.
