In the increasingly global world, it is important to understand other cultural groups. Such understanding will be helpful in peacefully addressing world conflicts, negotiating business deals, and facilitating group interactions. Westerners see themselves as independent agents, and they are individualistic in value. In contrast, some non-Western groups, such as people in Asia, and possibly those in Arab regions, Africa, and Latin America, often see themselves as interdependent with others in their groups and relations. They tend to be more collectivistic. This project investigates the ways that different non-Western groups develop their cultural styles of interdependence by utilizing different strategies of attaining this valued state. It is hypothesized, for example, that East Asians achieve interdependence by avoiding conflicts with others and attain social harmony within their groups. Arab people, on the other hand, do so by self-assertively resolving conflicts with others and by protecting their groups. By studying multiple cultural groups, we may be able to learn more about non-Western and Western cultures. Thus, this project can learn how Westerners typically assert themselves to express their individuality so that they can feel more esteemed and independent.
To test this framework, six studies will be conducted to identify the nuances involved in the interdependence-independence construct. The studies will assess three core features of interdependence vs. independence, including the primacy of personal versus social goals as predictors of happiness, analytic versus holistic attention, and analytic versus holistic social cognition. The research will also assess three pairs of subsidiary features that theoretically produce different styles of interdependence. In particular, the use of self-effacement vs. assertion, emotional suppression vs. expression, and dialectic vs. logical reasoning, can all produce different types of interdependence. Those strategies often arise from the ecological context of the cultures. Highly populated cites with greater commerce, for example, should produce more argumentative interdependence whereas more linguistically diverse areas should produce more emotional expressivity. The subsidiary features will be measured across a set of 16 cultural groups from South Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, and across the Middle East, Africa, Western Europe, Latin America, and those groups will be contrasted to groups in North America. It is expected that there will be a broad divergence between the groups regarding the strategies they use to achieve their desired cultural state of independence and interdependence. It is also predicted that the West will differ from the non-West in core features while the non-West will be characterized relatively more in subsidiary features. Experimental tests will include priming manipulations designed to produce independence or interdependence to test their later effects on the subsidiary features. Results will shed light on how cultural groups utilize social interaction styles to produce independence and interdependence. This project will facilitate our understanding of intercultural interactions and provide a more comprehensive view of human psychology.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
