The authors propose that need for closure (NFC) leads attributors to respond to an ambiguous social event by increasing reliance on implicit theories received from acculturation. Hence, the influence of NFC should be shaped by chronically accessible knowledge structures in a culture, and, likewise, the influence of culture should be moderated by epistemic motives such as NFC. The specific hypotheses drew on past findings that North American and Chinese attributors possess differing implicit social theories, North Americans conceiving of individuals as autonomous agents and Chinese conceiving of groups as autonomous. The present studies found the predicted pattern that among North American participants, NFC increased attributions to personal but not group dispositions. Among Chinese participants, NFC increased attributions to group but not personal dispositions. The findings are discussed in light of an emerging dynamic account of culture and cognition.

This paper compares how managers value knowledge from internal and external sources. Although many theories account for favoritism toward insiders, we find that preferences for knowledge obtained from outsiders are also prevalent. Two complementary case studies and survey data from managers demonstrate the phenomenon of valuing external knowledge more highly than internal knowledge and reveal some mechanisms through which this process occurs. We found evidence that the preference for outsider knowledge is the result of managerial responses to (1) the contrasting status implications of learning from internal versus external competitors, and (2) the availability or scarcity of knowledge-internal knowledge is more readily available and hence subject to greater scrutiny, while external knowledge is more scarce, which makes it appear more special and unique. We conclude by considering some consequences of the external knowledge preference for organizational functioning.In-Group Favoritism, Learning, Internal Competition, Knowledge Management

We develop a dynamic cognitive model of network activation and show that people at different status levels spontaneously activate, or call to mind, different subsections of their networks when faced with job threat. Using a multimethod approach (General Social Survey data and a laboratory experiment), we find that, under conditions of job threat, people with low status exhibit a winnowing response (i.e., activating smaller and tighter subsections of their networks), whereas people with high status exhibit a widening response (i.e., activating larger and less constrained subsections of their networks). We integrate traditional network theories with cognitive psychology, suggesting that cognitively activating social networks is a precondition to mobilizing them. One implication is that narrowing the network in response to threat might reduce low-status group members' access to new information, harming their chances of finding subsequent employment and exacerbating social inequality.

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The authors argue that cultures differ in implicit theories of individuals and groups. North Americans conceive of individual persons as free agents, whereas East Asians conceptualize them as constrained and as less agentic than social collectives. Hence, East Asian perceivers were expected to be more likely than North Americans to focus on and attribute causality to dispositions of collectives. In Study 1 newspaper articles about "rogue trader" scandals were analyzed, and it was found that U.S. papers made more mention of the individual trader involved, whereas Japanese papers referred more to the organization. Study 2 replicated this pattern among U.S. and Hong Kong participants who responded to a vignette about a maladjusted team member. Study 3 revealed the same pattern with respect to individual and group dispositionism using a different design that compared attributions for an act performed by an individual in one condition and by a group in the other condition.

Many tendencies in social perceivers 'judgments about individuals and groups can be integrated in terms of the premise that perceivers rely on implicit theories of agency acquired from cultural traditions. Whereas American culture primarily conceptualizes agency as a property of individual persons, other cultures conceptualize agency primarily in terms ofcollectives such as groups or nonhuman actors such as deities or fate. Cultural conceptions ofagency exist in publicforms (discourses, texts, and institutions) and private forms (perceivers' knowledge structures), and the more prominent the public representations ofa specific conception in a society, the more chronically accessible it will be in perceivers' minds. We review evidencefor these claims by contrasting North American and Chinese cultures. From this integrative model ofsocial perception as mediated by agency conceptions, we draw insightsfor research on implicit theories and research on culture. What implicit theory research gains is a better grasp on the content, origins, and variation ofthe knowledge structures central to social perception. What cultural psychology gains is a middle-range model of the mechanism underlying cultural influence on dispositional attribution, which yields precise predictions about the domain specificity and dynamics ofcultural differences.More than just an occasional modern pastime, people watching is an essential, primordial human activity. As social animals, people depend on the social perception abilities that allow them to navigate their social environments. Yet learning who to avoid, who to trust, and so forth, requires more than simply registering others' observable actions; it requires inferring underlying characteristics and enduring dispositions from which future actions can be predicted. Psychologists have long contended that perceivers go beyond the observable data with inferences guided by theorylike knowledge structures (Bruner, 1957;Heider, 1958). This "theory theory" of social perception is rooted in the metaphor that lay social perceivers are like scientists, guided by theories in the questions they ask and the answers they construct when interpreting ambiguous data. Proposals about the content of the implicit theories guiding social perception have ranged, with theories of action (Heider, 1958) and theories of mind (Wellman, 1990) being among the most influential. These proposals have been successful in accounting for particular inferences that perceivers Requests for reprints should be sent to make about persons, yet they do not capture how perceivers make parallel inferences about other kinds of perceived actors, such as groups or nonhuman supernatural entities. An integrated model of social perception across cultures requires a more encompassing account of the implicit theories that underlie attributions to dispositions.We propose that social perception is best understood as guided by implicit theories of agency (ITAs). ITAs are conceptions of kinds of actors, notions of what kinds of entities act intenti...

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