A recent report suggested that a radical change was occurring in the response of British students to the Asch-type conformity experiment. The present study of Japanese students, however, shows no such change; nor did it show any signs of anticonformity as reported earlier. In comparison with students of other countries, Japanese students showed less conformist responses to the stranger groups; and more conformist responses to the familiar groups, e.g. to their own university's sport clubs. These results seem to support the conclusion that response to the Asch-type experiment is not universal but rather reflects cultural and situational factors.

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In the present study American and Japanese subjects' judgments of emotional cues in body movements were compared, when facial information was excluded. Seven fundamental emotions of joy, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, anger, contempt and three affective-cognitive structures for the emotions of affection, anticipation, and acceptance were displayed by four Japanese actors/actresses with their backs turned toward the viewer. The emotions of sadness, fear, and anger as expressed in kinetic movement showed high agreement between the two cultural groups. Joy and surprise, even though they are classified as fundamental emotions, contained some cultural components that affected the judgments. Furthermore, USA subjects successfully identified disgust as portrayed by Japanese actors/actresses, but Japanese subjects did not identify the expressions of disgust or contempt. Affection, anticipation, and acceptance have some cultural components that are interpreted differently by Japanese and Americans, and this accounted for some of the misunderstandings. Nevertheless, most of the scenes depicting emotions and affective-cognitive structures emotions were correctly identified by the subjects of each culture.

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This study examines whether the common view that Japanese are more collectivistic than Americans is valid or not in three respects: First, the authors point out that those empirical studies that were directly related to the commonly accepted definition of individualism and collectivism (I/C) did not support the common view and that those studies whose relations to I/C were merely inferred were inappropriate in judging its validity. Second, the authors show that the reference-group effect (Heine, Lehman, Peng, & Greenholtz, 2002) cannot entirely explain the past questionnaire studies' failure to support the common view. Finally, by replicating Asch's (1956) conformity experiment with 40 groups of 140 Japanese college students belonging to the same college clubs, the authors demonstrate that Japanese conform no more than Americans even in in-groups.