The similarity between attributional (lazy, hard-working, bright) and labeling (father, murderer, professional) processes offers a promising point of rapprochement between psychological and sociological social psychology. Affect control theory (ACT) offers a falsifiable synthesis of the two social psychologies. The theory allows for rigorous operationalization of fundamental concepts underlying both disciplinary approaches: balance theories, theories of equity and justice, symbolic interactionism, dramaturgical studies, person perception studies, theories of emotions, etc. A newly created version of ACT indicates that Japanese use different schemata for characterizing social identities. That is, ACT models indicate that the Japanese employ an entirely different set of heuristics than used by Americans for making sense of common, everyday experiences. These findings led to the question of whether the Japanese model is representative of the larger Northeast Asian culture from which the Japanese people derive, or does it portray a unique culture? This proposal offers a series of five experiments to test these competing hypotheses. The methods employ the semantic differential through a computerized program called ATTITUDE that randomizes stimuli, scale endpoints, and scale dimensions to reduce typical interviewee biases and errors. The design reduces collinearity problems in the derivation of the regression equations representing the impression-formation processes of any particular culture. Because the Japanese and American equations have predictive validity approaching 90%, there is every reason to expect that a Chinese version of ACT should prove as successful.
